Professors Otto Stern and Walter Gerlach, c mid-20th century

Walther Gerlach, born 1 August 1889, died in 10 August 1979. Gerlach was a German physicist who co-discovered the Stern-Gerlach effect. Gerlach studied at the University of Tübingen from 1908 to 1912, where he was awarded his doctorate. He further completed Habilitation in 1916 whilst serving in WWI. From 1915 to 1918, he served in the German Army. He worked on wireless telegraphy. He worked at the University of Tübingen in 1916, and then the University of Göttingen. In 1921, he became a professor at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 1922, he finished work by Stern on the Stern-Gerlach effect. He then went back and worked at Tübingen again, and further to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1929 and held his position there until his arrest by Allied Forces in 1945. From 1937 to 1945, he was a member of the board on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG). Gerlach worked closely with scientists from the Nazi party form 1939 onwards, particularly Hitler's nuclear research adviser, Rudolf Mentzel. Gerlach was appointed as the head of the physics section of the Reichsforschungsrat. He also worked in an uranium research laboratory. He worked for the Nazis on provided advancements on their nuclear capacity for warfare in order to beat the programme developments in the USA. In December 1944, he was personally sent by Heinrich Himmler to Martin Bormann to report on develops in nuclear chain reactions. Gerlach was captured in Bavaria in May 1945. From May 1945 he was interned by Allied Forces under Operation Alsos, which purpose was to discover scientific advancements of the Nazis, particularly in nuclear developments. He was also interred under Operation Epsilon, as part of a group of 10 scientists who took part in the development of atomic weaponry. He was released in 1946, after which he returned to Germany and became a visiting professor at the University of Bonn, and then in 1948, worked at the University of Munich until 1957. In 1957, he was a co-signer of the Göttingen Manifesto, which argued against the nuclear rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). He died in 1979, aged 90. ; Otto Stern, born 17 February 1888, died 17 August 1969. Stern was a German-American physicist, and received the Nobel Prize in 1943 for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton. Stern was born into a Jewish family in the Kingdom of Prussia. Stern studied at the University of Breslau, being awarded his doctorate in 1912. He then went with Albert Einstein to Charles University, Prague, and then in 1912 to ETH Zurich. He served in WWI doing meteorological work, and in 1915 received his Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt. Stern became a professor at the University of Rostock in 1921, but left in 1923 to work at the University of Hamburg. Stern worked with Gerlach to discover the Stern-Gerlach effect in 1922. Stern received a LL.D. degree from UC, Berkeley in 1930, as he was a regular visiting professor. In 1933, Stern resigned from his position at the University of Hamburg due to the Nazis seizing power, and moved to Pittsburgh in the US and became a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1943. He retired from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and moved to UC, Berkeley. He died of a heart attack in 1969, aged 81. Stern was a member of a number of institutions, including the US National Academy of Sciences in 1945, and the American Philosophical Society in 1946.