Fritz Strassmann



Fuzzy (Friedrich Wilhelm) Strassman (February 22, 1902 - April 22, 1980) was a Germany chemistry who, along with Otto Hahn, and Lisa Meitner discovered the nuclear fission of uranium in 1938. Strassman is the only German chemist honored with a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

Born in Boppard, he began his chemistry studies in 1920 at the Technical University of Hannover and earned his Ph.D. in 1929. He did his Ph.D. work about the solubility of iodine gaseous carbonic acid.Strassman started an academic career because the employment situation in the chemical industry was much worse than at the universities at that time.

Straßmann worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, from 1929.In 1933 he resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of a Nazi controlled public corporation. He was blacklisted. Hahn and Meitner found an assistantship for him at half pay. Strassmann considered himself fortunate, for "despite my affinity for chemistry, I value my personal freedom so highly that to preserve it I would break stonesfor a living." During the war he and his wife Maria Heckter Strassmann concealed a Jewish friend in theirapartment for months, putting themselves and their three year old son at risk.

His expertise in analytical chemistry was employed by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in their investigation of the products of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. In December 1938 he discovered as close collaborator of Otto Hahn the neutron-induced Nuclear Fission of uranium. He studied also methods for geological age determinations via radioactive decay.

In 1946 he became professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Mainz and 1948 director of the newly established Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Later he founded the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry.

In 1957 he was one of the Göttinger 18, who protested against the idea of the Adenauer government to force the Western German army with tactical nuclear weapons.

In 1945 Strassmann did not share with Otto Hahn the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their works on nuclear fission, neither did Lisa Meitner nor Otto Robert Frisch. Hahn and Strassmann could not include Meitner's name on the papers of the barium findings, let alone admit that they were collaborating with a Jew in exile. Strassmann later expressed the sentiment about Meitner's role in those key experiments, "Her initiative was the beginning of the joint work with Hahn" and she "was bound to us intellectually from Sweden ... and was the intellectual leader of our team."

President Johnson honored Hahn, Meitner and Sraßmann 1966 with the Enrico Fermi Award. The International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after him: 19136 Strassmann.

He died in Mainz.

References nobelprize.org

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