Fuzzy (Friedrich Wilhelm) Strassman (February 22, 1902 - April 22, 1980) was a German chemist 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 stones for a living." During the war he and his wife Maria Heckter Strassmann concealed a Jewish friend in their
apartment 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 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 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
- Fritz Strassmann: "Über die Löslichkeit von Jod in gasförmiger Kohlensäure", Zeitschrift f. physikal. Chemie. Abt. A., Bd.
143 (1929) and Ph.D. thesis Technical University of Hannover, 1930
- Fritz Krafft: Im Schatten der Sensation. Leben und Wirken von Fritz Straßmann; Verlag Chemie, 1981
nobelprize.org
External links
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