The industrial firm Auergesellschaft was founded in 1892 with headquarters in Berlin. Up to the end of World War II, Auergesellschaft had manufacturing and research activities in the areas of gas mantles, luminescence, rare earths, radioactivity, and uranium and thorium compounds. In 1934, the corporation was acquired by the German corporation Degussa. In 1939, their Oranienburg plant began the development of industrial-scale, high-purity uranium oxide production. Special Soviet search teams, at the close of World War II, sent Auergesellschaft equipment, material, and staff to the Soviet Union for use in their nuclear weapon project. In 1958 Auergesellschaft merged with the Mine Safety Appliances Corporation, a multinational US corporation. Auergesellschaft became a limited corporation in 1960.
History
The Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG (Degea, German Gas Light Company), was founded in 1892 through the combined efforts of the Jewish entrepreneur and banker Geheimrat (Privy Councillor) Leopold Koppel and the Austrian chemist and inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach. It was the forerunner of Auergesellschaft. Their main research activities, up to the close of World War II, were on gas mantles, Luminescence, rare earths, radioactivity, and on uranium and thorium compounds.[1][2][3]
Geheimrat Koppel, who owned Auergesellschaft, was later intimately involved in the financing of and influencing the direction of scientific entities in Germany. Among them were the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society) and its research institutes.[4]
Bibliography
- Bernstein, Jeremy Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Copernicus, 2001) ISBN 0-387-95089-3
- Groves, Leslie M. Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (De Capo, 1962) ISBN 0-306-80189-2
- Hentschel, Klaus (editor) and Ann M. Hentschel (editorial assistant and translator) Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser, 1996) ISBN 0-8176-5312-0
- Holloway, David Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (Yale, 1994) ISBN 0-300-06056-4
- Maddrell, Paul "Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945–1961" (Oxford, 2006) ISBN 0-19-926750-2
- Macrakis, Kristie "Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany" (Oxford, 1993)
- Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Belknap, 1995)
- Oleynikov, Pavel V. German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project, The Nonproliferation Review Volume 7, Number 2, 1 – 30 (2000). The author has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70).
- Riehl, Nikolaus and Frederick Seitz Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1.
External links
References
- History of MSA Auer retrieved 2007-11-16^
- Riel and Seitz, 1996, 10.^
- Hentschel and Hentschel, 1996, Appendix D; see the entry for Auergesellschaft.^
- Macrakis, 1993, 18-20 and 22.^