- Paul Rosbaud
Paul Rosbaud (
November 18 ,1896 –January 28 ,1963 ), was a chemist and scientific adviser for Springer Verlag inGermany and duringWorld War II a secret agent for British IntelligenceMI6 , code named "Griffin". He was born inGraz ,Austria , and died inLondon , UK. Rosbaud had wide contacts within Germany and provided MI6 with vital information regarding weapon systems.Rosbaud served in the Austrian army during
World War I from 1915 to 1918. After the war ended his unit was taken as prisoner of war by British forces; this experience ended up giving him a liking of the British. He studied chemistry at Darmstadt Technische Hochschule beginning in 1920. He continued his studies at Kaiser Wilhelm Institut inBerlin and took his doctoral thesis atBerlin-Charlottenburg Technische Hochschule . He then started working at the scientific periodical Metallwirtschaft, but quit afterAdolf Hitler came to power, as the owner was aNazi .Work under the Nazi regime and during the War
In 1938 he had his Jewish wife Hilde and their only daughter Angela sent to the UK to keep them safe from Nazi harassment. Rosbaud was also invited to stay in the UK, but he decided to keep working in Germany to undermine the Nazi regime. In addition to his own, Rosbaud helped a number of other families flee the Nazis, including that of the well known Jewish physicist
Lise Meitner . He was assisted in his work saving Jews by the fact that he was run as a British agent byFrank Foley , the MI6 station chief in Berlin.Through his work at
Springer Verlag , Rosbaud knew most of the scientific community in Germany, and posing as a Nazi he could supply the allied forces with vital intelligence without any suspecting him of being a spy.One of his first scoops as an agent was to publish
Otto Hahn 's work on fission in the German physics magazineNaturwissenschaften in January 1939. Rosbaud seemed to be well aware of the possible use of this in a nuclear bomb. His immediate publishing thus helped alarm the international physics community and can be connected to the letterAlbert Einstein wrote to warn president Roosevelt of a German nuclear bomb.Among the reports he supplied to the British was that Germany produced rockets (V2) and that the German project for a nuclear bomb was not successful. Rosbaud has also been connected to the "
Oslo report ", a detailed list of new German weapons systems, but this seems to be the work ofHans Ferdinand Maier , technical director atSiemens .Many of his reports were smuggled out of Germany by couriers working for the Norwegian intelligence organisation
XU . Norwegians that were studying at technical schools in Germany, such asSverre Bergh , linked up with Rosbaud and transported the intelligence to occupiedNorway , and from there it was sent to neutralSweden . One daring route involved a flight from Berlin toOslo , with airport mechanics at each end helping to hide microfilms on the plane.Further reading
On Paul Rosbaud:
*Arnold Kramish (1986) "The Griffin: The Greatest Untold Espionage Story of World War II" Houghton Mifflin (T) ISBN 0-395-36318-7On Frank Foley:
*Michael Smith (1999) "Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews" Hodder & Stoughton. Now republished by Politicos ISBN 1-84275-088-7ee also
*
Harteck Process
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.