Karl-Heinz Höcker

Karl-Heinz Höcker (27 December 1915 – 17 July 1998) was a German theoretical nuclear physicist who worked in the German Uranverein. After World War II, he worked at the university of Stuttgart and was the founder of the Institut für Kernenergetik und Energiesysteme.

Höcker was born in Bremen. From 1935 to 1940, he studied at the University of Marburg and the Friedrich-Wilhelms University (in 1949 reorganized and renamed the Humboldt University of Berlin). He received his doctorate at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University, in 1940, under Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.

After 1939, Höcker and Paul O. Müller collaborated with von Weizsäcker at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik (KWIP, after World War II reorganized and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics), in Berlin-Dahlem, on the theory behind the Uranmaschine (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor). In 1942, Höcker was an Assistant (Assistant) at the KWIP.

Many at the KWIP and those working on the Uranmaschine had the classification of unabkömmlich (uk, indispensable) and were exempt from being drafted into armed service. Both Höcker and his colleague Müller had the classification uk, but their fates were quite different. As the war raged on, the demand for men to provide armed service resulted in Höcker and Müller being drafted in late 1940 or early 1941. Not even Kurt Diebner, managing director of the KWIP, could stop the call-up. Höcker was returned to the KWIP in 1942 due to poor health; Müller died at the Russian front. It was not until 1944 that Werner Osenberg, head of the planning board at the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council), was able to initiate calling back 5000 engineers and scientists from the front to work on research categorized as kriegsentscheidend (decisive for the war effort). By the end of the war, the number recalled had reached 15,000. Many of the scientists called for military service had been at institutes under the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society).

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