Kurt Sitte
| Kurt Sitte | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1 December 1910 Reichenberg, North Bohemia, Austro-Hungary |
| Died | 30 June 1993 Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany |
| Occupation | nuclear physicist convicted spy |
| Spouse(s) | 1. Kheda Kraus 2. Judith Krymokowski |
| Children | 1. Martin Sitte 2. _____ Sitte |
Kurt Sitte (1 December 1910 - 20 June 1993) was a nuclear physicist, originally from northern Bohemia.
As a result of frontier changes, he grew up, after 1919, in Czechoslovakia, and from 1938 found himself a citizen of an enlarged Germany. It was primarily because of his political activism that he was detained at the Buchenwald concentration camp between September 1939 and April 1944. Having survived this internment, his scientific skills opened up a range of career options internationally: between 1945 he lived and worked successively in Scotland, England, the United States, Brazil and Israel.
Kurt Sitte was arrested on espionage charges on 15 June 1960 and, as Israel's first convicted spy, spent the next three and a half years in prison. Early release, in March 1963, resulted from his "good behaviour", at which point he was quoted as saying that he would be "glad" to continue to work in Israel, but shortly after this he took West German citizenship and relocated to Freiburg where he pursued his academic career at the university.
Kurt Sitte was born in Reichenberg, a mid-sized city in North Bohemia that had industrialised and grown rapidly during the previous century. Even after the termination of Austro-Hungary and the transfer of Reichenberg to the new state of Czechoslovakia in 1919, Reichenberg remained ethnically, linguistically and culturally a German city right up till 1944/45. Kurt Sitte's father, also called Kurt Sitte, was a head teacher and a painter. After completing his Abitur (school leaving exams), Kurt Sitte moved on to the Charles-Ferdinand (German) University in Prague where he studied Maths and Physics, and where he obtained his doctorate in 1932. His habilitation, which was in Physics, followed just three years later, in 1935, after which he took a teaching position. He also presided over a leftist discussion group known as "Die Tat" ("the deed") back in Reichenberg and participated in the . At the time of the (and shortly before the Munich Agreement), Kurt Sitte was a co-founder, on 18 September 1938, of the "National Council of all Peace motivated Sudeten Germans" ("Nationalrats aller friedenswilligen Sudetendeutschen").
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