Otto Haxel

Otto Haxel (2 April 1909, in Neu-Ulm – 26 February 1998, in Heidelberg) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1950 to 1974, he was an ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he fostered the use of nuclear physics in environmental physics; this led to the founding of the Institute of Environmental Physics in 1975. During 1956 and 1957, he was a member of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the German Atomic Energy Commission. From 1970 to 1975, he was the Scientific and Technical Managing Director of the Karlsruhe Research Center.

Haxel was a signatory of the Manifesto of the Göttingen Eighteen.

From 1927 to 1933, Haxel studied at the Technische Hochschule München (today, the Technische Universität München) and the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. He received his doctorate in 1933, under Hans Geiger at the University of Tübingen. From 1933 to 1936, Haxel was Geiger’s teaching assistant there, and he completed his Habilitation in 1936.

In 1936, Geiger, as the successor to Gustav Hertz, became an ordinarius professor and department head at the Technische Hochschule Berlin (today, the Technische Universität Berlin, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Haxel also went to the Technische Hochschule Berlin and became a teaching assistant there in 1936 and a lecturer in 1939.

It was in 1940 that Haxel met a future collaborator, [[Fritz Houte ]], who, through the auspices of Max von Laue, had been released that year from Gestapo incarceration.

From at least 1940 to early 1942, Haxel worked on the German nuclear energy project, also called the Uranverein (Uranium Club). He specialized in studies of neutron absorption in uranium (see, for example, the Internal Reports below authored with Helmut Volz, also a former student of Geiger). Haxel was called up for military service in early 1942. He was put in charge of a group doing nuclear research for the German Navy under Admiral Rhein, who had formerly been a submarine commander.

...
Wikipedia