Siegfried Flügge

Siegfried Flügge (16 March 1912, in Dresden – 15 December 1997, in Hinterzarten) was a German theoretical physicist and made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked in the German Uranverein (nuclear weapons project). From 1941 onward he was a lecturer at several German universities, and from 1956 to 1984, editor of the 54-volume, prestigious Handbuch der Physik.

From 1929 to 1933, Flügge studied physics at the Technische Hochschule Dresden (after 1961, the Dresden University of Technology) and the Georg-August University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate at the latter, under Max Born, in 1933.

From 1933 to 1935, he was a teaching assistant at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. From 1936 to 1937, he was a teaching assistant to Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig. From 1937 to 1942, as successor to Max Delbrück, Flügge was an assistant to Otto Hahn at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Chemie (KWIC, after World War II reorganized and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry), in Berlin-Dahlem.

In 1938, Flügge completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule München (today, the Technical University of Munich).

In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner, who had in July of that year fled to The Netherlands and then went to Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Flügge and Gottfried von Droste, an assistant to Meitner, independently also predicted a large energy release from nuclear fission.

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