Gernot Zippe - Early Life and World War II

Early Life and World War II

Zippe was born in Varnsdorf, Austria-Hungary (nowadays Czech Republic) in 1917. Zippe studied and graduated with B.Sc. Physics at the University of Vienna in the '1938, and served in the Luftwaffe as a flight instructor and a researcher on radar and airplane propellers. In 1941, Zippe received his B.S. in Mechanical engineering, and M.Sc. in 1943 in same respected same discipline. While doing his post doctoral research at the University of Vienna, Zippe participated in Germany's nuclear weapons project in 1940s. He was the junior research team member of the Isotope separation project led by Klaus Clusius at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1945, he was awarded a PhD in Mechanical engineering with emphasizing on thermal column and its applicant physics. By the time, Zippe fully joined the project as the team leader, the Soviet Union's Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD) apprehended him, as with other technically skilled scientists and engineers, to a special camp where he led a team that worked on centrifuge research for the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union Zippe worked at the Physics Institute of Sukhumi on a centrifuge project, led by German director Manfred von Ardenne, and directly by another German scientist Max Steenbeck, whose theoretical achievements Zippe used. He was allowed to leave in 1956, and returned to Vienna.

When Zippe visited a 1957 conference on centrifuge research in Amsterdam, he realized the rest of the world was far behind what his team had been able to achieve. His notes had been confiscated when he left the Soviet Union, but working from memory, he was able to recreate the centrifuge at the University of Virginia in the United States.