Walter Weizel - Career

Career

After Habilitation, Weizel worked briefly at Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF, Baden Aniline and Soda Factory) at Ludwigshafen. Then, during 1931, he had a Rockefeller fellowship to the University of Chicago.

From late in 1931, Weizel was an ordentlicher Professor (ordinarius professor) of theoretical physics at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe (today, the University of Karlsruhe). After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Weizel was temporarily forced into retirement due to his opposition to National Socialism. In 1936, he was called from the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe to an ordinarius professorship at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

On 1 December 1939, after more than four years of a selections process, due to academic and political differences between the Munich Faculty and both the Reichserziehungsministerium (REM, Reich Education Ministry) and the supporters of deutsche Physik, Wilhelm Carl Gottlieb Müller was selected to succeed Arnold Sommerfeld in the chair for theoretical physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Müller was a supporter of deutsche Physik, which was anti-Semitic and had a bias against theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. The appointment of Wilhelm Müller – who was not a theoretical physicist, had not published in a physics journal, and was not a member of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft – as a replacement for Sommerfeld, was considered such a travesty and detrimental to educating a new generation of physicists that both Ludwig Prandtl, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Strömungsforschung ( Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research), and Carl Ramsauer, director of the research division of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electric Company) and president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, made reference to this in their correspondence to officials in the Reich. In an attachment to Prandtl’s 28 April 1941 letter to Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, Prandtl referred to the appointment as “sabotage” of necessary theoretical physics instruction. In an attachment to Ramsauer’s 20 January 1942 letter to Reich Minister Bernhard Rust, Ramsauer concluded that the appointment amounted to the “destruction of the Munich theoretical physics tradition.” When Müller, as editor, published the document Jüdische und deutsche Physik, Weizel published a very critical review of the booklet pointing out its inconsistencies; his review had the support of the Faculty of Science and Mathematics at the University of Bonn.

After World War II, Weizel focused his scientific research on the physics of electrical discharges in gases. He was involved in the establishment of the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Jülich Research Center). Also after World War II, he was a representative of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany). From 1946 to 1954 he was a Bonn city delegate, and from 1948 to 1954 he was deputy SPD chairman of the Council of the City of Bonn. From 14 July 1954 to 12 July 1958, he was a member of the Landtag (State Diet) of North Rhine-Westphalia. Weizel held his professorship at the University of Bonn until he reached emeritus status in 1969.