Karl Wirtz - Career

Career

In 1937, Wirtz became a staff scientist at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics), an institute under the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society) and located in Dahlem-Berlin. In 1940, he worked on the horizontal layer reactor design with Fritz Bopp and Erich Fischer. In 1941, he also became a Privatdozent at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1944, Wirtz was appointed head of the experimental department at the KWIP, which had been moved to Hechingen in 1943 to avoid bombing casualties to the personnel. In late spring 1945, Wirtz was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months under Operation Epsilon.

From 1946, Wirtz worked at the Max-Planck Institut für Physik, which was the renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and had been opened in the British Occupation Zone in Göttingen. From 1948 to 1957, he was also an extraordinarius professor at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. From 1950, he also became a scientific member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. From 1957 to 1979, Wirtz was an ordinarius professor of physical foundations of reactor technology at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and director of the Institute of Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology at the Center for Nuclear Research, which was established in 1957 in Karlsruhe. From 1965 to 1967, he was chairman of the scientific council of the Karlsruhe Center for Nuclear Research. From 1974 to 1976, he was dean of the faculty of mechanical engineering at Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe.