Ludwig Rosenberg, a top executive of the West German Trade Union Federation, is among the 25 personalities just approved by the Federal Cabinet as members of the new German Atomic Commission, an advisory body patterned after the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Born in Berlin 53 years ago, Rosenberg is a veteran union organizer and an avowed Jew, who visited Israel earlier this year. He returned to Germany from England in 1946.
At the same time, a similar atomic commission was formed in East Germany under the chairmanship of Prof. Gustav Hertz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovery of the laws governing the impact of electrons upon the atom. Prof. Hertz is the son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he resigned as head of the Physics Institute of Berlin’s College of Technology, but nonetheless stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi regime, first as director of research for the Siemens electrical plant and during the war as a researcher in the field of nuclear physics.
Since he was one of the two or three atomic scientists of note who had remained in Germany, the Soviets sought him out as soon as they conquered Berlin at the end of the war and immediately brought him to Russia, where he spent almost 10 years in a laboratory on the Black Sea, enjoying the privileges accorded to top scientists. Later, he was decorated with the Stalin Prize. Last year, he was permitted to return to East Germany.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
