Time After Time: Fritz Houtermans at the beginning (and nearly the end) of the world. By Jacob Mikanowski
The first full
interrogation of German scientist Felix Houtermans by the NKVD took place in
January 1938 in Kharkov, to which he had been transported after his arrest in
Moscow a month before. It lasted eleven straight days, a procedure known to the
secret police as a “Conveyor.” During those eleven days Houtermans was given
only two breaks, of five hours on the first day and two hours on the second.
The rest of the time he was kept awake. After the fourth day, he was also kept
on his feet. By the end, he was falling into unconsciousness every twenty to
thirty minutes, and his feet were so swollen that his shoes had to be cut off
afterward. The interrogators told him they were going to arrest his wife, that
his children were going to be sent to an orphanage under new names, so he would
never see them again. As he would later tell his cellmate, this last threat is
what finally broke him.
The interrogators only
had two questions: “Who induced you to join the counterrevolutionary
organization?” and “Whom did you induce yourself?” Fritz told them everything
they wanted to hear about what he had been doing since arriving in the Soviet
Union with his family three years before. He said that he was a spy and had
been sent to the Soviet Union by the Gestapo. That he had designed a machine
that could measure the speed of airplanes with lines of magnetic force. That
the focus of his espionage was nuclear physics. That he knew how to bring about
a chain reaction—even though this was 1938, when no such thing had been done
before, and no one would actually accomplish it for another four years.
Sixty-Three
Years: Born in Poland in
1903, raised in Vienna, and educated in Germany, Houtermans was deported from
the Soviet Union as a German spy two years after his interrogation, in 1940.
But once back in Germany, he was arrested again—this time as a Soviet spy. At
the time of his death in 1966 he was living in neither country: he had left for
Bern, Switzerland, where he ran a physics institute. During his sixty-three
years, Houtermans work had reconnoitered the extremes of time, examined the lifespan
of the world. He had once helped to give the Earth its birth date. Had he acted
differently at one crucial juncture, he might have helped destroy it.
Fritz Houtermans arrived in the Ukrainian
Socialist Republic with his wife and daughter in February 1935, during the
abbreviated enactment of that second plan. His family’s emigration to the
Soviet Union stemmed in part from equal parts necessity and conviction.
Houtermans’ father was a Dutch businessman who had settled in what is now
Poland, and his mother came from Vienna. She was an accomplished scientist, the
first woman in that city’s history to receive a doctorate in biology; she was
also half-Jewish, which made Fritz what the Nazis called a Mischling,
or half-breed.
From 1928 to 1933 Fritz Houtermans had worked in Berlin as an
assistant to the renowned experimental physicist Gustav Hertz, but when Hitler
came to power at the start of 1933, Houtermans’ wife Charlotte - who was also
trained as a physicist and had witnessed the early years of the Nazis’ rise to
power - insisted that they should leave Germany. Houtermans was also a committed
Communist - an identification that, following the Nazi-dominated elections of
1933, carried considerable risks of its own. So in the early summer of 1933 the
Houtermans family left Germany and moved to London, where Fritz worked for the
fledgling company EMI, before it became the famed recording giant. But the
family hated the food in England, and Houtermans hated the science, so they
decided to move again, this time to Kharkov (now Kharkiv), where he accepted a
position at the Kharkov Physico-Technical Institute.
Their timing could
hardly have been worse. The Houtermans arrived in a country gripped by mounting
paranoia and fear. In December 1934, Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party boss of
Leningrad, was assassinated by a disgruntled former cadre, setting off a wave
of arrests and inquisitions. Meanwhile, the second Five-Year Plan wasn’t going
well. There was famine in the countryside (some of it deliberate) and economic
malfunction everywhere. Someone had to be at fault. Blame settled on foreign
agents and saboteurs.
By 1937 the Great
Terror was in full swing. Anyone with connections to the world outside the
Soviet Union was a suspect. The atmosphere at the Physico-Technical Institute
became unbearably tense. One after another, Fritz’s friends and colleagues were
being arrested. Unable to withstand the pressure any longer, one of his
scientific collaborators drank acid and threw himself from the institute’s
windows. He survived just long enough to be arrested.
Charlotte and Fritz
knew their turn was coming and decided to travel to Moscow, where they could
apply for exit visas. On their way they saw peasants bound together with rope
like cattle, herded onto trains for deportation to Siberia. Once in Moscow,
they were surprised to receive their visas almost at once, but then Fritz made
a grave mistake: he notified the police about the family’s planned departure,
as he was required to do by regulations. The next day he was arrested.
Charlotte took the children and fled for Latvia, from which she was able to
escape to Denmark through the intervention of the physicist Niels Bohr, a
family friend… read more:
