Paul Rosbaud

https://spartacus-educational.com/Paul_Rosbaud.htm

MI6 codename Griffin

The Beginnings of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta by Denis Shaw Introduction It is believed by some (see Ingerson, 1985) that it was the Geochemical Society which founded its journal, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, but this was not the case and it will be seen in the following that GCA is some five years older. The prime mover for the new journal was a former scientific editor named Paul Rosbaud, whose background will be introduced shortly. In his declining years in England, V.M. Goldschmidt discussed with Rosbaud that the time was coming for launching a journal devoted to geochemistry. This was not to happen during Goldschmidt’s lifetime, but soon after his death a meeting was called in Durham, in 1949, to oversee the start of a journal (see below); it is clear that the instigator was Rosbaud, as he had written the following: “I am aware that the new journal will, at the beginning, have to fight its way through the maze of scientific literature, but I have no doubt that the journal will soon be established and become a very valuable contribution to the development of geochemistry and cosmochemistry. I am deeply sorry that the late Professor V M Goldschmidt, who was an old friend of mine, is with us no longer. I have discussed the idea of such a journal with him many times after the war, and he would certainly have given every possible support to it.” (inWickman, 1988) In the following, we will look first at the role played by Rosbaud, then at how the British publishing business developed after World War II, and finally at the birth of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. The Instigator - Paul Rosbaud It is not clear to the writer how familiar Paul Rosbaud was with the earth sciences in general, or geochemistry in particular, although as a young man he had worked in X-ray crystallography. But Haines tells us (1988, p.135) that at Butterworth in 1946 A[Rosbaud} was to edit the journal which the board proposed to publish... and that was clearly to be Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. Rosbaud had also been a friend of V.M. Goldschmidt and wrote (Rosbaud, 1961) a short biography as an obituary for him (in Mason, 1992). He did not in fact become the editor of G.C.A. but is evident that he was the prime agent in persuading a group of geochemists that the time had come to initiate it. His background was colourful and moulded by the times. Before and during World War II he was science editor for Springer Verlag in Berlin.According to the biography by Kramish (1986, p. 250), Rosbaud had been seen, apparently, as “a pillar of Nazi society” when he was, in fact, a spy for Britain, with the codename “Griffin”. The book credits him with the first information to reach Britain about the German V-2 rockets which brought terror attacks on London in late 1944, and it was from him that the British Government first learned of the German intention to build an atomic bomb. He was also the first to send word of Hitler’s plan to launch a blitzkrieg against England with the help of submarines. His motive was a burning hatred of Nazism. Paul Rosbaud was instrumental in getting Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman’s paper on the fission of uranium into press in Die Naturwissenschaften on an accelerated schedule, so as to alert the scientific community of the danger of this discovery. He hoped to inform the scientific community without delay about these exceptionally important results, fearing, perhaps, that the results might be suppressed by the Nazi secret services (Khariton and Smirnov, 1993). During 1945, Rosbaud was spirited out of Berlin in military uniform, and took up various consultancies with European scientific publishers, including the one with Butterworth. Sometimes he had his payments from German firms remitted directly to his friend Ruth Lange. She was living in 1988 in Berlin in poverty, but was apparently content to have been with him during the most trying years of his life. Two of his other mistresses lament that Rosbaud ruined their lives (Kramish, op.cit.). Ruth’s sister, Hilde Benjamin, became the Minister of Justice for East Germany and authorized the building of the Berlin Wall. She dispensed harsh justice to those who attempted to cross it and became known as Rote Hilde, Red Hilde. It is she who was the model for the president of the tribunal that tried the spy who came in from the cold, in John le Carré’s novel of that name. The woman who had opposed the tyranny of Adolf Hitler sentenced 146 people to death, 356 to life imprisonment, and more than 24,000 to a total of 116,476 years of penal servitude (Kramish, op.cit.).

https://www.geochemsoc.org/files/3313/4436/8118/gn114.pdf

"The information that spy Rosbaud, who was Jewish, provided is mentioned in a U.S. Department of Justice memorandum dated April 26, 1955, which reads: "[Rosbaud] returned to Germany determined to assist England and its allies at all costs. This he accomplished. The records in this matter contain official corroboration that Dr. Rosbaud remained in Berlin during World War II for the purpose of obtaining certain technical intelligence for the United States and the United Kingdom. This information was extremely useful and invaluable for the allied cause and involved great risk on the part of Dr. Rosbaud. His activities on behalf of the allied cause were successful and of such importance that even today they cannot be disclosed and are still highly classified."

http://www.phoenixsourcedistributors.com/951212.pdf