Download "Three German Professors in Communications Engineering during

"Three German Professors in Communications Engineering during the Nazi Regime"
Joachim Hagenauer
Emeritus Chair Communications Engineering (LNT), Technical University München (TUM), Germany
The talk covers the life of 3 professors of Communications Engineering before, during and after Hitler’s
“Third Reich”. All three were of the same age, had been volunteers in WWI, shared a conservative
background and the same profession and even occasionally worked and published together. Yet each
of them reacted differently to Hitler’s regime.
Hans Piloty was the author’s pre-predecessor at his chair in Munich. He opposed Hitler firmly but
quietly and almost got fired by the Nazis from his academic position. After the war he became Rector
of the “Technische Hochschule München” and built one of the first German electronic computers.
Hans Ferdinand Mayer was Head of Research at Siemens. He was an active opponent of the Nazis
and revealed war secrets in radio technology to the British through the “Oslo Report” in an attempt to
shorten Hitler’s war. This was kept secret until the late 1980s. He also saved the life of a Jewish girl.
Because he constantly spread BBC news in the neighborhood arguing against Hitler he was jailed in
1943, ended up imprisoned in several KZs and barely survived until April 1945. Through “Operation
Paperclip” he was subsequently employed by the US Army and later became a professor at Cornell
University. Siemens recalled him from Cornell in the 1950s to appoint him Member of the Board until
his retirement in 1962.
Karl Küpfmüller became a tenured professor very early in his life in Danzig as well as in Berlin, where
he joined the NSDAP and even became a high ranking member of the SS. During WW II he directed
the communications research at Siemens and for the German Navy. Because of his SS rank, he was
jailed by the Allied Forces from 1945 to 1947, but was later acquitted. Nevertheless, he was able to
pursue his career in post-war Germany and finally became a well-respected professor in Darmstadt
where the author met him during his studies and revered him as a teacher. There is no doubt that he
was the most brilliant researcher and teacher of the three, but his involvement with the Nazi movement
was not revealed and discussed in his later years.
All three of them became well known and celebrated scientists in post-war Germany. Neither their
opposition nor their collaboration with the Nazi regime was much discussed in Germany until the
1980s. Nevertheless, the behavior of these three professors gives some idea of the options scientists
have under a dictatorship.
This research is joint work with the historian of TU München Dr. Pabst.
CV Joachim Hagenauer
Joachim Hagenauer received his degrees from the Technical University of Darmstadt. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, working on error--correction coding for magnetic recording. Later he
became a Director of the Institute for Communications Technology at the German Aerospace Research Center DLR. Since
1993 he held a chaired professorship at the TU Munich from which he retired in 2006. During 1986 -- 1987 he spent a
sabbatical year at Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill, NJ, working on joint source/channel coding and on trellis coded modulation
for wireless systems. Joachim Hagenauer is a Fellow and a "Distinguished Lecturer" of the IEEE. He served as Member of the
Board and in 2001 as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. 1993 he was elected as Member of the Bavarian
Academy of Science. Amongst other awards he received in 1996 the E.H. Armstrong-Award of IEEE COMSOC, in 2003 the
IEEE “Alexander Graham Bell Medal” and an Honorary Doctorate from the University Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2006. His
research interests concentrate on the turbo principle in communications and more recently on the application of communication
principles to genetics.