Günter Wirths (1 June 1911 – 26 January 2005) was a German nuclear chemist in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons and an authority on the uranium metal production, especially on the reactor-grade. Until the fall of Berlin in 1945, Wirths was employed with the Auergesellschaft AG in the production of uranium for the Heereswaffenamt as part of their Uranverein club. After taken into the Soviet custody, he became one of many German nuclear physicists who were involved in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons in Russia and returned to Germany in 1955 where he later worked at the Degussa AG chemical company.
Career
Early years Günter Wirths was born in Berlin on 1 June 1911– he received doctorate in chemistry from University of Freiburg. His thesis contained the fundamental research work on the complexity on the molten salts which was done under the supervision of Walter Noddack. Wirths was a colleague of Nikolaus Riehl, who was the director of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. Auergesellschaft had a substantial amount of "waste" uranium from which it had extracted radium. After reading a paper in 1939 by Siegfried Flügge, on the technical use of nuclear energy from uranium, Riehl recognized a business opportunity for the company, and, in July of that year, went to the Heereswaffenamt (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) to discuss the production of uranium. The HWA was interested and Riehl committed corporate resources to the task. The HWA eventually provided an order for the production of uranium oxide, which took place in the Auergesellschaft plant in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. It was this that got Wirths involved with the production of uranium metal, which Auergesellschaft did for the Uranverein project of the Heereswaffenamt.
In Russia Near the close of World War II, as American, British, and Russian military forces were closing in on Berlin, Riehl and some of his staff moved to a village west of Berlin, to try to ensure occupation by British or American forces. However, in mid-May 1945, with the assistance of Riehl's colleague Karl Günter Zimmer, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich showed up one day in NKVD colonel's uniforms. The use of Russian nuclear physicists in the wake of Soviet troop advances to identify and "requisition" equipment, material, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Russian atomic bomb project is similar to the American Operation Alsos. The military head of Alsos was Lt. Col. Boris Pash, former head of security on the American atomic bomb effort, the Manhattan Project, and its chief scientist was the eminent physicist Samuel Goudsmit. In early 1945, the Soviets initiated an effort similar to Alsos (Russian Alsos). Forty out of less than 100 Russian scientists from the Soviet atomic bomb project's Laboratory 2 went to Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in support of acquisitions for the project. The two colonels requested that Riehl join them in Berlin for a few days, where he also met with nuclear physicist Yulii Borisovich Khariton, also in the uniform of an NKVD colonel. This sojourn in Berlin turned into 10 years in the Soviet Union. Riehl and his staff, including their families, were flown to Moscow on 9 July 1945. Wirths either flew out with Riehl or was later sent to join Riehl in Russia as a member of his group. Eventually, Riehl's entire laboratory was dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1950, Riehl was in charge of uranium production at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal' (Электросталь). German scientists, who were mostly atomic scientists, sent by the Soviets, at the close of World War II, to work in the Riehl group at Plant No. 12 included Alexander Catsch (Katsch), H. J. Born, Ortmann, Przybilla, Herbert Schmitz, Sommerfeldt, Herbert Thieme, Tobein, Günter Wirths, and Karl Günter Zimmer. Three major technological upgrades were made at Plant No. 12 in the production metallic uranium, two of them involved Wirths as a principle driving force:
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