HERTZ, GUSTAV

HERTZ, GUSTAV (1887–1975), German physicist and Nobel Prize winner, son of a Jewish father. Born in Hamburg, he became an assistant in the Physical Institute at Berlin in 1913.   He was severely wounded in World War I, and subsequently worked at Eindhoven in the Netherlands. In 1925 he became professor of physics and director of the Physical Institute at Halle, and in 1928 at the Technische Hochschule. He resigned "for political reasons" in 1934, and became director of the Siemens Research Laboratory II. He remained in Germany throughout World War II and subsequently became professor of physics at the University of Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic. He and james franck were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for physics in 1925 for their discovery of the laws governing impact between an electron and an atom. Hertz converted to Christianity. He was a nephew of Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857–1894), the discoverer of electromagnetic waves, who was the son of a baptized Jewish father and a Christian mother. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: N.H. Heathcote, Nobel Prize Winners in Physics (1953), 230–48. (J. Edwin Holmstrom)