Secret War Research

In the file on the award of a doctorate to the meteorologist Emil Frank (born 1913), the title of his dissertation “Aerosol” in 1944 stands out. Doctoral theses often employ complex, compound vocabulary and interposed conditional clauses in their titles to describe their topic, in order to plot the object of inquiry within the proper disciplinary parcel. The short title used for this thesis on the file cover and on the doctoral certificate served to maintain secrecy. As an employee of the Greifswald Naval Observatory, Frank focused on the artificial dissipation of a specific aerosol — fog — a persistent everyday issue, and most especially so in wartime. Fog removal was particularly relevant in aviation, where it was essential to keep runways clear. The assigner of the task, which was carried through all the way up to the development of a “large main apparatus,” the Naval Observatory, exposes the military relevance of Frank’s thesis. The primary supervision and reviewing of Frank’s dissertation, by Franz Wolf (1898–1984), a physics professor at Karlsruhe Polytechnic, exemplifies this institution’s involvement in war research. kn