Scienceקורט סיטה

Kurt Sitte

Kurt Sitte was a nuclear physicist and Technion professor who became Israel's first convicted spy, after spying for Czechoslovakia.

1910 to 1993Israel's first convicted spyCosmic ray research at the TechnionSurviving Buchenwald

Born: 1 December 1910, Liberec
Died: 20 June 1993, Freiburg im Breisgau
Occupation: university teacher, physicist, nuclear physicist, resistance fighter
Education: Charles University, faculty of science, German University in Prague, Deutsche wissenschaftliche Prüfungs-kommission für das Lehramt an Mittelschulen in Prag

Kurt Sitte was born in 1910 in Liberec

Kurt Sitte was born in 1910 in Reichenberg, in northern Bohemia, to a German Christian family. His father, also named Kurt Sitte, was a head teacher and a painter. Around 1938 he married Hedwig Kraus, a nurse from Reichenberg.

He studied mathematics and physics at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1932 and his habilitation in 1935. He was active in the Sudeten German anti-Nazi resistance. In 1938 he co-founded a council of Sudeten Germans seeking peace.

In 1939 he was arrested and held as a political prisoner in Dachau and then Buchenwald. He worked in the camp's pathology department and was freed by the United States Army in April 1945.

After the war he worked at Edinburgh and Manchester, then at Syracuse University in the United States and at the University of São Paulo. From 1950 he worked for Czech intelligence. In 1954 he joined the Technion, where he headed the physics department and sat on the Israel Atomic Energy Commission.

He was arrested in June 1960 and tried in the Haifa District Court for espionage. He was convicted and released early in March 1963. He then took West German citizenship and taught at the university in Freiburg until his death in 1993.