Klara Döpel
German physicist
Klara (Minna) Renate Döpel (née Mannß; 1900 – 6 April 1945 in Leipzig) was a feminist and a German lawyer until 1933. Then she married the German nuclear physicist Robert Döpel, and they worked together as a team at Leipzig University studying nuclear reactor configurations for the German nuclear energy project. Klara was killed in an air raid near the end of World War II.
Education
Klara Döpel studied law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and worked as a lawyer until 1933. In 1934, she married the nuclear physicist Robert Döpel. She changed her area of studies to physics at the Julius Maximilian University Würzburg.
Career
In 1938, Klara Döpel followed her husband Robert to Leipzig, where Robert became an extraordinarius professor at Leipzig University. Robert was a colleague of Werner Heisenberg, who headed the theoretical physics department there. After the German nuclear energy project began, Heisenberg and his staff worked on major components of the program including isotope separation, measurements of nuclear constants, and the Uranmaschine (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor). Klara and Robert worked together on Uranmaschine experimental configurations designated L 1 through L 4. Klara and Robert Döpel and Heisenberg published the Deutsche Forschungsberichte reporting on the experiments conducted there.
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This entry incorporates text from “Klara Döpel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.