Death-Rays as Life-Savers in the Third Reich - Pedro Waloschek ...

how closely Gans and Gerlach were befriended and how frequently
they used to meet or speak on the telephone during that period. Gans’
home in Berlin was never without a telephone connection during the
war, even when he had to move after his building was destroyed in a
bombing raid.
At any rate, many highly regarded scientists expressed positive
opinions about the Rheotron plan, and finally Schmellenmeier first took
on the task of drafting a proposal and then agreed to work on its
realisation in his laboratory, should a contract be forthcoming.
Rheotrons were not unknown in Germany at the time. They were
even thought of as a German invention, and had been patented under
the name ‘Elektronenschleuder’ (‘electron catapults’) in 1933 and
1935 by the physicist Max Steenbeck (1904-1981), who was
employed by Siemens-Schuckert in Berlin-Siemensstadt [Ru33]
[St35]. However, the electron beam produced by the experimental
apparatus that Steenbeck developed in strict secrecy was so weak
that Siemens decided to stop the project.
The crucial factor that was to arose such a high degree of interest in
the Rheotron and the ‘electron catapult’ was an article written in 1941
and published in the last issue of ‘Physical Review’ to be distributed in
Germany during the Third Reich. In this article the American physicist
Donald William Kerst (1911-1993) [Ke41b] described a relatively
small piece of apparatus in which electrons coursed around a circle
with a diameter of only 15 centimetres. The energy achieved by the
electrons was the same as that, which would result from accelerating
them with an electric potential of 2.3 million Volts. The equipment,
including the required magnet, measured less than 50 centimetres in
width and could easily be placed on a laboratory table. The
astonishing thing was the intensity of the X-rays which resulted from
the electron beams hitting a suitable material, and which Donald Kerst
was able to measure. In the first apparatus this was more or less
equivalent to the radiation produced by a tenth of a gram of radium,
and in a second device this rose to the radiation produced by an entire
42