Nikolaus Riehl

Nikolaus Riehl was a German industrial physicist. He was head of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. When the Russians entered Berlin near the end of World War II, he was invited to the Soviet Union, where he stayed for 10 years. For his work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, he was awarded a Stalin Prize, Lenin Prize, and Order of the Red Banner of Labor. When he was repatriated to Germany in 1955, he chose to go to West Germany, where he joined Heinz Maier-Leibnitz on his nuclear reactor staff at Technische Hochschule München (THM); Riehl made contributions to the nuclear facility Forschungsreaktor München (FRM). In 1961 he became an ordinarius professor of technical physics at THM and concentrated his research activities on solid state physics, especially the physics of ice and the optical spectroscopy of solids.