Kurt Sitte

Kurt Sitte (1 December 1910 - 20 June 1993) was a nuclear physicist, originally from northern Bohemia.

As a result of frontier changes, he grew up, after 1919, in Czechoslovakia, and from 1938 found himself a citizen of an enlarged Germany. It was primarily because of his political activism that he was detained at the Buchenwald concentration camp between September 1939 and April 1944. Having survived this internment, his scientific skills opened up a range of career options internationally: between 1945 he lived and worked successively in Scotland, England, the United States, Brazil and Israel.

Kurt Sitte was arrested on espionage charges on 15 June 1960 and, as Israel's first convicted spy, spent the next three and a half years in prison. Early release, in March 1963, resulted from his "good behaviour", at which point he was quoted as saying that he would be "glad" to continue to work in Israel, but shortly after this he took West German citizenship and relocated to Freiburg where he pursued his academic career at the university. Provided by Wikipedia