Kurt Lehovec Czech, later American, physicist and inventor, semiconductor researcher. Date of Birth: 12.07.1918

1. Early Life and Education
2. World War II and Early Research
3. Operation Paperclip and Immigration to the US

Early Life and Education

Kurt Lehovec was born in Ledvice, Sudetenland, Austria-Hungary, in the waning days of World War I. His mother was an ethnic German, while his father was an ethnic Czech and an officer in the Austrian and later Czechoslovak armies. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother raised him and his older brother in isolation, strictly controlling their reading and instilling in them a mistrust of women. Lehovec's father's appearance set him apart as an outcast within his own family, and he developed an inferiority complex that he later referred to as his "Charlie Chaplin complex."

After graduating from secondary school in 1936, Lehovec moved to Prague with his family and enrolled in the physics department of Charles University. In 1939, Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, and the university was decapitated, with Jewish professors disappearing and German scientists filling the void. One of these Germans, Professor Bernhard Gudden, established a semiconductor laboratory at the university and became Lehovec's doctoral advisor. Lehovec received his doctorate in philosophy "at an accelerated pace" in 1941 for his research on the photoelectric effect in lead selenide.

World War II and Early Research

Immediately upon receiving his degree, Lehovec was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front. He remained tight-lipped about his military service, only stating that army life finally freed him from his mother's oppressive control. In 1942, he was recalled to Prague and made technical director of a research group at the Physical Institute of Charles University.

During the war, two semiconductor research laboratories were established in Bohemia. Lehovec's group in Prague, under Gudden's leadership, focused on rectifier diodes, while another laboratory in Tanvald worked on radar detector crystals. Lehovec's research on selenium rectifiers, funded by the Nuremberg-based Südddeutsche Apparatefabrik (SAF), led to the discovery that thallium impurities significantly suppressed the reverse current of blocked rectifiers. This finding caught the attention of his sponsors, and in 1942, Lehovec was granted access to the frontlines of military research – the secret "material X" (germanium).

Operation Paperclip and Immigration to the US

In 1945, Gudden and most of his staff were killed during the Soviet advance into Prague. Elmar Frank survived and remained in Prague, but Lehovec fled on a bicycle westward. He settled in the American sector of what would become West Germany and continued his scientific work, publishing several papers on the photoelectric effect in semiconductors. However, it was impossible to support himself through science in the devastated region.

In 1947, Lehovec was recruited by British agents from the 30th Assault Group (by his own account, American agents from the U.S. Army Signal Corps) for Operation Paperclip, a program to bring German scientists to the United States. Despite speaking no English and lacking any means of support, Lehovec eagerly accepted the offer. He was given cigarettes to barter on the black market for clothing and soon sailed to the United States with a group of 210 German specialists. Twenty-four of them, including Lehovec and Hans Ziegler, were assigned to work at the U.S. Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Lehovec was among the youngest Germans brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip.