Peter Herbert Jensen
Peter Herbert Jensen (28 November 1913 – 17 August 1955) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was born in Göttingen and died in Quend, France.
During World War II he worked on Germany’s uranium project, the Uranverein. After the war he held important research positions: he was department director of the high‑voltage section at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and a professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Education and early career: Jensen studied from 1932 to 1938 at Göttingen and Freiburg, earning his PhD in 1938 under Georg Joos at Göttingen. In 1938 he volunteered at Walther Bothe’s institute at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and served as a teaching assistant from 1939 to 1946. He completed his habilitation in 1943 at Heidelberg, focusing on neutron scattering.
Nuclear research and the B8 reactor: Late in the war, German scientists moved to safer sites; the B8 reactor was built in Haigerloch, involving researchers from KWIP and KWImF, including Bothe and Jensen.
Later career: From 1946 to 1953 Jensen was Wolfgang Gentner’s teaching assistant at the University of Freiburg, becoming a senior assistant in 1953–1954. He lectured from 1947, and in 1951 he became a non-regular professor, focusing on Van de Graaff generator experiments for nuclear physics. In 1954 he became department director of the high‑voltage section at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Otto Hahn Institute) in Mainz and served as a non-regular professor at the University of Mainz.
Publications: Several internal reports appeared in Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte, the Uranverein’s classified reports. They were seized after the war, declassified in 1971, and are now available at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:15 (CET).