Günter Wirths (1 June 1911 – 26 January 2005) was a German chemist who was an authority on uranium production, especially reactor-grade. He worked at Auergesellschaft in the production of uranium for the Heereswaffenamt and its Uranverein project. In 1945, he was sent the Soviet Union to work on the Russian atomic bomb project. When he was released from the Soviet Union, he settled in West Germany, and worked at the Degussa company. Career Early years Wirths was a colleague of Nikolaus Riehl, who was the director of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft. Auergesellschaft had a substantial amount of "waste" uranium from which it had extracted radium. After reading a paper in 1939 by Siegfried Flügge, on the technical use of nuclear energy from uranium, Riehl recognized a business opportunity for the company, and, in July of that year, went to the Heereswaffenamt (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) to discuss the production of uranium. The HWA was interested and Riehl committed corporate resources to the task. The HWA eventually provided an order for the production of uranium oxide, which took place in the Auergesellschaft plant in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. It was this that got Wirths involved with the production of uranium metal, which Auergesellschaft did for the Uranverein project of the Heereswaffenamt. In the Soviet Union Near the close of World War II, as American, British, and Russian military forces were closing in on Berlin, Riehl and some of his staff moved to a village west of Berlin, to try to ensure occupation by British or American forces. However, in mid-May 1945, with the assistance of Riehl's colleague Karl Günter Zimmer, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich showed up one day in NKVD colonel's uniforms. The use of Russian nuclear physicists in the wake of Soviet troop advances to identify and "requisition" equipment, material, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Russian atomic bomb project is similar to the American Operation Alsos. The military head of Alsos was Lt. Col. Boris Pash, former head of security on the American atomic bomb effort, the Manhattan Project, and its chief scientist was the eminent physicist Samuel Goudsmit. In early 1945, the Soviets initiated an effort similar to Alsos (Russian Alsos). Forty out of less than 100 Russian scientists from the Soviet atomic bomb project's Laboratory 2 went to Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in support of acquisitions for the project.