Draft:Theodor Buchhold

Theodor Buchhold (July 10, 1900 – January 1, 1984) was a German-American electrical and rocket engineer.

Life
Theodor Buchhold was born on July 10, 1900, as the son of the bookseller Hermann Buchhold in Unterliederbach, a district of Frankfurt am Main since 1928. After graduating from high school, he studied electrical engineering at the TH Darmstadt from 1919 and completed his studies on May 16, 1923, with the main diploma examination. He then went to Brown, Boveri & Cie. to Mannheim.

On July 24, 1925, he received his doctorate in engineering at the TH Darmstadt with a thesis on “Theoretical and experimental studies on chain overhead lines.” doctorate. Buchhold was an expert in electrical railways and had made a name for himself through his research in the field of so-called shaking oscillations in electrical railways. He joined Brown, Boveri & Cie. up to the deputy director of the railway department.

Buchhold joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 (membership number 3,458,729). As the successor to Adolf Sengel, who was forced out of office in 1933, Buchhold took over the professorship of electrical engineering II at the TH Darmstadt on October 1, 1934. Associated with this professorship was the supervision of the electrical parts of the power plant, which supplied the university with heat and electricity.

Since 1939, Theodor Buchhold was entrusted with tasks important to the war effort.

He was particularly concerned with questions of rocket navigation and control. Buchhold was one of a larger group of Darmstadt professors (e.g. Viktor Blaess, Hans Busch, Ernst Hueter, Kurt Klöppel, Hans Rau, August Thum, Richard Vieweg, Carl Wagner, Alwin Walther) who carried out research projects for the Peenemünde Army Research Institute. Buchhold was assigned to the design department headed by Walter H. J. Riedel.

Buchhold was dean of the electrical engineering department from 1941 to 1944. Theodor Buchhold was dismissed from civil service at the end of October 1945 for “political reasons”. He was one of nine professors and research assistants in whom the U.S. War Department expressed interest in August 1945. Buchhold accepted this invitation in June 1946 and came to the United States with Operation Overcast.

He spent the rest of his professional life in the United States and made a career in American rocket and space research. From January 1947 he worked at Fort Bliss. Here he was part of the “Braun Rocket Team”. He later moved into industry at General Electric.

After his active professional career, he returned to Germany. His first marriage was to Ilse Center and his second marriage was to Hildegard Margarethe Karoline Trietsch.