[1] Jehle graduated in 1930 from the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart with a degree in engineering and in 1933 from the Technische Hochschule Berlin with an engineering doctorate in textile manufacture.He was part of the 'Bonhoeffer circle' of students, talking theology and making hesitant attempts at spiritual exercises, listening to Bonhoeffer's Negro spirituals.
He was a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in 1973/74 and at the University of Munich from 1977 until his death.
His contributions included the first theoretical description of two-component fields with mass and charge, the prediction of particlelike singular solutions in nonlinear field theory, extension of the formalism of covariant two-component spinor fields, the association of some comets with the orbital parameters of Jupiter, new statistical methods in gravitational systems, calculation of specificity of the van der Waals' interactions between macromolecules due to coherent quantum charge fluctuations, models of DNA replication, and quark models based on the topology of singular quantized magnetic flux loops.
[2]As Richard Feynman describes in his Nobel Lecture, it was Herbert Jehle who gave him (at a beer party in the Nassau Tavern) in Princeton the decisive clue to Paul Dirac's work on the Lagrangian, which then led to Feynman's development of the path integral.
[3] Silvan Schweber recounted his graduate study of physics at the University of Pennsylvania: The person I got closest to was ... Herbert Jehle, ...