[2] Kurt Sitte was arrested on espionage charges on 15 June 1960 and, as Israel's first convicted spy,[1] spent the next three and a half years in prison.

[3] Early release, in March 1963, resulted from his "good behaviour",[2] at which point he was quoted as saying that he would be "glad" to continue to work in Israel,[3] but shortly after this he took West German citizenship and relocated to Freiburg where he pursued his academic career at the university.

[2] Kurt Sitte was born in Reichenberg, a mid-sized city in North Bohemia that had industrialised and grown rapidly during the previous century.

After completing his Abitur (school leaving exams), Kurt Sitte moved on to the Charles-Ferdinand (German) University in Prague where he studied Maths and Physics, and where he obtained his doctorate in 1932.

[4] He also presided over a leftist discussion group known as "Die Tat" ("the deed")[5] back in Reichenberg and participated in the Sudeten German Anti-Nazi Resistance movement.

He was imprisoned briefly in Prague and then moved to the Dachau concentration camp before he and his wife, as "political detainees", were transferred to Buchenwald in September 1939.

[2] Early in 1942 Sitte began working in the SS-Pathology department at the concentration camp where he was employed as a deputy to the "Kapo" Gustav Wegerer [de].

[9] As the end of the war approached, on 11 April 1945 Kurt Sitte was one of those freed from the Buchenwald concentration camp by members of the United States Army.

[7] Shortly afterwards his inclusion on a list of security risks was confirmed when he booked a flight to Rome that included a transfer in New York City.

When Sitte asked if he might stay at a hotel overnight the New York authorities refused his request, placed him under a heavy police guard, and bundled him onto the first available flight out of the country, which took him not to Italy, but back to Brazil.

Because of his various offices and duties he also acquired knowledge of research projects in nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute just outside Tel Aviv and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Israeli intelligence services reported that Sitte had been afraid that his research on cosmic rays as a potential energy source could lead to a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[2] In 1963 Kurt Sitte married, as his second wife, Judith Sitte-Amon (born Judith/Yehudit Krymokowski) and the couple relocated to West Germany.

[4] Between 1970 and 1983 he belonged to the scientific committee of the Cosmo-Geophysical Laboratory of the Italian National Research Council, based in Turin, where he had been employed as a teaching professor between 1966 and 1970.