Laboratory B
From early in 1945, Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin, as head of the 9th Chief Directorate of the NKVD (MVD after 1946), was responsible for the acquisition of German scientists, equipment, materiel, and intellectual property, under the Russian Alsos, to help Russia with the Soviet atomic bomb project.
Zavenyagin's purview also included the resources of the Gulag; some of the facilities to which the German scientists were assigned were run as a sharashka.
On the basis of false denunciations, Timofeev-Resovskij and Tsarapkin were arrested by the NKVD in September 1945, returned to Russia, and both sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag.
Timofeev-Resovskij's wife Elena Aleksandrovna, after receipt of a letter in his handwriting, left Berlin in 1948, with their son Andrew, to join him in Sungul'.
The house occupied by the three Timofeev-Resovskijs was every bit as nice as that planned for the German scientists working at the Sungul' institute.
[18] On the basis of a false denunciation, Sergej Aleksandrovich Voznesenskij was arrested in June 1941; in April 1942, he was sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag.
[31] With the liquidation of Laboratory B and its merger into NII-1011 in 1955, Voznesenskij was transferred to the Ural Polytechnical Institute to head up the Department of Radiochemistry, and was simultaneously appointed as a scientific consultant at Combine No.
)[32][33] The radiochemistry division had four sections and conducted research and development in the following areas:[18][32] Owing to its proximity to the radiochemical plutonium facility Combine No.
[27] The first director of Laboratory B, starting in 1946, was MVD Colonel Alexander Konstantinovich Uralets, who had previously worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project.
When Riehl learned that professional colleagues from the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Hirnforschung (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research) in Berlin, Hans-Joachim Born and Karl Zimmer, were being held in Krasnogorsk, in the main PoW camp for Germans with scientific degrees, Riehl arranged though Zavenyagin to have them sent to Ehlektrostal'.
At Ehlektrostal', Riehl had a hard time incorporating Born, Catsch, and Zimmer into his tasking on uranium production, as Born was a radiochemist, Catsch was a physician and radiation biologist, and Zimmer was a physicist and radiation biologist; in December 1947, Riehl sent all three to Laboratory B to work with Timofeev-Resovskij.
[44][45] Besides those already mentioned, other Germans at Laboratory were Rinatia von Ardenne (sister of Manfred von Ardenne, director of Institute A, in Sukhumi) Wilhelm Menke (botanist), Willi Lange (who married the widow of Karl-Heinrich Riewe, who had been at Heinz Pose's Laboratory V, in Obninsk), Joachim Pani, and K. K. Rintelen.
