Quote:Spy Questions To Classroom Lessons Mark Brotzen’s Life
By Meg Langner, Rice News Correspondent

In early 1945, Franz Brotzen, now a Rice University professor emeritus, was a U.S. military officer charged with helping to organize the once-powerful Nazi spy network in the Soviet Union into a resource for the United States.

The German high command knew the war would soon end. They expected no mercy from the Soviets but hoped to be punished less severely when they surrendered to the Americans, said Brotzen, the Stanley Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science. The United States knew very little about the Soviet Union at that time, he said, and when the Allies won the war, the Nazis decided to turn over to the United States their intelligence on the Soviets.

During the war, Germany controlled large spy networks within the U.S.S.R., but as the Nazis retreated before the Soviet forces, the system fell into disarray, Brotzen said.

Brotzen, along with three other American intelligence officers, was sent into Germany following the surrender of the Nazis, where he lived for six months interviewing former-Nazi officers who had served on the Eastern front. He fulfilled the American government’s request for information on the Soviet Union by figuring out how facts could best be obtained.

“That was quite an exciting time, sort of a little bit out of spy novels,” he said.

Brontzen left Germany for Brazil and eventually settled in at Rice University to conduct research in materials science.

Brotzen, born in Berlin, graduated from the gymnasium during the depression and landed a job with I.G. Farben, the chemical monopoly that manufactured poison gas for the “Solution,” made extensive use of slave labor, etc. Farben maintained symbiotic bonds with a host of German and American corporations and the Nazi genocidists throughout the war. German spies under Farben corporate cover were dispatched throughout South America before the war, and the young drug salesman did fit the profile. Brotzen joined Farben’s pharmaceutical division at the age of 18, and was quickly transferred to Brazil. In Teofilo Otoni, he worked temporarily in the sales department and contracted his share of diseases, he says, while wandering through the jungle, but survived to see WW II erupt. He left Farben, by his own account, and took a job in Rio de Janeiro importing steel mill construction equipment. Franz began to read about metallurgy and his interest in materials science was kindled. Brotzen headed for the U.S. to pursue a degree and arrived on December 1, 1941 — a week before Pearl Harbor. His draft status: “enemy alien,” but Brotzen quickly landed a job in Cleveland, Ohio anyways. He took evening classes at the Case School of Applied Science. A year after his entry into the States, he was drafted by the Army and packed off to a military intelligence training school in Maryland. The German expatriate spy rose to officer rank and taught at the military intelligence center until the final phase of the war, when he was sent back to Germany to liaison with the Nazi intelligence high command along the Eastern front. A year later, he returned to the U.S., earned his doctorate at Case. and went on to become a full professor at Rice University in 1954:

His research has spanned almost every field within materials science, from work on materials’ mechanical, electronic and magnetic behavior to studies of their physical chemistry, and Brotzen has long been internationally recognized as an outstanding researcher.

He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and received the U.S. Senior Scientist Award from Germany’s Humboldt Foundation in 1973. He is a fellow of ASM International and is the 1995 recipient of the Case Institute of Technology Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award.

Brotzen has also been involved in student life at Rice. That he enjoys and excels in teaching is proven by the number of awards he has won: four George R. Brown Awards for Superior Teaching, the Gold Medal from the Alumni Association, the Minnie Stevens Piper Award and the Student Association’s Mentor Award.

He is also a strong supporter of the college system. He and his wife, Frances, have been masters of both Jones and Brown, and they remain active Brown associates, welcoming and counseling advisee groups each year.

The couple also gives an annual scholarship in Brown and Jones and a substantial summer travel award open to all undergraduates from all colleges.

Brotzen has been active in university administration as well. In the early 1960s he was responsible for Rice’s federal funding, which he helped increase from $1 million to $13.5 million.

And as the dean of engineering from 1962 until 1966, he expanded Rice’s research and graduate programs in engineering.

He has also served on “practically every committee that ever existed on campus,” according to Ronald Sass, Rice professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Brotzen has spent a total of approximately 20 years on each of the Faculty Council and the University Council and its predecessors.

“He’s someone who has … a deep and abiding love for this institution,” said Ronald Stebbings, professor of space physics and astronomy. “When I was a senior member of the administration, I often found that I’d learn important details about the running of the place from my weekly lunches with Franz.

“I can’t think of anybody, frankly, who really has a clearer picture, on a day-to-day basis, of the wide range of things that are going on this campus.”

Although he has made an enormous contribution to Rice over the years, Brotzen has kept up interests outside engineering and away from Rice. He loves to travel and has seen much of the world. He is an art buff. He follows sports and stays active in the Democratic Party.

He has taught as a visiting professor at schools including the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland….

Brotzen has been an integral part of the Rice community.

He retired in 1986, but President George Rupp immediately asked him to become the Stanley C. Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Brotzen has continued his research and taught every semester since, except one. There’s no telling when he will actually retire.

“I’m having a ball, I’m having a very good time, so why change?” Brotzen said.

Quote:“A Holocaust museum has rejected the donation of an advertising fee from Rice University’s student newspaper after it printed an ad from a group that doubts the Holocaust occurred. ‘This money is tainted and its purpose is to deny the murder of millions of human beings, Jews and non-Jews alike, and aims to deny Holocaust survivors the opportunity to bear witness for those who cannot speak for themselves,’ said Abraham J. Peck, executive director of Holocaust Museum Houston.”

Quote:“Nazis stormed through the streets of German cities, terrorizing and killing Jews and members of religious minorities. Although news of these events reached the outside world, nothing was done. Today, we would be wise not to ignore the early warning signs from a country which has twice this century brought the world to war, and whose government is today attempting to rewrite history with an exhibition at Columbia University puffing up so-called German resistance to the Nazis – a spectacle that, according to the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is intended solely to polish Germany’s international prestige.”

Quote:“most of the evidence points to indirect relationships, but because the CIA is closed and secret and because the Columbia Administration refuses to discuss its CIA relations, it is quite possible that CIA-CU ties are far more direct and pervasive than the public data now indicates. In fact, our own information indicates that these ties are so direct as to involve a highly influential group of men in dual positions of leadership — inside Columbia and in the CIA itself.”

Quote:When Lang asked if Columbia held any contract the existence of which was classified, Warren Goodell, Associate Director of Projects and Grants, said he was not at liberty to comment. Ralph S. Halford, then Dean of Graduate Faculties, stated the administration’s official policy on CIA funding: ‘University policy would not preclude the acceptance … of project support from the CIA.’ He went on to say that if a project was in line with regular academic duty, endorsed by the chairman or dean of the division in which it would be conducted, and approved by the Office of Projects and Grants as being appropriate to a University, ‘the University would not hesitate to accept … an offer by the CIA to furnish funds in support of the project.’ … As important as direct CIA involvement in SIA research projects, is Columbia’s association with two organizations, the Asia Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Asia Foundation has received much if not all of its financial support from the CIA. It has a budget of about $7 million a year to provide ‘private American assistance to those Asian groups and individuals working for continued social and economic improvement.’ …

In 1962, when Robert Blum, president of the Foundation, resigned, Kirk was appointed Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Trustees, whose purpose was to select a new president. In his search for suitable candidates for this position, Kirk sought the advice and suggestions of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman, a move which indicates the importance of the Foundation. He also encouraged recommendations from George S. Moore, President of the First National City Bank of New York, and A.L. Nickerson, Chairman of the Board of Socony Mobil Oil Company, Inc., concerning members of the bank and of Socony Mobil, which had experience in Asian affairs. One man who was proposed as a possible choice was Robert Amory, but Kirk himself is reported to have feared that he might bring embarrassment to the Asia Foundation. From 1952-1962, Amory was Deputy Director of the CIA.

George Tenet, “acting” director of the CIA for the past four years, received his master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International Affairs (SIA), a limb of the CIA’s Ivy League learning tree, in 1978. The Agency connection is long-standing. NACLA found an indirect tie between the CIA and SRI, “demonstrated by the presence of Eugene C. Bewkes and Alger B. Chapman, advisory council members of SIA, and David S. Smith, Associate Dean of SIA, Director of the International Fellows Program and a member of the Administrative Board of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs. All three men are directors of the Edward John Noble Foundation, which besides passing money for the CIA, has also given over $2 million [in federal proceeds] to SIA.” Smith’s connection to Langley extended to a past position as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and his involvement in the U-2 spy plane over flights.

Under Rupp’s reign, spooks still haunt the campus. He keeps the secrets. He daren’t mention, for instance, that the university trains CIA and Mossad agents, an arrangement subsidized by the black budget. Many students studying foreign languages at Columbia’s Department of Middle East Languages and Culture are either training for the Israeli Mossad or the Central Intelligence Agency. Columbia students with poor grades who still want a CIA job receive scholarships to Cairo’s American University, or Robert College in Turkey. Some Muslims in the foreign language schools at Columbia train for employment in D.C. One Jordanian-American student confessed that he is took Arabic in preparation for a State Department exam. Language study toward intelligence work is disguised as `cultural’ programs, legitimizing them and assuring continued federal funding.
(Muslimedia International, http://www.malaysia.net/mulimedia/, July 17, 1996)