German Geology from the Third Reich to the Iron Curtain

摘要

The German oil industry did not employ geologists until the 1920s. Instead, they relied on geological surveys and other resources from universities, predominantly from Jakob Stoller of the Prussian Geological Survey. After World War I, with the beginning of private motorization and the interest of the military, demand for oil began to increase. This led to the establishment of a separate department of petroleum geology and the employment of a young geologist, Alfred Bentz, as assistant to Stoller. Bentz obtained his doctorate in 1922 from the University of Tubingen, then worked briefly as an assistant in Tubingen until he became a geologist at the PGLA in Berlin. After Stoller's death in 1930, Bentz was appointed head of the small petroleum department. He established meetings and workshops, which led to fruitful exchange between the various smaller and larger oil companies and the state geologists. Around 1930, there was much discussion about oil genesis in Germany -about whether it was a purely stratigraphic phenomenon or if it migrated from an as-yet unknown source. August Moos and Karl Krejci-Graf supported the migration theory, and they were supported by Bentz.