Professor G. Leitmann on for 85th Birthday

George Leitmann was born in Vienna, Austria on May 24, 1925. He emigrated, with his mother and two grandmothers, to the USA in 1940. Leitmann entered a technical high school in New York from which he graduated in 1943. Immediately after graduation he joined the US army and served in the reconnaissance unit of a Combat Engineer Battalion in France in 1944-45. For his role in the battle for Colmar, Leitmann was awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes. At the end of the war, he was assigned to the Counterintelligence Corps as its youngest special agent and served as an interrogator at the Nuremburg war crimes trial in 1946. After his discharge from military service in 1946, Leitmann began his university education at Columbia University in New York. He received a BA degree in physics in 1949 and an MS degree in physics, with research on secondary electron emission, in 1950. From 1950-57 he worked as a physicist and then as head of aeroballistics at the rocket development center, China Lake, California. During that period he also enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received the PhD in engineering science, with a dissertation on the exterior ballistics of high altitude rockets, in 1956. He joined the engineering faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of engineering science in 1957; he was advanced to Associate Professor in 1959 and to Professor in 1963. During his employment at the rocket development center, Leitmann worked on the design and testing of a variety