Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer (8 August 1910-27 October 1972) was a German-American biologist, botanist, former CPUSA member, and the wife of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Biography[]
Katherine Puening was born in Recklinghausen, Westphalia, German Empire in 1910, a maternal cousin of Wilhelm Keitel. Her family emigrated to the United States in 1913, and her family settled in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania. Puening divorced her first husband for his homosexuality and drug addiction, and in 1933, she became involved in the Communist Party USA after becoming the common-law wife of a communist union organizer in Youngstown, Ohio. She distributed copies of the Daily Worker on the streets, but she separated from her husband in 1936 and moved in with her parents in Claygate, Surrey, England and worked as a translator. Her second husband died in the Spanish Civil War before Puening could join him in Spain, and Puening remarried to a medical doctor in 1938 and left the Communist Party, having realized that the party which she believed championed social justice in America was actually rigidly controlled by Moscow. She accompanied her husband to Pasadena, California, where she met J. Robert Oppenheimer in August 1939 and began an affair with him. In 1940, Oppenheimer impregnated Puening, who divorced her second husband and remarried Oppenheimer a day after her divorce was finalized. Katherine Oppenheimer struggled with motherhood and left her child Peter in the care of Haakon Chevalier during his youth, and, on 16 March 1943, she accompanied her husband to New Mexico due to his work on the Manhattan Project. After the end of World War II, Oppenheimer became a celebrity as the "father of the atomic bomb," while "Kitty" became an alcoholic. The family moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1947, and she suffered from alcohol, cigarette, and pill abuse. Oppenheimer died in 1967, and Kitty took up with her former neighbor Robert Serber, who had been widowed in 1967. She died in Panama in 1972.