Fritz Johann Hansgirg (1891–1949) was an Austrian electrochemist and metallurgist who in 1928 invented the process, similar to the Pidgeon process. In 1934, he left Austria for the Empire of Japan where he worked with industrialist Shitagau Noguchi to set up a magnesium plant and further helped the Japanese build a pilot plant to produce heavy water by the Combined Electrolysis Catalytic Exchange (CECE) he invented. Coming to the United States in 1940, he worked with American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser to design a magnesium plant in California, but at the outbreak of World War II, Hansgirg was arrested by the FBI on a Presidential warrant and interned for "the duration of the war." After the war, the Soviet Union captured Hansgirg's plants in northern Korea, using the plants' processes