As part of an investigation of in situ etching of germanium substrates in a reaction chamber, prior to epitaxial deposition, a study was made of the kinetics and reaction chemistry of the Ge-HC1 and Ge-GeC14 etch reactions taking place in flowing hydrogen. Recent work has been reported on the in situ gas phase etching of silicon and germanium samples by Bean and Gleim (1), Lang and Stavish (2), and Amick et al. (3). The latter authors have reported in detail on the substrate texture obtained by gas phase etching prior to epitaxial deposition.