How Physicists Hid Their Nobel Prizes From The Nazis During World War II

Two Nobel Prize-winning physicists smuggled their medals out of Germany (and had a buddy dissolve them in acid) to maintain them out of Nazi fingers.

(Unique Caption) 10/4/54-New York: Professor James Franck (left), College of Chicago scientist, and Professor Albert Einstein, famend scientist at Princeton, N.J., chat after receiving Honorary Levels of Physician of Science in Know-how, at a convocation organized by the American Technion Society, October 4th. Technion, which is the Israel Institute of Know-how, was lauded by each scientists, who’re Nobel Prize winners within the discipline of physics, for the institute’s service in offering engineers, utilized scientists, and educated technicians for the younger state.

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Chilean opposition chief Maria Machado tried to curry favor with the U.S. final week by providing to share her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. president Donald Trump. Her insistence prompted the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize) to difficulty a reminder final week that whereas a Nobel laureate can do what they like with the medal and the prize cash, the award itself is non-transferable.

A laureate can not share the prize with others, nor switch it as soon as it has been awarded,” wrote the committee in a current press launch, which didn’t point out Machado or Trump by title – however which, actually, didn’t must. “No matter what might occur to the medal, the diploma, or the prize cash, it’s and stays the unique laureate who’s recorded in historical past because the recipient of the prize.”

However the medal itself stays a deeply symbolic disk of gold. That’s in all probability why 4 physicists throughout World Battle II went to such nice lengths to maintain their Nobel Prize medals out of the fingers of the Nazis. Right here’s the completely wild story.

Hidden In Plain Sight

The morning the Nazis invaded Denmark, physicist Geroge de Hevesey shut himself in a lab on the Institute for Theoretical Physics, frantically mixing chemical substances. Right into a fuming flask, he fastidiously positioned two heavy gold medals. Whereas the sounds of marching troops stuffed the streets outdoors, Hevesey watched as twin golden portraits of Alfred Nobel, every set beneath a Latin inscription that means “for the peace and fraternity of countries,” swirled and disappeared into the orange fluid.

He gave the answer another good stir, then positioned the jar on a shelf and walked out of the lab. There it will sit till years after the tip of the struggle.

The 2 Nobel Prize medals belonged to a pair of German physicists, Max von Laue and James Franck, who had entrusted them to Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1933 because the Nationwide Socialist Get together consolidated its management over Germany.

“Hey, Can You Watch This For Me?”

James Franck (along with his colleague Gustav Hertz) obtained the 1925 Nobel Prize for an experiment that exposed how electrons behave. Eight years later, the Nazi regime gained energy in Germany and nearly instantly handed a regulation firing all Jewish staff from Germany’s civil service. That included professors on the nation’s public universities, like Franck – who was Jewish however technically exempt from the brand new regulation as a result of he had served in World Battle I. However Franck was too livid on the regime’s actions to stay round.

(That turned out to be a stable choice; two years later, in 1935, the regime handed the Nuremberg Legal guidelines: a set of legal guidelines designed to exclude Jewish and Roma individuals, individuals of shade, and immigrants from public life in Germany. The legal guidelines stripped these individuals of their citizenship and most of their authorized rights. Being a veteran wouldn’t have protected Franck from the Nuremberg Legal guidelines or the horrors that adopted.)

Franck resigned his place on the College of Goettingen in protest and stayed in Germany simply lengthy sufficient to assist most of his former colleagues discover new positions abroad, safely past the Nazis’ attain. Then he fled to Denmark, to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, a prestigious middle for quantum physics analysis lead by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. In 1934, Franck moved on to america, the place he ultimately turned a part of the Manhattan Challenge; he left his Nobel Prize medal within the care of Niels Bohr.

Physicist Max von Laue additionally visited Bohr’s Institute in 1933, however not like Franck and plenty of others, von Laue was capable of return residence and his work on the College of Berlin. As a result of von Laue and his household weren’t Jewish, Germany nonetheless thought-about him a citizen – and from that place of relative security, he pushed again towards the regime as a lot as he might, each publicly and in secret. However earlier than leaving Denmark, he deposited his medal for 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics (for his analysis on x-ray diffraction) with Bohr.

Why The Nazis Hated (Trendy) Physics

James Franck was simply considered one of many scientists fleeing Germany within the Thirties, searching for security and educational freedom. In Berlin, von Laue labored along with his buddy, chemist Otto Hahn, to assist as many Jewish scientists as doable escape the nation. A number of of them ended up, at the least briefly, in Copenhagen, at Niel’s Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics. Bohr helped as many scientists as doable discover extra everlasting postings at universities and laboratories abroad, however within the meantime, they may keep it up their analysis on the Institute, supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller Basis within the U.S. (which Bohr had helped negotiate).

At numerous occasions within the Thirties, the Institute’s ranks included Hilde Levi (who pioneered radiocarbon courting), Arther Robert von Hippel (who helped develop radar throughout the struggle), Edward Teller (who labored on the Manhattan Challenge and ultimately developed the hydrogen bomb), and James Franck.

In the meantime, von Laue tried (largely in useless, in the long term) to take a stand towards the Nazi regime in academia. As a part of the Nazis’ complete antisemitic bundle, the regime had declared struggle on… anticipate it… most of theoretical physics, together with quantum mechanics and atomic physics. A number of of the main figures in early Twentieth-century theoretical physics, like Albert Einstein, occurred to be Jewish, and the Nazis – together with numerous the previous guard of theoretical physics, who had constructed their careers on the concept gentle waves journey by means of an invisible substance referred to as luminiferous ether – simply couldn’t stand it.

(It’s value a facet notice that a number of of the outstanding scientists who fled Germany ended up engaged on the American atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Challenge. Together with being horrific human rights violations, the Nazis’ antisemitic and racist insurance policies additionally just about hamstrung their very own nationwide safety. U.S. coverage may be well on the way to repeating that mistake, some analysts suggest.)

How To Dissolve A Nobel Prize

For his vocal opposition to the get together line, von Laue obtained official reprimands and misplaced a few of his educational positions (along with a professorship on the College of Berlin, von Laue had been an advisor to Germany’s metrology institute since 1922; he was fired from that place in retaliation for his efforts to dam a outstanding Nazi scientist from becoming a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences).

However von Laue would have been in a lot worse bother if the regime found his Nobel Prize medal in Niels Bohr’s fingers. Beneath the Nazis, sending gold out of Germany was the subsequent smartest thing to treason, and von Laue might have confronted jail time and even outright execution if he had been caught. The medal had his title etched into its shiny floor, so the second an occupying soldier noticed it, von Laue’s head might have been on the chopping block. That’s why, when German forces marched into Copenhagen on that April morning, Niels Bohr was beside himself with fear about two absent colleagues’ Nobel Prize medals.

“I advised that we must always bury the medal, however Bohr didn’t like this concept, because the medal may be unearthed,” wrote de Hevesey a long time later, in his 1962 guide Adventures in Radioisotope Analysis. “I made a decision to dissolve it.”

The Nobel Prize medals are solid in stable 18-carat gold: 196 grams of it. Gold melts at round 1,000 levels Celsius, however melting the medals down would have left a 400-gram lump of gold for the enemy to seek out and, presumably, ask pointed questions on at gunpoint. Hevesey wanted to make the gold disappear utterly.

Gold is a notoriously tough metallic to dissolve, as a result of it doesn’t oxidize the way in which copper, silver, iron, and different metals do. One of many few substances that may get the job finished is named aqua regia: a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. That’s what Hevesey was mixing in one of many Institute’s labs whereas German troops have been marching previous outdoors.

The Nazis searched the Institute, as Bohr had anticipated them to. The entire time, the 2 Nobel Prize medals sat in plain sight on a shelf in Hevesey’s lab – if the troopers had solely been capable of see the tiny atoms of gold floating within the answer of acid. However they noticed solely a plain jar of orangeish liquid on a laboratory shelf, which was precisely the form of factor they anticipated to see.

It took seven years after the tip of the struggle for von Laue and Franck to get their Nobel Prize medals again. In 1950, Hevesey precipitated the gold out of the acid answer and returned the medals – deconstructed all the way down to the molecular stage – to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years later, Franck obtained his re-cast medal throughout a ceremony on the College of Chicago, turning into the primary individual on report to be awarded the identical Nobel Prize twice.