by Craig Nelson
When Lise returned to KWI in 1917, her salary was raised to match Hahn’s, and she became head of her own physics department. With Hahn’s assistance through letters, she discovered protactinium, and in an echo of her self-denigrating behavior from her university years, she published those results as a team, even putting Hahn’s name first, though he wasn’t even physically present in the lab when she made the find. Twenty years later, when both would be involved in the greatest discovery of their lifetimes, Otto Hahn would not return this favor. When in 1926 at the University of Berlin, Lise Meitner became the first female professor in the history of Germany, social misogyny remained in force; a lecture she gave on “cosmic physics” was written up in an academic review as being about “cosmetic physics.”
When La Ricerca Scientifica published Fermi’s irradiation findings in March and May of 1934, his discoveries reinvigorated the Joliot-Curies in Paris and Meitner-Hahn-Strassmann (Hahn’s new assistant) in Berlin. The competing German, French, and Italian teams, all firing neutron cannons at uranium targets, produced one new element or isotope after the next, chemically detected yet short-lived creatures that were even atomically fatter than naturally occurring uranium, which they called transuranes. In Rome, after the group’s chemist left to develop insecticides and Segrè departed for a job in Palermo, Fermi lost interest in transuranics, but Berlin and Paris battled, driving the science to new heights, churning out a torrent of experimental results, each side arriving at different interpretations for what was happening, and each claiming the other was inept. On January 20, 1938, Otto and Lise told Irène Curie that “she had committed a gross error” in claiming to have produced a three-and-a-half-hour transuranic thorium isotope and said that if she didn’t release a “public retraction,” they would humiliate her themselves.
But in fact they were all wrong. Their radioactive chemistry was misreading a fundamental process, and though elements atomically grander than uranium would in time be artificially engineered (and called plutonium, americium, et al.), the transuranes themselves were a mirage. Only one scientist seemed to grasp what was happening, German chemist Ida Noddack, who wrote to Fermi, “One can imagine that when heavy nuclei are bombarded with neutrons, these nuclei break apart into several large fragments, which are indeed isotopes of known elements but not neighbors of the irradiated elements.” Noddack’s revolutionary concept was, though, only a side note in her criticism that Fermi hadn’t excluded such known elements as polonium in his chemical testing for transuranes. As she offered no proof of nuclei breaking apart into large fragments, no one in the physics community took this comment as revelatory. In fact, as Hungarian Quartet member Edward Teller explained, “Fermi was a very careful experimenter. He covered his uranium with a thin sheet of inert material to stop the normal alpha particles (without the extra energy) in which he was not interested. That sheet also stopped the fission products, which had a short range but extremely high energy-density. Had Fermi forgotten to cover this sample even once, fission would have been discovered years earlier.”
While Meitner was making history as a woman physicist in the leafy Berlin suburb of Dahlem, outside that ivory tower in the economically collapsed Weimar Republic, “mystics, magicians and religious fanatics drew followers desperate for rescue. Each was called a Heiland, or savior. But in German, there is no plural word for ‘savior.’ There can be only one,” as historian Nicole Rittenmeyer said. When on February 28, 1933, the Reichstag, Germany’s Capitol, was attacked by arsonists, President von Hindenburg ordered the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State,” suspending private property, personal liberty, freedom of assembly, privacy, and press freedom, “until further notice.” Chancellor Hitler dissolved parliament, dismissed the Weimar constitution, and sent eight hundred thousand Germans to prisons or concentration camps. Six weeks later, on April 7, 1933, the anti-Semitic “Law for the Restoration of the Career Civil Service” was passed. Over the next three years, sixteen hundred scholars were fired or resigned, a third being scientists, twenty being Nobel laureates, and quarter of Germany’s physicists were exiled. Lise’s nephew Otto Robert Frisch lost his Rockefeller fellowship to study with Fermi in Rome since, on his return to Germany, he would no longer be employed. Szilard’s Academic Assistance Council got Frisch to Birkbeck in the UK, and after a short term he was able to join Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. Lise’s next-door neighbor, James Franck, could continue working because of his service in the Great War, but he resigned on principle as did Erwin Schrödinger.
On May 16, the greatest scientist still living in Germany, Max Planck, tried to reason with Hitler. “I have nothing against the Jews. But the Jews are all Communists, and these are my enemies. My life is against them,” Hitler insisted. Planck argued that many of the greats of German culture and many of its oldest families were Jews, and besides, “there are different sorts of Jews, some valuable for mankind and others worthless . . . distinctions must be made.” “That’s not right,” Hitler immediately replied. “A Jew is a Jew; all Jews stick together like leeches. Whenever there is one Jew, all Jews of all sorts immediately gather.” When Planck then said that expelling Jews wholesale would damage German science, Hitler became enraged: “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. . . . If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!”
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute employees were not civil servants and so not subject to this law. Lise Meitner was additionally exempt as a university professor since she wasn’t German, but Austrian. Yet now, everything began to change. Her chief assistant became an ardent party member, while the new head of organic chemistry, Kurt Hess, was a “fanatic” Nazi. Even so, Lise spent the next years seemingly unconscious of the reality of the new Germany, perhaps because of her life of physics and music and nothing else, or her remove within the academic exile of Dahlem, or because of her joy in her professional achievements, which would be taken from her if she fled.
On May 10, 1933, University of Berlin professors and students, wearing their brown shirts, held a bonfire to burn twenty thousand books, notably those of Einstein, Kafka, Proust, Thomas Mann, and Helen Keller. Then, starting in the summer of 1933, one of the titans of world physics, Max von Laue, decided enough was enough. He campaigned to keep “Aryan physicist” Johannes Stark out of the Prussian academy; opened a physics conference with a paean to relativity following the history of Galileo and political opposition; wrote a spring 1934 Naturwissenschaften obituary for Haber praising him; was reprimanded by the Ministry of Culture, and welcomed it. But this kind of heroism was rare, and rarely effective.
On September 6, 1933, even though she was Austrian, Meitner was dismissed from the university and could no longer present findings at scientific conferences. When Hahn and Planck tried to reverse the decision, they found they were powerless, even after Hahn resigned in protest.
In November, Bohr got Lise a Rockefeller grant to spend a year with him in Copenhagen. She turned it down. Planck and Hahn convinced her she could stay; emigration was especially difficult for such a socially awkward woman; the world was still in an economic depression, and decently paying jobs were rare; and there was KWI physics, which she had created and run; her own department; her baby. In a letter to Gerta von Ubisch of July 1, 1947, she explained, “I built it from its very first little stone; it was, so to speak, my life’s work, and it seemed so terribly hard to separate myself from it.”
By the end of 1933, KWI chemistry was entirely staffed with party members and once again devoted to weapons R&D. Hahn’s assistant Strassmann was offered a good job with an industrial firm, but had to first join the Nazi Party. When he refused, he was blacklisted and spent the 1930s trying to live on a quarter of his income. Regardless, he hid a Jewish friend in his apartment. Naturwissenschaften continued to accept Jewish contributions, becoming Meitner’s sole outlet for the 1930s, but was so hounded by
Nazi boycotts that its founder and editor of twenty-two years was dismissed.
On September 15, 1935, at the Nuremberg party rally, Hitler spoke on “the Jewish problem. . . . This law is an attempt to find a legislative solution. If it fails, it will be necessary to transfer the problem to the National Socialist Party for a final solution.” The new laws: Jews were no longer German citizens, and sex and marriage between Jews and Germans were illegal. Historian Erich Ebermayer: “After these three laws were read, the halls rang with minute-long applause. It was the call of a wild animal, a beast that smells blood.”
Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg nominated Lise for the Nobel for 1936 and 1937 both because she deserved it, and because they thought it might save her. Then on March 12, 1938, Austria “united” with Germany (removing the exemption of her nationality), and the day after, KWI organic chemistry chief Kurt Hess publicly denounced Meitner, saying, “The Jewess endangers the institute.” Four days after, KWI’s treasurer told Hahn that Lise should resign since “nothing more could be done; perhaps she could continue working unofficially,” and Otto began distancing himself from Lise so as not to be tainted by decades of collaboration with a Jew. The tension became so great that Hahn’s mentally unstable wife, Edith, muttered over and over, “The great misfortune has happened! The great misfortune has happened!” Kaiser Wilhelm Society president Carl Bosch, however, insisted that the institute was under his management, not the government’s, and that Lise was staying. The same month, Meitner received lecture offers from Paul Scherrer in Zurich and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. From the University of Chicago, James Franck filed an affidavit ensuring that if she emigrated to America, she wouldn’t become a public ward (the first document needed for US entry).
She just couldn’t decide what to do. So, she did nothing. She turned them all down, even though, if she lost her job and then tried to leave Germany, she could be arrested and imprisoned. Finally, on May 9, she accepted Bohr’s offer to join her nephew Otto, in Copenhagen. But the Danish consulate declared her Austrian passport no longer valid and refused entry.
Meitner and Bosch decided the answer was for him to formally request an Auslandpass (a passport allowing travel outside the Reich), which he submitted, filled with praise for Meitner’s international reputation and worth to the KWI, on May 22. He quickly received an answer: “It is considered undesirable that renowned Jews should leave Germany for abroad to act there against the interests of Germany. . . . The Kaiser Wilhelm Society will certainly find a way for Prof. M. to stay in Germany after her retirement. . . . The Reichsführer SS and the Chief of German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior [Heinrich Himmler] in particular have advocated that position.” Bosch wanted to appeal directly to Himmler, but was told that would not be effective.
Now, it was too late. Not even Max Planck could save Lise Meitner.
But Niels Bohr could. Bohr had made his career by noticing errors, omissions, or points unexplored in others’ work, yet these seemingly trivial origins would make him a titan in the history of science. He had terrible difficulty thinking and writing at the same time, so he ended up having assistants—such historically significant physicists as Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Gamow, Urey, and Bohr’s own wife, Margrethe—take dictation and used their responses as something of a sounding board. He spoke in murmurs, coming up to his acolytes (who were legion), leaning in close, and whispering into their ears. Einstein said that Bohr “is like a sensitive child and walks about this world in a kind of hypnosis,” but that his atomic theory “appeared to me like a miracle and appears as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.” A true gentleman like Planck—whenever Bohr thought an idea was wrong, he told its originator that it was “very interesting”—Bohr had been so good at soccer as a young man that he’d won a spot on one of Denmark’s best teams. Now, he was a Ping-Pong champion, and for his fiftieth birthday, the Danish public surprised him with 0.6 grams of radium. He was then awarded the Aeresbolig, the mansion of the Carlsberg brewery founder, which had been bequeathed to the state as the House of Honor. Edward Teller: “Bohr loved paradoxes and did his brilliant best to explain them, carefully emphasizing the contradictions. He also liked to talk about subjects that he did not understand, although he always made sense in an inspirational and ambiguous way. His sentences were long and convoluted. I remember his friend Paul Dirac once asked him, ‘Were you never taught in school that before you begin a sentence you should have some plan as to how you’re going to finish it?’ Bohr turned to the rest of us and commented: ‘Dirac may think that one should not start life until one has a plan about how to end it.’ ”
The minute Niels Bohr returned from a trip to Berlin that June, he launched a campaign across Scandinavia and Holland to rescue Lise Meitner from Hitler. In the Netherlands, Dirk Coster and Adriaan Fokker knew that lab space was easy but university jobs were hard, so they campaigned among their professional and industrial colleagues for funds to support Lise, then discovered they would need permission from both the Ministries of Justice and of Education for her immigration. They just didn’t have enough time.
On June 14, Meitner learned that “technical and academic” citizens would not be allowed to leave Germany.
On June 16, Bosch received a letter from the Ministry of the Interior, categorically refusing Meitner a German passport.
Now she knew she had to get out. Otto Hahn asked Paul Rosbaud, the well-connected new editor of Naturwissenschaften, if he could get a passport forged for her. But then Adriaan Fokker, Dirk Coster, and W. J. de Haas achieved a miracle. By June 27, 1938, they had raised enough money to finance her for a year abroad, and Coster gave her the news. Then on July 11, the Netherlands approved her entry.
On July 12, Lise spent the night at Hahn’s. Carrying only two valises of summer clothes, ten marks in cash, and a diamond ring Hahn had inherited from his mother and given her since “I wanted her to be provided for in case of an emergency,” Paul Rosbaud drove her to the station. All the way, she begged him to take her back home.
The train took seven hours, but Coster and Fokker arranged for a Dutch border officer to overlook that her Austrian passport was invalid and she had no official entry visa, merely papers assuring a visa was on its way.
Otto Hahn: “The danger consisted in the SS’s repeated passport control of trains crossing the frontier. People trying to leave Germany were always being arrested on the train and brought back. . . . We were shaking with fear whether she would get through or not.”
Inexplicably, the SS let her pass. By six that evening she was safely in Groningen. Ardent Nazi chemist Kurt Hess learned she was escaping and informed the government, but some sympathetic members of the police force delayed processing his information until she was safely across the border. Wolfgang Pauli was so thrilled he cabled Coster, “You have made yourself as famous for the abduction of Lise Meitner as for [the discovery of] hafnium!”
In the meantime, Bohr had turned to Manne Siegbahn, then overseeing the construction of Sweden’s Research Institute for Physics and the country’s new cyclotron. After being repeatedly nagged by Bohr, Siegbahn finally agreed to offer Meitner both refuge and a one-year contract, even though he was in the building and not the staffing stage. In loyalty to Bohr, Lise accepted, turning down the Dutch, who were dispirited. But she had nothing, no money, no winter clothes for Scandinavian life, and, as it turned out, no entry visa for Sweden, as Siegbahn hadn’t yet gotten permission.
On July 28, she flew to Copenhagen, terrified that the plane would be forced to land in Germany and she would be repatriated against her will. She stayed with the Bohrs at their seaside villa, Tisvalde, where one guest had asked Bohr about the horseshoe on the door, if he believed that it brought good luck. Bohr replied, “No, but I was told that they also bring luck to people who do not believe in them.”
In August, Lise sailed for Sweden, stopping along the way at the coastal village of Kungälv to visit Eva von Bahr-Bergius, on
e of the few other internationally known women scientists and a longtime friend from Berlin. Eva told Lisa that she must officially retire from KWI and receive her pension now, when she needed it most.
Meitner finally arrived at the Physics Department of the Nobel Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, finding it spacious, empty, and completely disorganized, still under construction, with equipment always on order but never arriving, no assistants, her salary equivalent to what assistants would be paid if there were any, and all of her would-be professional colleagues talking in Swedish, which she could not understand.
The full force of exile now crushed her spirit and Lise collapsed in despair, sending out letter after letter to Hahn over that autumn of 1938: “Perhaps you cannot fully appreciate how unhappy it makes me to realize that you always think that I am unfair and embittered, and that you also say so to other people. If you think it over, it cannot be difficult to understand what it means to me that I have none of my scientific equipment. . . . I see no real purpose in my life at the moment and I am very lonely. . . . [Siegbahn] is not at all interested in nuclear physics and I rather doubt whether he likes to have an independent person beside him. . . . I can’t do anything but live my life just as it is. . . . I often feel like a wound-up puppet that does certain things, gives a friendly smile, and has no real life in itself. By that you can judge how valuable my activity is.”
November 7 was Lise’s sixtieth birthday, and November 9–10, Kristallnacht: twelve hundred synagogues and prayer rooms destroyed; thirty thousand Jews sent to concentration camps; and the Nazis fining the Jews a billion marks for these damages. One man riding the train the next day noticed that few of his fellow passengers bothered looking out the windows, deliberately ignoring all the synagogues burning, burning, burning. Three hundred thousand German Jews applied for US visas; a third were granted. Storks migrating from Europe to Africa had notes taped to their legs: “Help us. The Nazis are killing us all.”