The Nazis, the Bomb, and the Woman that Science Forgot

latest book, Who Is Government. But I want your help to explore the theme of altruism with Michael Lewis, So please send all of your kindness related questions from Michael Lewis to Tales at Pushkin dot fm. This episode is based on the book The Woman Who's the Atom by Marissa Moss. July thirteenth, nineteen thirty eight, Berlin, Lisamightner is terrified. She's being driven to the railway station to get on a slow stopping train to Neuveshance, a small town across

the border in the Netherlands. It's a desperate final throw of the dice. Lisamightner is a scientist, and new restrictions under the Nazi government forbid scientists from emigrating, so she can't leave. But Lisamightner is also Jewish, meaning that she has no rights at all if she stays. Against all the odds, Miightner has carved out a career as a respected physicist. It was hard, very hard, and she doesn't

want to give it up. A Jewish colleague, Albert Einstein, was visiting the United States when Hitler came to power. Now he has a job at Princeton. Other Jewish scientists, less famous than Einstein have also left. Sometimes they found good positions, sometimes they had to take whatever they could, but they left. As a woman in a man's world, Lisa Miitner didn't think she had any chance of getting

a job to match what she'd achieved in Berlin. A professorship, a salary, a pension, and far more important than any of that, a modern laboratory in which to do physics. Nothing else really mattered, And so alone she had stayed while things got worse and worse and worse. Her friends have been worried about her. They've been begging her to get out before it's too late. Reluctantly, Miightner has agreed. She's decided to make a break for the border. But maybe it is too late. The man driving her is

her friend, Paul Rossbard. He's a science editor. As they approach the railway station, she starts to panic. The plan is absurd. She's small and dark haired. She doesn't look arian. She has no passport. The station and the train will be crawling with guards. She begs Rossbard to turn back. Rossbard keeps going. What Miightner doesn't realize is that he leads a double life. He's a spy working with British intelligence.

He's not going to let one of the world's most brilliant atomic physicists stay in Germany any longer, so he soothes her. She's going to be fine. Nobody's going to suspect anything. She has a small suitcase, it doesn't look like she's taking a long trip, and she'll have company, a Dutch physicist called Dirk Costa. He'll look after her. She has more friends rooting for her than she realizes. The station is framed by swastikas and packed with police patrols.

Costa is smiling, friendly waiting on the train. Everything's going to be fine, he explains. As the little train chugs past village after village, each one plastered with Nazi symbols. The Dutch border officials are expecting us. Everything's arranged, and if the ESSs stop us, she wonders. She knows many people who've been arrested on trains and dragged back to Berlin. Costa is nervous himself, but he pretends to be relaxed. Why would the ESSs bother with them? And then at

the border the train stops. German border guards and ss officers enter the compartment where Costa and Lisa Miightner are sitting. She shrinks in her seat, acutely aware that she's Jewish. She's expressly forbidden to leave the country, and she has no passport. The SSS officer stands in front of them and holds out his hand expectantly papers I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Born in Vienna in eighteen seventy eight, Lisa Mightner was an ordinary girl, or

so she felt. She just happened to be an ordinary girl who slept with a math textbook under her pillow. Marissa Moss's biography of Miightner describes a girl who was full of questions. Why did oil on a puddle? Produce that strange rainbow reflection. How could numbers describe curves carefully drawn on a grid? She dreamed of university, just a dream since she hadn't even been able to go to

high school and Austrian universities didn't admit women. Fortunately, the law in Austria changed just in time for Lisa to fulfill her dream. She sat the ferociously difficult high school exit exam, test skills taught in classes she had never been able to take. She passed, and in nineteen oh one became the first woman at the University of Vienna

to study physics. It wasn't easy, small, cringingly shy, and obviously resented by many of the professors, She nevertheless persevered if she could do physics, all the everyday indignities were bearable. In nineteen oh six, she earned a PhD in physics. Nobody would offer an academic job to a woman, so she built her own equipment at home and began studying radiation.

In nineteen oh seven, she published her first scientific paper, and she decided that if her research was to advance, she would need to move to Berlin, the world center of physics at the time. That wasn't easy either. Again, there were no job offers. The University of Berlin was an entirely male environment, and Encyclopedia commissioned her to write a piece about radioactivity before rescinding the offer when they realized that this scholarly seeming el Miightner was nothing more

than a woman. But she made it work. She was offered some space in the basement of Berlin's Experimental Physics Institute, no salary, no toilets, should have to leave via the side door and go to a hotel or restaurant down the street, no access to the men's laboratories, but something she scraped by on a small allowance from her father and earning money for translating scientific articles. Then Lisa Meitner met Otto Hahn and things started to change. Otto Hahn

wasn't a physicist like Miightner. He was a chemist, but the new science of radiation was a place where physics and chemistry met and worked in partnership. Hahn was easygoing and sociable. Miightner was neither, but he was also ambitious and meticulous, and he knew a good physicist when he met one. Lisa Miightner was a good physicist, and the fact that she was a woman didn't bother Otto Hahn. Hahn and Mightner would work together as research partners for decades.

It was a close relationship, but also an unusual one. Lisa Mightner was very reserved, very shy, Otto Hahn later recalled, for many years, I never had a meal with her except on a official occasions, nor did we ever go for a walk together, and yet we were really very close friends. Otto was perhaps Miightner's closest friend of all. She didn't love small talk, but she felt comfortable with Otto, and of course when she wanted to talk about science,

which was often, Hahn was perfect. I love physics with all my heart, she once wrote. It's a kind of personal love, as one had for a person to whom one is grateful for many things. Hahn was an expert chemist, but he needed Miightner to interpret the results of his experiments to understand what they were revealing about the nature of the atom and the particles that made it up. Over the first six years of their research partnership, Hahn

and Miightner published more than twenty scientific papers. He ran the experiments, she interpreted the physics underpinning the results and wrote them up. When a new research center, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was established, both Hahn and Miightner were given modern laboratories on the basis of their work together. The rest of the scientific world was beginning to admire the work of el Meightner. The most assumed, of course, that

l Meitner was a man. But in Berlin, her colleagues at the KWI, including Albert Einstein himself, were starting to treat her neither as a man nor as a woman. But how she wanted to be treated as a scientist. And then came nineteen fourteen and the war. Lisa volunteered as an X ray specialist on the Eastern Front, using scientific discoveries to help people heal. Otto Hahn went to work with the great chemist Fritz Harbor making chemical weapons.

In nineteen eighteen, Fritz Harbor was wanted by the Allies for war crimes and was also awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Such were the contradictions of modern science. After the war, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Meitner conducted and analyzed experiments that revealed a new element, protactinium. She'd discussed her work intensively with Hahn and so put his name

alongside hers on the scientific paper she wrote. Hahn was promptly awarded the prestigious Emil Fisher Medal for the discovery of Protactinium Meiitner's contribute was acknowledged with the replica of Hahn's medal. But despite the ongoing misogyny and the difficulties of life in Germany after the First World War, Lisamightner was flourishing. She built the first cloud chamber in Germany, a vital piece of scientific equipment for investigating tiny particles.

She published a string of papers without Hahn's involvement, and finally she was given a full professorship, the first woman in Germany ever to hold the position. Hahn was making three times more money than her, but progress was progress. Lisa Miightner and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty five, nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty three. Surely the prize was just a matter of time, but something else happened.

In nineteen thirty three, Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Fritz Harbour's fate should have been a warning. In nineteen thirty three, he was the head of their institute, the KWI. Harbor was a scientific hero, the creator of the chemical process that even today gives the world access to fertilizer, one of the single greatest contributions any scientist has made to

human well being. He was also a war hero in Germany thanks to his work on chemical weapons, and he was also a Jew. Harbor was ordered to fire every Jewish scientist in the KWI. He refused and resigned. Good riddance, said the Nazi Minister for Education. He might have been a competent scientist, but he had stocked the KWI with Jewish scientists. Harbor's successor as the head of the KWI was Max Planck. Plank was influential enough to arrange a

meeting with Adolph Hitler himself. Surely, said Plank, it wasn't necessary to purge patriots such as Harbor. He was deeply German. Hitler flew into a rage. There are no good Jews, he shouted, there is no Jewish worthiness. As Plank tried to apologize, Hitler became even more agitated, Plank made a hasty exit. Harber died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, and his former colleagues at the KWI waited in vain for the official commemoration of this great scientific hero. Nothing.

Plank decided that the KWI would hold a memorial. The authorities promptly announced that university faculty were forbidden to take part in the memorial ceremony for the Jew Fritz Harbor. Max Planck insisted that the ceremony should go ahead. When Planck, Miitner, and Hahn arrived at the venue, there were plenty of Nazi soldiers observing the proceedings, but the hall was packed. Most professors had bowed to the pressure and stayed away, but they'd sent their wives as representatives. It was a

touching moment, but it was also ominous. If Fritz Harbor couldn't be protected, nobody could. And the presence of all those scientists' wives showed that while many people had sympathy for the way Jews were being treated, there was a limit to how much defiance they were really willing to show when the Nazis came to power. Jews were one percent of the German population, but twenty percent of scientists were Jewish. You might think that this would make them

a national asset, but not a bit of it. The Nazi complained was that the Jews had taken over and filled the universities with their unscientific Jewish dogmas, and some leading German scientists were happy enough to amplify this message. The most prominent example of the damaging influence of the Jews on science, wrote one Nobel laureate physicist, is provided by mister Einstein with his theories. Every Jewish scientist who could left, from mister Einstein himself, all the way down

the academic pecking order, everyone left except Lisamightner. What she'd built up at the KWI was so essential to her she couldn't bear to leave it. There were only so many jobs that universities outside Germany could find for these refugee scientists, and a woman such as Miightner would never be a priority. If she didn't have a lab, if she couldn't practice physics, what was the point of leaving before long? Lisamightner was the last Jewish scientist in Berlin.

If she'd hoped that her colleagues would protect her, she'd be disappointed. Max Plank tried, but hadn't been able to protect Fritz Harbor. He certainly couldn't protect her. Miightner was banned from teaching and stripped of her title and salary, but she still had her lab. Even so, colleagues started to worry that having a duess in the institute was a bad look. When Miightner asked Otto Hahn to speak up on her behalf, he refused. He had his own concerns.

He later recalled that the presence of l Mightner did not make the situation better. Thus, at the yearly meetings of the KWI, I was already seated in a less prestigious place at the dinner table than was appropriate for my position. These were, he said, painful experiences. Hahn and Mightner had worked closely together for a quarter of a century, but now that no longer suited him, He ended his

research partnership with Lisa Miightner. Officially, that is, unofficially, he was always coming to her for help in understanding the physics behind his chemistry experiments. Not every scientist was so complicit. Hahn's new young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had already been sacked for protesting the Nazi takeover of the German Chemical Association. When Hahn hired him, Strassman again refused to join the Nazi party and lost three quarters of his salary as

a result. It was Miitner who urged Hahn to divert research funds to help Strassman support his young family. Indeed, Strassman was braver than she knew. For a time, his little apartment concealed a Jewish woman on the run from the Gestapo. Most of Meitner's colleagues didn't have anything like that kind of courage. One Jewish physicist, Leo Zillard recalled how the complicity played out. They ask, well, supposing I

would oppose this, thinking what good would I do? I would just lose my influence, Then why should I oppose it? But otto Hahn didn't just fail to oppose the Nazi rules. He was anxious to comply. Behind Lisa Miightner's back, he lobbed to have her dismissed so as to end the institute's distracting Jewish problem. So much for we were really very close friends. Having lost her salary and her title,

she next lost her academic apartment. She moved into a hotel, living off her savings and continuing to go into the lab. But by nineteen thirty eight it was obvious to Lisa Mightner's friends that she was in terrible danger. The kW I tried to arrange a passport for her, without success. The authorities refused to let her go, explaining that it was undesirable to let renowned Jews leave Germany for abroad

to act there against the interests of Germany. An international network of scientists desperately searched for a way to get Lisa out of Germany, and with equal desperation, tried to persuade her to go. The decisive moment when she tried to visit her own laboratory and her old friend and colleague, Otto Hahn confronted her and insisted that she leave. He has, in essence thrown me out, she wrote in her diary, and she sadly agreed to the plan to smuggle her

out of Germany. Otto Hahn did find a bit of courage in the end. He invited Lisa to stay at his house the night before she left, helping with her cover story. As they said their goodbyes and agreed to work together by writing letters, Otto pressed his mother's diamond ring into Lisa's hand. Maybe it would be useful in an emergency, he stiffly explained, she could sell it or something. Lisa was touched and then into the car with Paul

Rossbard and to the station. Might Know in a panic, and Rossbard trying to soothe her and sitting next to Dirk Costa on the seven hour train journey to the Netherlands as he smoothly reassured her that nobody was going to ask for her papers until the train stopped at the border crossing, and standing there in front of them was the SS officer and outstretched demanding to see a passport. Lisa Mightner clutched the ring tightly, as though somehow it

might save her. She knew it couldn't. Derk Costa, seeming calm, reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his passport. The SS guard inspected it, nodded, then walked on down the train corridor. The husband's papers were in order, Why bother to check the wife's. For decades, over and over again, Lisa Mightner had been ignored with the attention being given to whichever man happened to be in the vicinity. It had happened again, and this time it had saved her life. Caution,

retales will be back. After the break, the trains started moving again, crossing the border into the Netherlands. No more swastikas or soldiers. They were free. Over the days that followed, words spread among her friends and the scientific community more widely, Lisa Miightner was safe. One scientist sent a telegram to Dirk Costa, you have made yourself as famous for the

production of Lisamightner as for discovering hafnium. Back in Berlin, Hahn and his Nazi DeFi buying assistant Strassmann were puzzled. In Berlin, they were continuing work that Hahn had been doing with Miightner, firing neutrons at uranium, the heaviest known naturally occurring element. They hoped to create a new element

like protactinium, which Miightner had discovered years earlier. But instead of discovering new heavy elements as a result of the experiment, Hahn was finding something that behaved like barium, a much lighter element that just seemed impossible. It was as though Newton's apple didn't fall from the tree but floated off into space. Was Hahn just making a mistake doing sloppy chemistry. He wrote to his old collaborator, Lisa Miightner to ask

for her help. Miightner was safely in Stockholm, where she'd secured a position as a dune. You're a searcher. All her old equipment, the best neutron sources, the best detectors, was all sitting untouched in her lab since the day she had fled Berlin. But even if she couldn't get to it, she could at least explain to Hahn how to use it with her guidance. He tried again, but

he was still baffled, and Miightner was puzzled too. While Hahn was writing up his results for publication, including an admission that frankly, he didn't understand what was going on, Lisa Miightner went for a long walk with her nephew, another physicist. It was Christmas eve and they were staying in the Swedish countryside for a few days. Lisa walked and talked her nephew, skiing alongside as they bounced around

the problem. Maybe Hahn was just making a mistake the setup of his experiment, he suggested, No, she replied, he had the best equipment my equipment, and Otto Hahn does not make mistakes, not in the laboratory anyway. And then suddenly it came to her. She sat down on a snow covered log, pulled out a notebook, and started to run through some calculations. What if Hahn really had created barium. Barium was about half the atomic weight of uranium, it

would mean the atom had just split in two. Everyone assumed that couldn't happen. In his book E Equals MC Squared, David Badanis describes it as like throwing a pebble at a boulder, only for the boulder to crack in half. But Mitna realized that the urineum nucleus wasn't like a boulder. There were powerful forces holding it together, but there were also powerful forces inside it trying to push it apart.

When she did the calculations, she understood a stream of neutrons could start to wobble it, and once it was wobbling, a single neutron that hit at the right moment would split the atom, but split it into what Ottohhn had found barium. Mitna realized that if the uranium atom was literally splitting in two, and one part was barium, the other part would be krypton. The total number of protons in a barium atom and a krypton atom are the same as the protons in an uranium atom, so that

added up, and krypton was an invisible gas. You couldn't see it, you couldn't smell it, and so of course Hahn hadn't realized it was even there. Miightner realized two more things linked together. First, barium and krypton together have the same number of protons as uranium, but their total mass is less. Where had the extra mass gone? Second, once the uranium had split into barium and krypton, those two new atoms would fly apart, repulsed by powerful forces.

Where did the energy for that come from? Mass had mysteriously disappeared. Energy had mysteriously appeared. But her old colleague Einstein had a formula for that E equals mc squared. A little bit of mass could turn into a vast release of energy. Miightner realized that otto Hahn had split the atom and unlocked atomic energy without realizing what he had done. Einstein later wrote, I believed only that it was theoretically possible. It was discovered by Hahn in Berlin

and he himself misinterpreted what he discovered. It was Lisa Meiitner who provided the correct interpretation. It was the biggest discovery in physics since Einstein's theory of relativity. But while scientists initially gave the credit to Miiitner and her nephew, journalists increasingly tended to mention Hahn. She wrote to Hahn

begging him to be honest about the credit. I don't feel at all happy, she wrote, adding that her new colleagues in Stockholm will soon believe, especially after your excellent results, that I didn't do anything, and that you both did all the physics too. At Berlin, alongside the tussle for credit, a much bigger struggle was developing. Meiightner's analysis had been comprehensive, but there was one thing she had missed. When a neutron split an atom, other neutrons might be emitted. Over

in the United States. Meiightner's old colleague Leo Zillard realized that those neutrons could go on to split more nearby atoms. The result would be a chain reaction and a colossal release of energy, a source of power perhaps or the deadliest weapon in history. Zillard alerted Einstein, Einstein alerted President Roosevelt. Secretly, work started on the atomic bomb. But would Lisa Maiitner

join the effort. Absolutely Not like Einstein, and unlike almost all of her other peers, she refused to be complicit in creating such a deadly weapon. After Germany surrendered, Liza wrote to Otto about the behavior of the scientists who had stayed in Germany. All of you worked for Nazi Germany and never attempted passive resistance. Of course, to save your troubled consciences, you occasionally helped an oppressed person. Still, you let millions of innocent people be murdered, and there

was never a sound of protest. She urged him and his colleagues to make a statement acknowledging their culpability. Hahn never did, and indeed received the letter. By then, he and other leading German scientists were being comfortably detained by the British. Both Liza and Otto were pondering life after the war, but the war wasn't over. The sudden chain reaction in an atomic explosion produces temperatures hotter than the

center of the sun. One of those artificial suns appeared in the sky nineteen hundred feet above the city of Hiroshima. The full burning blast lasted about half a second, and as it started to fade, the incredible heat radiated out nineteen hundred feet below. Fires started, apparently for no reason. Skin was ripped off, hanging in sheets from people's flesh.

A moment later, a shockwave incredible ferocity flattened Hiroshima. When the news reached Lisa Mightno in Stockholm, she was utterly appalled. Imagine her horror when the American press named her the mother of the atomic bomb. Otto Hahn received a different honor. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Somehow, the shy little lady got the credit when it came to mass slaughter, but the charming gentleman was at the front of the queue when it was Nobel Prize time.

In nineteen o three, the Swedish Academy had tried to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to honor re Becquerel and Pierre Curie, but someone tipped off Pierre and he complained that his wife Mary Curi was equally deserving. In the end, Mary got her share of the prize, but Mary Curie had a loyal husband to advocate for her. Lisa Miitner only had Otto Hahn. It was understandable that when Hahn was in Berlin working under the Nazi regime, he would hesitate to credit the dwess who had eluded

the SS. After the war, some of his colleagues still pressed him to downplay Mitner's achievement. But Hahn had a Nobel prize. He could give credit to anyone he liked. He could play the role that Pierre Curie played for Marie. So when Hahn was giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, the adopted home of his colleague, mentor, and very close friend, Lisa Mightner, what did he say as she looked on from the audience. He thanked Lisamightner for

the excellent work she had done as his assistant. Afterwards, Hahn complained that Miightner and her friends had been rather frosty towards him. He couldn't understand why. Maybe they were still bitter about Hitler, but some part of Hahn's conscience was bothering him because he quietly gave Lisa Mightner a large share of the Nobel prize money. Miightner gave it all to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization

helping to resettle Jewish scientist refugees. Hahn wanted to forget all about how the Jews had been treated. Miitna didn't. She never returned to her old job in Germany, and she never did get the pension they owed her. Neither did she ever receive the Nobel Prize, despite being nominated nineteen times for chemistry and twenty nine times for physics. She did receive many other awards. Most poignantly, she was

the first recipient of the Otto Hahn Prize. Otto joked as he handed her the medal that bore his name that she could buy him a beer with the prize money. Liza didn't see the funny side. This episode of Cautionary Tales was based on the book The Woman Who Split the Atom by Marie Moss. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills

and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound designs by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Mas, Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman,

and rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London. Like Tom Barrier, if you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

It really makes a difference to us and if you want to hear the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus