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The purge of German science in 1933
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
A future Nobel Prize winner, at the time he was among the world’s 3–4 foremost authorities on quantum physics, having supervised the likes of Pascual Jordan (1902-80), J. Robert Oppenheimer(1904-67), Enrico Fermi (1901-54) and collaborated with Heisenberg, Pauli and Bohr. There, in collaboration with Walter Zinn (1906-2000), he took up the task of experimentally verifying the news (brought to America by Bohr in January 1939) that Otto Hahn (1879-1968) and Fritz Strassmann (1902-80) in Germany had observed barium in the residue after bombarding uranium with neutrons, demonstrating the previously unknown phenomenon of nuclear fission. Later founder and President of the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn (1879–1968), despite supposed Jewish ancestry (Riehl & Seitz, 1996), too remained in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, discovering nuclear fission in 1938 and being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944.
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