Before the Fallout

by Diana Preston

  Picasso's Guernica

  However, the long partnership between Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn was about to end. On 12 March 1938, welcomed by rapturous crowds, German troops marched into Austria and annexed it. Austrian citizenship ceased to exist as the country's "Aryan" population, hailed by Hitler as German racial comrades, became citizens of the Third Reich. Austria's Jews became subject to the Reich's racial laws, enforced by the Austrians with such speed and brutality that even the Germans were startled. Stefan Meyer, Rutherford's "dear friend," resigned as director of the Radium Institute in Vienna before he could be dismissed.

  The day after Austria's annexation, a fervent Nazi member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Kurt Hess, denounced Vienna-born Lise Meitner, stating that "the Jewess endangers the institute." That she had become a Protestant in 1908 was no protection. A friend tipped off Hahn, who hurriedly consulted Heinrich Horlein, the treasurer of an organization that sponsored the institute. Horlein's view was unambiguous: Lise Meitner must leave. On 20 March, Hahn told Meitner the news, and she wrote in her diary, "Hahn doesn't want me to come to the institute anymore." She was "very miserable," feeling that "he has, basically, thrown me out." Two days later, Hahn and his wife, Edith, celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. A depressed Meitner was among the guests at what must have been a subdued occasion, with Hahn guiltily aware that "I too had left her in the lurch." As he later admitted, "I lost my nerve."

  Lantern parade in Hiroshima to celebrate the capture of Nanking by Japanese troops

  Lise Meitner turned for help to Paul Rosbaud, a fellow Austrian who was scientific adviser to the German publishing house Springer Verlag and had taken over editorial responsibility for the important scientific journal Naturwis-senschaften after its Jewish editor, Arnold Berliner, was fired. Rosbaud had a Jewish wife, whom he took to England with their daughter for safety in 1938. He loathed the Nazis and would later skillfully exploit his contacts across the universities, the military, and industry, as well as within the Nazi Party, as an agent for the British. He would also help many Jews and smuggle food into concentration camps. He took the bewildered and miserable Meitner to visit her lawyer and also to call on several senior members of the hierarchy governing the institute, who, against all the odds, asked her to remain. Horlein, whose first reaction, like Hahn's, had resulted from panic, had meanwhile changed his mind and was no longer demanding her departure.

  Lise Meitner felt paralyzed with indecision. No one had dismissed her, but, she wondered, was it safe or sensible to remain? Friends outside Germany perceived her danger with greater clarity. Several wrote ostensibly inviting her to come and give lectures or seminars but with the underlying purpose of providing her with an official reason to be allowed out of Germany. Among them was Niels Bohr, who asked her to come to Copenhagen, stating that the Danish Physical Society and Chemistry Association would pay her expenses and adding that "you would give my wife and me special pleasure if you would live with us during your stay." The letter was carefully crafted to convey to the Nazi authorities that Meitner was a scientist of international standing. Experience of helping others get out of Germany had taught Bohr that this tactic sometimes helped. He specified no date but urged her to come quickly.

  Still she clung on. The thought of leaving Berlin and her work and all that was familiar was painful to the fifty-nine-year-old spinster. She had until now been shielded from what was happening to Germany's Jews. Cocooned in the institute, surrounded by friends and colleagues in the scientific community, and until recently an Austrian citizen, she had not been exposed to the full brunt of the Reich's anti-Jewish policies. The dismissal of Jewish academics in 1933 had been only the start of a much broader campaign to make the lives of Jews intolerable. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws had stripped them of their citizenship. Jews were progressively denied the right to make a living, frozen out of contact with "Aryans," no longer even allowed to enter public parks. In the first years of their regime the Nazis had encouraged Jewish people to emigrate and allowed them to take money and possessions with them. That was changing. Soon refugees lucky enough to get foreign visas would be allowed to take almost nothing.

  Toward the end of April 1938 Meitner learned that the Ministry of Education was considering her position in the institute. Nervously, she tried to find out what was going on while continuing her normal schedule of work. On 23 April she attended Max Planck's eightieth-birthday celebrations and presented him with a photograph album that was also, perhaps, a farewell gift. Her diary for those weeks shows that, although trying to live an ordinary life, she was coming to accept that her time in Germany was over. She wrote to James Franck, about to leave the Johns Hopkins University for the University of Chicago, seeking his help. He at once lodged an affidavit on her behalf—the first step in the immigration process—and undertook to support her. Yet going to the United States seemed such a huge step. On 9 May she decided instead that she would prefer to join Niels Bohr's team in Copenhagen. She had admired Bohr since their first meeting in 1920, which she remembered as having "a magic which was only enhanced" on subsequent occasions. Going to Copenhagen also meant she could be with her nephew Otto Frisch.

  She was shocked when, next day, officials at the Danish Embassy declared her Austrian passport invalid and refused her a visa. They told her they could act only if she had a German passport. She asked Carl Bosch, the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which administered her institute, to lobby on her behalf. He wrote to the minister of education, asking that "the well-known scientist, Professor Lise Meitner," be given a German passport and permitted to leave for a neutral country, but days turned into weeks bringing still no news.

  In the midst of Lise Meitner's own anxiety, Otto Hahn's wife, Edith—her friend since the earliest days of the marriage—had a nervous breakdown, brought on by tension. Then on 14 June came chilling news that, as Meitner wrote in her diary, "technical and academic [people] will not be permitted to leave." On cue, two days later Bosch received a reply to his letter. His request for a passport for Meitner was refused: "It is considered undesirable that well-known Jews leave Germany to travel abroad where they appear to be representatives of German science." It concluded, "This statement represents in particular the view of the Reichsfuhrer-SS and Chief of the German Police in the Reichsministry of the Interior"—Heinrich Himmler.

  The thought that she had come to Himmler's personal attention was terrifying. However, the new rules forbidding Jewish scientists to leave were not yet in force, and Lise Meitner's friends worked frantically. Niels Bohr lobbied scientists in countries with more flexible entry requirements than Denmark's. He had particular hopes of Holland and launched an appeal to Dutch physicists. Dirk Coster in Groningen, who had been helping Jewish refugees since 1933, and Adriaan Fokker in Haarlem, responded. Both men began trying to raise funds and to find Meitner a job. By late June Coster sent word that he could offer her a position for a year.

  Almost simultaneously, Meitner was offered a post at the new Nobel Institute for Experimental Physics in Stockholm, where she would be working under Manne Siegbahn, a scientist she had known for two decades. She decided to go to Sweden if she could. Experimental physics was in its infancy there and would offer her more scope. However, a few days later, a letter from Bohr brought disturbing news. The Swedish offer was not yet firm after all. In particular formalities allowing her to enter Sweden had not been completed. At this worrying moment, she was tipped off by Carl Bosch that the new rules forbidding Jewish scientists to leave were about to come into force. She sent anxious messages to Holland to inquire whether Dirk Coster's offer was still open. She also wrote to her former assistant, Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, asking him to contact his father in the foreign office about her request for a German passport. At just that time, the senior von Weizsacker was overseeing new laws forbidding Jews to transfer any funds out of Germany. Lise was informed that the ministry could not help.

  Dirk Coster badgered the Dutch authorities to
allow her in without passport or visa. Finally, on 11 July he learned that she would indeed be admitted to Holland. He left immediately for Berlin, where only a tiny inner circle knew Meitner was about to flee—among them Otto Hahn, Max von Laue, Paul Rosbaud, and Peter Debye, a Dutch physicist who was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and had acted as a secret conduit for messages between Meitner and colleagues in Holland. Hahn helped Lise pack, and she spent her last night in Berlin at his house. As he recalled, "We agreed on a code telegram in which we would be let known whether the journey ended in success or failure. 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."

  On 13 July, Lise Meitner "left Germany forever—with 10 marks in my purse" and two small suitcases. She was wearing "a beautiful diamond ring" which had once belonged to Hahn's mother and which he gave her as they parted because, he said, "I wanted her to be provided for in an emergency." Paul Rosbaud drove her to the station. She was so frightened that at one stage she begged him to turn back, but she managed to pull herself together. Dirk Coster was waiting on the train. Greeting each other as if they had met by chance, they sat down together. The journey passed quietly, but as the train approached the Dutch border, Coster sensibly suggested that she give him the diamond ring in case it drew attention to her, and he tucked it discreetly into his waistcoat pocket. They crossed the border unhindered and by early evening were in Groningen. Lise Meitner felt in a state of shock, "uprooted from work, colleagues, income, and language, suspended between a past that was gone and a future that held nothing at all."

  Coster dispatched the prearranged telegram, reporting that the "baby" had been safely delivered, and Hahn sent "heartiest congratulations." When Meitner's fellow Austrian Wolfgang Pauli—the so-called Atomic Housing Officer—heard the news, he told Coster, "You have made yourself as famous for the abduction of Lise Meitner as for hafnium," the element Coster had codiscovered in 1922 in Copenhagen and named after the city's Latin appellation, Hafnia. The jocular remarks masked huge relief. Meitner had left with only hours to spare. Kurt Hess, the man so quick to denounce her, had alerted the authorities that she was planning to flee. Max von Laue later wrote to her of his thankfulness that "the shot that was to bring you down at the last minute missed you."

  · · ·

  Manne Siegbahn's offer of a post in Stockholm was clearly Lise Meitner's best hope of security. Dirk Coster, whose invitation to Holland had primarily been a device to help her escape from Germany, urged Siegbahn to complete the outstanding formalities quickly. Meitner finally arrived in Sweden in August 1938 after spending some time with the ever-hospitable Bohrs. She wrote to Coster, "One dare not look back, one cannot look forward." At the same time she worried about friends and family still trapped in Germany and Austria.

  Despite her eminence, Meitner discovered she was to be paid less than the starting salary of an assistant. Indeed, she was so poor that she could barely pay for room, meals, and small daily expenses. Yet poverty mattered less than the loss of facilities to carry on with her work. She wrote miserably to Hahn that she had "no position that would entitle me to anything." She asked him to imagine how he would feel if he had a room at the institute that "wasn't your own, without any help, without any rights and with the attitude of Siegbahn who loves only big machines and who is very confident and self-assured—and there I am with my inner shyness and embarrassment."

  Hahn, meanwhile, was doing what he could to have her possessions sent on to her, although his personal position was difficult. His name had appeared in a list of dismissed Jewish academics included on a traveling anti-Semitic exhibition, The Eternal few, designed to disgust the onlooker with examples of supposed "Jewish" physical characteristics and alleged "Jewish" moral depravity. Hahn had had to submit fresh affidavits to convince the authorities of his Aryan roots. The more he tried to do on Lise Meitner's behalf, the more he risked attracting further unwelcome attention and suspicions. Yet, stressful though it was, he persisted, arguing with the Education Ministry, which at first insisted that everything Meitner owned must stay in Germany. Her clothes finally arrived in October, although she had to pay heavy customs dues. However, when her remaining possessions finally reached Stockholm, she found her furniture in splinters, her china smashed, and her books ripped apart—a final act of petty malice by the Nazi authorities.

  In November 1938 she was at least able to see Otto Hahn again when both were invited to Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. She was waiting on the platform for Hahn as his train drew in, but their reunion was sad rather than joyful, for he brought disturbing news. Meitner's brother-in-law, Otto Frisch's father, who was still living in Vienna with his wife, Lise's sister, had just been arrested. He had been rounded up with thousands of Jewish men in the aftermath of the vicious government-inspired attack on Jews and Jewish property on the night of 9 November, remembered ever after as Kristallnacht—"crystal night"—for all the splintered glass left lying in the streets.

  The distressed and desperately worried Meitner found some consolation in hearing about Hahn's recent work. He updated her on his ongoing sparring with Irene Joliot-Curie over her mysterious substance—"curiosium"—and of his continuing efforts to prove her wrong. Hahn's assistant, the chemist Fritz Strassmann, had convinced him not to be so dismissive of the French team's work and to replicate some of their experiments. In so doing he and Strass­mann had created what they firmly believed to be isotopes of radium. However, when they had attempted to use barium as a "carrier" to help extract the radium—the use of carrier chemicals to separate out substances produced by neutron bombardment had become a standard technique—they had found to their surprise that they could not separate the barium from the radium. Meit­ner listened carefully and then advised Hahn exactly what experiments to conduct to cross-check his findings.

  Hahn returned to Berlin, keeping his meeting with Lise Meitner a closely guarded secret, but Strassmann understood precisely who was setting the agenda. He had a very high regard for the exiled physicist, whom he had always seen as the intellectual leader of their team. He also owed her a great deal. He had arrived at the institute in 1929, extremely poor but grateful just to be there, and prepared to work for almost nothing. In 1933, though reportedly so malnourished that he sometimes fainted from weakness, he had turned down a well-paid job in industry because it would have required him to join the Nazi Party, which he abhorred. Meitner had persuaded Hahn to find fifty marks a month out of a contingency fund to keep Strassmann going and eventually to appoint him as an assistant. Looking back on the events of late 1938, Strass­mann wrote, "She urgently requested that these experiments be scrutinised very carefully and intensively one more time—Fortunately L. Meitner's opinion and judgment carried so much weight with us in Berlin that the necessary control experiments were immediately undertaken."

  Lise Meitner meanwhile returned to Stockholm. Learning that her brother-in-law had been deported to the Dachau concentration camp and that his only chance of release was to emigrate, she tried desperately to get visas for the Frisches to come to Sweden. She felt like "a mechanical doll, going smilingly through the motions but with no real life inside," and wrote to Hahn of her gratitude that work "forces me to collect my thoughts, which is not always easy." In particular, she was eager to know what results Hahn and Strassmann were obtaining.

  Over the next few weeks they worked relentlessly, trying to discover more about the material they had created. Yet whatever they did, as Otto Hahn recalled, it behaved like barium—an element in the middle of the periodic table and much lighter than uranium. They could not understand how bombarding uranium could possibly have produced such a result. A few days before Christmas Hahn mailed his findings off to Meitner, hoping that "perhaps you can put forward some fantastic explanation" for results that were "physically absurd," adding, "You will do a good deed if you can find a way out of this." He knew he
needed her expertise; as he later wrote, "We poor chemists . . . we are so afraid of these physics people." His letter reached her on 21 December, and she immediately replied that his findings were "very odd. A process in which slowr neutrons are used and the product seems to be barium. . . . but we've had so many surprises in nuclear physics that one can't very well just say it's impossible."

  Two days later she left Stockholm to spend Christmas with a friend in the small, windswept seaside resort of Kungelv near Gothenburg. Otto Frisch arrived from Copenhagen to join the "short, dark, and bossy" aunt he was so fond of. With his father still in Dachau and his mother trapped in increasingly desperate conditions in Vienna, he was deeply anxious and, like Lise Meitner, glad to immerse himself in Hahn's scientific dilemma as a distraction. Frisch's initial reaction was that Hahn must have made a mistake, but Meitner insisted that she "knew the extraordinary chemical knowledge and ability of Hahn and Strassmann too well to doubt for one second the correctness of their unexpected results."

  They "sort of kept rolling this thing around," as Frisch later recalled, and went out into the snow to think, Frisch on skis and his aunt walking rapidly on foot. The problem confronting them was that until then no one had thought it possible to chip more than tiny pieces off nuclei. Yet the barium nucleus was roughly half the size of a uranium nucleus—suggesting that Hahn had split the uranium in two. Searching her mind for an explanation, Meitner recalled an idea of Niels Bohr's: that the nucleus was like a drop of liquid with nuclear forces playing the part of surface tension and keeping the nuclear "drop" spherical. She described how, "in the course of our discussions we evolved the following picture: if, in the highly-charged uranium nucleus—in which the surface tension is greatly reduced owing to the mutual repulsion of the protons—the collective motion of the nucleus is rendered violent enough by the captured neutron, the nucleus may become drawn out length-wise, forming a sort of 'waist,' and finally splitting into two more or less equal-sized, lighter nuclei which, because of their mutual repulsion, then fly apart with great force."