The Nazis, the Bomb, and the Woman that Science Forgot
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She's being driven to the railway station to get on a slow stopping train to Noivashans, a small town across the border in the Netherlands. It's a desperate final throw of the dice. Lisa Meitner is a scientist and new restrictions under the Nazi government forbid scientists from emigrating. So she can't leave. But Lisa Meitner is also Jewish, meaning that she has no rights at all if she stays.

Against all the odds, Meitner has carved out a career as a respected physicist. It was hard, very hard, and she doesn't want to give it up. Her 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 Meitner 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, Meitner 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 Rosbard. 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 Aryan. She has no passport. The station and the train will be crawling with guards. She begs Rossbard to turn back. Rossbard keeps going. What Meitner doesn't realise 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 Koster. He'll look after her. She has more friends rooting for her than she realises. 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. If the SS stop us, she wonders. She knows many people who've been arrested on trains and dragged back to Berlin.

Kosta is nervous himself, but he pretends to be relaxed. Why would the SS bother with them? And then, at the border, the train stops. German border guards and SS officers enter the compartment where Kosta and Lisa Meitner 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 SS 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 1878, Lisa Meitner 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 Meitner 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 fulfil her dream. She sat the ferociously difficult high school exit exam, testing skills taught in classes she'd never been able to take.

She passed and in 1901 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 1906, 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 1907, 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. An encyclopedia commissioned her to write a piece about radioactivity before rescinding the offer when they realised that this scholarly-seeming Elle Meitner 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 job.

No toilets, she'd 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 Meitner. 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. Meitner was neither. But he was also ambitious and meticulous. And he knew a good physicist when he met one. Lisa Meitner was a good physicist. And the fact that she was a woman didn't bother Otto Hahn.

Hahn and Meitner would work together as research partners for decades. It was a close relationship, but also an unusual one. Lisa Meitner was very reserved, very shy. Otto Hahn later recalled, For many years I never had a meal with her, except on official occasions. Nor did we ever go for a walk together, and yet...

We were really very close friends. Otto was, perhaps, Meitner'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 Meitner 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 Meitner published more than 20 scientific papers. He ran the experiments, she interpreted the physics underpinning the results and wrote them up. When a new research centre, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was established, both Hahn and Meitner were given modern laboratories on the basis of their work together.

the rest of the scientific world was beginning to admire the work of L. Meitner. 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 1914.

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 Haber, making chemical weapons. In 1918, Fritz Haber 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 analysed 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 Fischer Medal for the discovery of protactinium.

Meitner's contribution was acknowledged with a replica of Hahn's medal. But despite the ongoing misogyny and the difficulties of life in Germany after the First World War, Lisa Meitner 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 Meitner and Otto Hahn were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1924, 1925, 1929 and 1933. Surely the prize was just a matter of time.

But something else happened in 1933. Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Fritz Haber's fate should have been a warning. In 1933, he was the head of their institute, the KWI. Haber was a scientific hero, the creator of the chemical process that even today gives the world access to fertiliser, one of the single greatest contributions any scientist has made to human wellbeing.

He was also a war hero in Germany, thanks to his work on chemical weapons, and he was also a Jew. Haber 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.

Haber's successor as the head of the KWI was Max Planck. Planck was influential enough to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler himself. "Surely," said Planck, "it wasn't necessary to purge patriots such as Haber. He was deeply German." Hitler flew into a rage. "There are no good Jews," he shouted. "There is no Jewish worthiness.

As Planck tried to apologise, Hitler became even more agitated. Planck made a hasty exit. Haber 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.

Planck 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 Haber. Max Planck insisted that the ceremony should go ahead. When Planck, Meitner 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 Haber 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 1% of the German population, but 20% of scientists were Jewish. You might think that this would make them a national asset, but not a bit of it. The Nazi complaint 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 Mr Einstein with his theories.

Every Jewish scientist who could, left. From Mr Einstein himself, all the way down the academic pecking order. Everyone left. Except Lisa Meitner. 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 Meitner 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, Lisa Meitner was the last Jewish scientist in Berlin. If she'd hoped that her colleagues would protect her, she'd be disappointed.

Max Planck tried, but hadn't been able to protect Fritz Haber. He certainly couldn't protect her. Meitner 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 Jewess in the Institute was a bad look. When Meitner asked Otto Hahn to speak up on her behalf, he refused.

He had his own concerns. He later recalled that the presence of L. Meitner 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 Meitner had worked closely together for a quarter of a century.

But now, that no longer suited him. He ended his research partnership with Lisa Meitner. 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, Strassmann again refused to join the Nazi party and lost three quarters of his salary as a result. It was Meitner who urged Hahn to divert research funds to help Strassmann support his young family. Indeed, Strassmann 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 Szilard, 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 Meitner's back, he lobbied 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 1938, it was obvious to Lisa Meitner's friends that she was in terrible danger. The KWI 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 Rosbard and to the station. Meitner in a panic and Rosbard trying to soothe her. And sitting next to Dirk Koster 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.

hand outstretched, demanding to see a passport. Lisa Meitner clutched the ring tightly, as though somehow it might save her. She knew it couldn't. Dirk Koster, 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 Meitner 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. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort, it takes the right financial foundation and support.

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The train started moving again, crossing the border into the Netherlands. No more swastikas or soldiers. They were free. Over the days that followed, word spread among her friends and the scientific community more widely. Lisa Meitner was safe. One scientist sent a telegram to Dirk Koster. You have made yourself as famous for the abduction of Lisa Meitner as for discovering hafnium.

Back in Berlin, Hahn and his Nazi-defying assistant Strassmann were puzzled. In Berlin they were continuing work that Hahn had been doing with Meitner, firing neutrons at uranium, the heaviest known naturally occurring element. They hoped to create a new element, like protactinium, which Meitner 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 Meitner, to ask for her help.

Meitner was safely in Stockholm, where she'd secured a position as a junior researcher. All her old equipment, the best neutron sources, the best detectors, was all sitting untouched in her lab since the day she'd 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 Meitner 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 Meitner 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 with 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=mc2, David Bodanus describes it as like throwing a pebble at a boulder, only for the boulder to crack in half. But Meitner realised that the uranium 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? Otto Hahn had found barium. Meitner realised 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 a 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 realised it was even there. Meitner realised 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 = mc2. A little bit of mass could turn into a vast release of energy. Meitner realised that Otto Hahn had split the atom and unlocked atomic energy without realising what he'd 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 Meitner 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 Meitner 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.

Meitner's analysis had been comprehensive, but there was one thing she'd missed. When a neutron split an atom, other neutrons might be emitted. Over in the United States, Meitner's old colleague Leo Szilard 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? Szilard alerted Einstein. Einstein alerted President Roosevelt. Secretly, work started on the atomic bomb. But would Lisa Meitner 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, Lisa wrote to Otto about the behaviour 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, he never received the letter. By then, he and other leading German scientists were being comfortably detained by the British. Both Lisa 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. On the 6th of May 1945, one of those artificial suns appeared in the sky 1900 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

1,900 feet below, fires started. Apparently for no reason, skin was ripped off, hanging in sheets from people's flesh. A moment later, a shockwave of incredible ferocity flattened Hiroshima. When the news reached Lisa Meitner 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 honour. 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 1903, the Swedish Academy had tried to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie. But someone tipped off Pierre, and he complained that his wife, Marie Curie, was equally deserving. In the end, Marie got her share of the prize. But Marie Curie had a loyal husband to advocate for her. Lisa Meitner only had Otto Hahn.

It was understandable that when Hahn was in Berlin, working under the Nazi regime, he would hesitate to credit the Jewess who had eluded the SS. After the war, some of his colleagues still pressed him to downplay Meitner'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 Meitner, what did he say? As she looked on from the audience, he thanked Lisa Meitner for the excellent work she had done as his assistant.

Afterwards, Hahn complained that Meitner 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 Meitner a large share of the Nobel Prize money.

Meitner 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. Meitner 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 19 times for chemistry and 29 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. Lisa didn't see the funny side.

This episode of Cautionary Tales was based on the book The Woman Who Split the Atom by Marissa Moss. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben-Nadaf Hafri edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Munro, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berger.

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 ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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