Niels Bohr gave his Nobel medal to help Finland

Person: Niels Bohr
Lived: 1885–1962
Field: Physics
From: Danish

The story

On 30 November 1939, three months after the Second World War began, the Soviet Union invaded Finland and started what became known as the Winter War. Finland was far smaller and badly outgunned in tanks and aircraft, yet its army held off the attacks for more than two months in temperatures that dropped as low as minus 43 degrees Celsius. The League of Nations judged the invasion illegal and expelled the Soviet Union. Across Scandinavia, people gave what they could to help the Finns.

Niels Bohr was by then Denmark's best-known scientist. He had received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his work on the structure of atoms, and he directed the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen. His contribution to the Finnish cause was deeply personal: he donated his gold Nobel medal to an auction held for the Finnish Relief Fund.

The medal was sold in March 1940, the month the war ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty. It went under the hammer together with the Nobel medal of August Krogh, the Danish physiologist who had won the 1920 prize in Physiology or Medicine for explaining how the capillaries in muscle are regulated, and who had worked alongside Bohr and George de Hevesy in the 1930s. The buyer later gave both medals to the Danish Historical Museum at Frederiksborg Castle, where they are still kept. In 2023–2024 Bohr's medal even made a temporary trip into orbit with the Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen on ISS Expedition 70.

Bohr's institute put Nobel gold to humane use more than once. During the 1930s it had become a haven for scientists pushed out of Nazi Germany, and the medals of the German laureates Max von Laue and James Franck had been sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940, Bohr asked de Hevesy to dissolve the two medals in aqua regia so the occupiers would not find them. The liquid sat on a shelf at the institute for the rest of the war. Afterwards the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation struck the medals again.

Together these episodes show how Bohr regarded the highest honour in science. He did not treat it as a trophy to be guarded, but as something that could be spent to protect people and principles when they were in danger.