Niels Bohr found jobs for scholars fleeing the Nazis

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

The story

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, many scholars lost their posts overnight, either because they were Jewish or because they opposed the regime. Many had nowhere obvious to go. That year the Rockefeller Foundation created a fund to support refugee academics, and Niels Bohr, whose own mother came from a Danish Jewish family, discussed the programme with the foundation's president, Max Mason, during a visit to the United States in May 1933.

Bohr then turned his Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen into a place of refuge. He offered displaced scientists temporary jobs, gave them financial support, arranged Rockefeller fellowships for them and, in the end, found them places at universities and laboratories around the world. Copenhagen became a safe stopping point where they could keep working while their futures were settled.

The list of those he helped reads like a roll call of twentieth-century science: Guido Beck, Felix Bloch, James Franck, George de Hevesy, Otto Frisch, Hilde Levi, Lise Meitner, George Placzek, Eugene Rabinowitch, Stefan Rozental, Erich Ernst Schneider, Edward Teller, Arthur von Hippel and Victor Weisskopf. Franck was already a Nobel laureate, and Bloch and de Hevesy went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own.

Their later careers show how much talent was saved. Meitner and Frisch provided the theoretical explanation of nuclear fission after it was discovered in late 1938, drawing on the liquid drop picture of the nucleus that Bohr had proposed in 1936. Bloch became the first Director-General of CERN in 1954, and Weisskopf later held the same post. De Hevesy, who stayed in Copenhagen, discovered the element hafnium there with Dirk Coster and later dissolved two Nobel medals in acid to hide them from the Nazis.

The refuge did not last for ever. When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, Bohr kept the institute running, but all the foreign scholars left. In 1943 Bohr himself, considered Jewish by the Nazis because of his mother, had to flee to Sweden.

Bohr's quiet work behind the scenes is a reminder that saving science in dark times often depends on individuals who use their standing to open doors for others.