- Person
- James Franck
- Lived
- 1882–1964
- Field
- Atomic physics
- From
- German-American
The story
The Nazi civil service law of April 1933 threw hundreds of Jewish scientists out of German universities almost overnight, along with others the regime regarded as political opponents. Many had families to support and nowhere to go, and young Jewish researchers could no longer be hired at all.
James Franck, a Nobel laureate who directed experimental physics at Göttingen, was exempt from the law as a decorated veteran of the First World War, but he resigned in protest on 17 April 1933. He then stayed in Germany for several more months and used his prestige and contacts to help. He assisted the Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, who was working to bring dismissed scientists to British universities, helping colleagues who had lost their positions find work overseas. Many of them were young researchers whose careers had barely begun. Franck left Germany himself in November 1933.
He kept helping others for years. At Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where he spent a year as a guest professor, he took on as his assistant Hilde Levi, a young Jewish physicist who had just finished her doctorate in Berlin but could find no post in Germany. He had never met her, but he had read her thesis and rated it highly. Levi went on to a distinguished career in Denmark. Franck also found a position in Copenhagen for his son-in-law, the physicist Arthur von Hippel.
After moving to the United States, Franck made a place in his Chicago laboratory for his old Berlin collaborator Peter Pringsheim, who had escaped from Belgium after the German invasion of 1940. He also worked hard to bring his own relatives out of Germany.
The scientists who fled Nazi Germany carried their knowledge to universities in Britain, Denmark, the United States and beyond, where many of them trained new generations of researchers. Franck’s quiet work in 1933 was part of that rescue.
Why it matters
Franck's efforts were part of a wider rescue that saved many scientists' careers and lives and greatly strengthened science in Britain and America.
About James Franck
Nobel physicist whose electron-collision experiment proved atoms have quantised energy levels; he resigned in protest in 1933 and later led the Franck Report against a surprise atomic attack.
More about James Franck
- James Franck championed women in physicsJames Franck actively advanced the careers of women physicists, notably Hertha Sponer and Hilde Levi, at a time when few women held research posts.
- The Franck–Condon principle explains how molecules glowIn 1925 James Franck proposed the mechanism, later developed by Edward Condon into the Franck–Condon principle, that governs how molecules absorb and emit light.
- James Franck made Göttingen a world centre of physicsFrom 1920 to 1933 James Franck and Max Born made Göttingen a world centre of quantum physics, training scientists such as Blackett, Condon and Oppenheimer.
- James Franck proved atoms take energy in fixed stepsIn 1914 James Franck and Gustav Hertz showed electrons lose exactly 4.9 electronvolts to mercury atoms, proving atomic energy is quantised; they won the 1925 Nobel Prize.
- James Franck devoted his later years to photosynthesisFrom the 1930s James Franck studied how plants turn light into chemical energy, heading Chicago's Photosynthesis Research Group until 1956.
- James Franck resigned in protest against Nazi lawsOn 17 April 1933 James Franck, exempt as a war veteran, resigned his Göttingen chair in protest, the first German academic to do so over the Nazi civil service law.
- The Franck Report urged a warning before the bombOn 11 June 1945 the Franck Report urged that the atomic bomb be demonstrated in an uninhabited place rather than used on Japanese cities without warning.
Sources
- James Franck Wikipedia
- Hilde Levi Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.