Otto Hahn

Hahn worked for thirty years with Lise Meitner, an Austrian physicist who was for a long time unpaid and initially had to use a separate entrance because women were not admitted to the institute. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria stripped her of protection, she fled Germany with ten marks in her purse. Hahn and Fritz Strassmann continued the uranium experiments and found barium among the products, which made no chemical sense. Hahn wrote to Meitner in Sweden; she and her nephew Otto Frisch worked out over Christmas that the nucleus had split, and gave the process its name.

Hahn published the chemistry without her — she was a Jewish refugee and could not be named in a German journal — and the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to him alone, a decision the Nobel committee's own later review found unjust. He was interned in England when the Hiroshima bomb was announced and was badly shaken; afterwards he campaigned publicly against nuclear weapons and against arming West Germany with them. He and Meitner remained friends, and disagreed to the end about how much he had understood at the time. He is buried in Göttingen.