Lise Meitner: Her Life and Times—On the Centenary of the Great Scientist's Birth

Cooperation between the three scientists Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Fritz Strassmann in the study of the “transuranics” (1934—1938) prepared the way for the chemical identification of a first fission product of uranium by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the end of 1938. Together with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, she also gave the first theoretical interpretation of that experimental finding (barium instead of the expected radium) and suggested the inert gas krypton to be the second fission products, which Hahn and Strassmann subsequently identified (besides xenon) among the products. But she was kept from direct participation in the experiments conducted at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry at Berlin—and therefore from the unrestricted claim to being co-discoverer of uranium fission—because she was an Austrian “Jewess”. Thus after the “annexation” of Austria by the German Reich, the Nazi racial laws also applied to her and precluded her continuing to work in Germany. She therefore emigrated illegally via Holland to Sweden in the middle of 1938. There she continued to work on problems of nuclear physics under less favorable conditions untill 1960. Work on radioactivity already started at Vienna had also brought her together with Hahn at Berlin in 1907, and she continued the work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute studying α-, β-, and γ-radiation and related nuclear processes. Not only because of her descent, but also because of her status of a woman in science, her fate was molded by the circumstances prevailing in Germany prior to World War II. On November 7, 1978 Lise Meitner would have celebrated her hundredth birthday, reason enough for recalling her lot as a woman scientist in Germany against the background of her times, which should stand as a warning to us. To that end contemporary documents could be quoted which till now were largely unknown.