Page 45 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

Chapter 2: Portrait of three founders of the ILL
Hitler came to power in January 1933, and on 13th April the decree was published dismissing all Jewish professors without compensation. Max Born, Richard Courant and other Jewish scientists had to leave Göttingen, and emigrate. Franck, deeply anti-Nazi, also left Germany in May 1933, with his family, to settle in the USA. Though profoundly affected, M.L. remained at the university in Göttingen, and in April 1935 managed to submit his thesis on a topic of atomic physics, the impact of electrons in the rare gases. This period greatly marked M.L. The personality and charisma of James Franck profoundly influenced him to the point that some observers said they could see in him these traits of Franck. In addition being in the laboratory where a great number of scientists had or would later have a Nobel Prize (Blackett, Maria Göppert, etc) made him think38 that every good physicist would be awarded this famous prize one day or another.
In July 1935 he joined Walter Bothe in Heidelberg as a
collaborator at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research
(later renamed Max-Planck-Institute after the war). This institute
was founded as a multidisciplinary centre with departments of
pathology, physiology, chemistry and physics. The first director
of the physics department was Karl W. Hausser, who had a great
interest in the interplay of physics and medicine. He died in
1933, and Walter Bothe, who had been director of the physics
department at the University of Heidelberg, succeeded him in
1934. Bothe, a nuclear physicist, with no particular interests in
biology or medicine, was isolated from the other departments
headed by leading researchers Richard Kuhn and Otto Mayerhof.
So it was a lot less exciting than it had been for M.L. in Göttingen
38 I report what he said to me. He was referring to the pre-war period and said that this was no longer the case with the great increase in the number of physicists.
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