The Women Physicists who Fled Nazi Germany

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Just months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the German government on April 7, 1933, issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which barred Jews and other political opponents of the Nazis from holding all civil service positions. The law, at least at first, included some exemptions, for instance, for veterans of World War I, but 50 year old, Nobel Prize winning physicist and decorated war veteran, James Franck, chose to resign from the University of Gottingen before he was fired. The previous month, Albert Einstein had likewise resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, stating, "As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail." Of course, what Einstein, Franck and other Nobel Prize winning men had was the choice to leave. They were quickly hired by universities eager to have them. Between 1930 and 1941, a dozen Nobel laureate scientists immigrated to the United States, and institutions in other countries also hired away scientists fleeing Germany. For women scientists in Germany, though, it wasn't so simple to leave. Many were in a much more precarious position, despite their brilliant minds, having careers that didn't look nearly as impressive on paper, because they had been held back by rules that limited women's careers and by misogynistic supervisors and colleagues. Among those women who struggled to leave and to re-establish themselves outside of Germany, were four physicists who are our focus today. Hertha Sponer was born in Prussia on September 1, 1895, and earned her PhD in 1920 at the University of Gottingen working on theoretical physics with Peter Debye. That same year, James Franck hired her to be his assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, where she assisted him with research on the inelastic collision of electrons with mercury atoms. In 1925, Sponer received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to research at the University of California, Berkeley for one year, where, with RT Birge, she developed the Birge-Sponer method for determining dissociation energies. After Franck resigned and left Germany, Sponer was dismissed from her position. She taught at the University of Oslo and was then appointed as the first woman in the physics department at Duke University. At Duke, Sponer set up a spectroscopy laboratory, where not only did she complete groundbreaking research, but she also invited her fellow German expats to make use of her lab facilities as well. Although Sponer was not Jewish, her sister, resistance fighter Margot Sponer was killed by the Nazis. In 1946, Hertha Sponer married James Franck, who by then was widowed. Sponer retired in 1966 and moved to Germany, where she died in 1968. Hildegard Stucklen was born in Berlin on May 3, 1891, the daughter of a factory owner. As far as we know from the historical record, she did not have any Jewish ancestry. Like Sponer, Stucklen earned her PhD from the University of Gottingen, completing her degree in experimental physics in 1919. When her original supervisor passed away, Stucklen, worked with notorious misogynist, Robert Poll. After graduating, Stucklen, headed to the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Working in the lab of Victor Henri, Stucklen began to work with spectroscopy. She was publishing and lecturing, but she was only earning a living through translation work. In 1931, Stucklen went on fellowship for a year to the United States to research and teach at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Just as she returned to Switzerland, though, Switzerland tightened its immigration laws in response to 1000s of German refugees flooding their borders. Stucklen knew she wouldn't have a job much longer, and she didn't want to return to Germany and its hostile environment toward women academics. Luckily, she was able to lean on her connections and received an offer of employment at Mount Holyoke. She emigrated to the United States with the help of a National Research Council fellowship. In 1943, Stucklen moved to Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where she could more easily visit Hertha and collaborate in her lab. In 1956, Hildegard Stucklen retired from Sweet Briar, but then spent four years as chair of the physics faculty of Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. She moved to Germany in 1960 and died in 1963. Hedwig Kohn was born on April 5, 1887, in Breslau, in what was then part of the German Empire and is now part of Poland. Her family was part of the 20,000 person Jewish community in the town. Kohn earned her PhD in physics from Wroclaw University in 1913, under the supervision of Otto Lummer, and she became his assistant in 1914. As the Nazis rose to power, Germany became less and less safe for Kohn. In 1933, with the restoration of the Professional Civil Service Law, Kohn was removed from her position at the university, and for the next several years, she made a living doing small research jobs. She briefly had funding in 1935 for a stay at an observatory in Switzerland, to measure ultraviolet light intensity from the sun. But it didn't develop into a permanent job. By May, 1940, Kohn learned that if she didn't find a place to go by the middle of June, she would be sent to a concentration camp, but to get a visa to the United States to teach, she needed two years of guaranteed employment. It took the intervention of physicists including Lise Meitner and Hertha Sponer, along with representatives of groups like the American Association of University Women. But finally, Cohn had in hand three consecutive one year positions at US women's colleges, and she was able to immediately leave for Sweden and then the US, saving her life. Her brother Kurt was sent to Kovno and murdered.

After a long and arduous journey to the US, Hedwig Kohn spent a year and a half at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and then went to what became a permanent position at Wellesley College, where she stayed until her retirement in 1952. After retirement, Kohn joined Sponer at Duke, where she was a research associate until shortly before her death in 1964, working on flame spectroscopy. Elise Meitner, who went by the nickname Lise, was born on November 7, 1878, in Vienna, to chess master Philip Meitner and his wife Hedwig. Although born into a Jewish family, Lise converted to Lutheranism in 1908. Meitner earned her PhD in Physics at the University of Vienna in 1906, supervised by Franz Exner. In 1913, she began working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, and in 1917, Meitner and colleague, Otto Hahn discovered a new element, protactinium. After she was awarded the Leibniz Medal, Meitner was given her own physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In 1926, Meitner was the first woman in Germany to be granted a full Professorship of Physics, teaching at the University of Berlin. That same year, she began researching nuclear fission. Although Meitner had a Jewish background, she was somewhat insulated at the beginning of Hitler's reign because for her Austrian citizenship, and because the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was a partnership between the government and industry. However, when Germany annexed Austria in March, 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship, and it became dangerous for her to remain in Germany. Since Germany would not allow academics to leave,and since her passport was no longer valid, she had to sneak out of the country and plead with the Swedish government to admit her. She would eventually become a Swedish citizen after researching and teaching in Stockholm for many years. Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 19 times, and for the Nobel Prize in Physics 30 times. But she never won a Nobel. As you'll hear in today's interview, she should have won the Nobel for discovering nuclear fission. Meitner was, however, awarded the Enrico Fermi Award for the discovery. In 1997, element 109 was named meitnerium in her honor. Lise Meitner died in Cambridge, England in 1968. Joining me now to learn more about these incredible women and their struggles to leave Germany and continue their scientific lives, is writer Olivia Campbell, author of the forthcoming book, "Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History."

Hi, Olivia, thanks so much for joining me today.

Olivia Campbell  14:50  
Thank you so much for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:52  
Yes. I would love to start by asking just how you got interested in writing this book, telling this story. I know you had a previous book that was about women doctors, but how you became interested in writing about these women physicists?

Olivia Campbell  15:06  
So I was interested in finding maybe a story of one woman who made it out from Nazi Germany and one woman who didn't make it out, and making like a juxtapositioning story of two women's paths and how they diverged. So one of the first things I did was I found a Northeastern University database they had recently created about all the women academics in Germany and other Nazi occupied areas, and whether they got funding from the US, whether they, you know, where exactly, what country they were from, what languages they spoke, whether they were married, whether they had kids, you know, full of information, whether they were Jewish, whether all, all these different data points. It was really fascinating to look at, and I found these three, the three women with the "H" names, Hertha, Hildegard, and Hedwig there. And then I also discovered that Lise Meitner, who was a much more well known of the four, was also involved with these women. So I was shocked to find these four women who you know in this data set, who all knew each other. At some point, their paths crossed, and they they all ended up helping each other escape the Nazis right, and get out of Germany. So that was a big find for me, and the fact that they're they're not only that they're working together, maybe before and after, but that they helped each other escape, and that they worked in the same sort of subset of physics was also fascinating.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:45  
Could you talk a little bit about the sources you were able to draw on putting this story together? You're able to get kind of deep into some of their stories and their relationships with each other. So what are the the ways you're able to uncover their story?

Olivia Campbell  17:02  
It's a lot of primary sourcing, going into archives. Since the pandemic, you don't really need to go to as many archives. There's a lot more digital requests you can put in. So with the first book, I did a lot of in person going to every single, it was right before the pandemic. This time around, I went to, like, two archives, and the rest I emailed, and you could say, "Oh, I need these 50 pages," and they'd send it to, you know, digitize it for free. It's been amazing. So I didn't have to go to Germany. I didn't have to go to the UK, which would have been nice. But also, you know, it's very time consuming, very expensive process. So the fact that I could get to those archival documents without having to do that was great. But, yeah, so there's a, you know, we kept a lot of diaries of these women. A few people have had biographies, or they've kept notes. You know, there is a lot to find in the archives here for most of them. Some of the women were much harder. They were much less known, so their stuff maybe wasn't thought to be kept. You know, it wasn't as important to keep in the archive. And then some of the information is sort of kept by, oh, this academic researcher thought this person was important, so they kept all of their documents. Maybe they're not in a public archive. So I, you know, I just trying to contact those people, those intermediaries, and getting my hands on what I can. And so this was definitely harder than the first book. I feel like the women I profiled in the first book had a lot more written about them in the public domain, which was interesting because it's, it's, it was further in the past than this one, but yeah, it was a lot of using my translator, my German translator. I don't speak German, so that was a huge, big ordeal to get everything so I could read it. You know, there's so many handwritten documents. So like, do I even want to bother trying to show this to my poor translator? You know, try to stick to the typed things. But it was really cool to see, you know, even just copies of the book, sort of, you know, postcards, note cards, little copies of the telegrams that these people sent. It was, it's really cool.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:10  
So I want to talk a little bit about the kind of sexism that these women were facing in Germany, even before the rise of Nazism, that sort of put them in a more precarious position in their academic careers, even before they were facing potential expulsion from the country. So could you talk a little bit about you know, this is the beginning of the 20th century, is really the beginning of when PhDs are even being granted to women in the sciences. What, what does this look like for these women?

Olivia Campbell  19:49  
So these are some of the first women who were legally allowed to attend university. One of the women, you know, there are actually a couple of they were, like, auditing classes, or they, you know, they would go to a couple classes as, like a, you know, not full student, right? So that they were kind of confident that soon it would happen. Because in some other states, it happened in different states, in Germany at different times. So you have, in one state in Germany, women are allowed to go to university much sooner and then. But maybe that's not a very populous state, so you have, you know, people migrating there to attend college. Others are sort of seeing that happen in other states and waiting, auditing some classes, saying, "Oh, maybe, you know, next year I should be able to attend." And luckily, that's what happened for most of them. But yes, this is the first, the first group of women allowed, permitted to attend universities. So it, you know, we're already a step back from men, right? We're already starting at us from a place where, you know, the men have had this for forever. They've always had this, you know. So the women are being tolerated, perhaps not even, in some cases. They're definitely not being welcomed in a lot, because, especially in sciences, sciences are very much considered the men's area of things. So you're going to face, you know, professors that didn't think you belonged there. You were going to face colleagues that didn't want to work with you, some that flat out refused to work with you. And but there were also sometimes, there was going to be a few that stood up for you, a few men that you would work with, and they would want to work with you, have no problems with the fact that you are women. And that's usually the younger people at the universities that they came across. Possibly they these men had worked with women in other situations, like they had maybe gone to Canada or gone to the US and worked with women professionally, you know, that sort of sense. So they were accustomed to this idea of women being capable, just as capable as men. But in general, yes, there was a lot of animosity. There was a lot of sexism, personally and institutionally. Still, just because they were allowed to be there doesn't mean suddenly, "Oh, welcome. You know you have all the same rights."And you know that wasn't the case for sure for a long time.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:10  
And these four women that you're focusing on, they're just brilliant, right? Like, this is a this area of physics that they're working and this is hard science. This is not easy stuff. And from everything that you describe in the book, this is really difficult stuff to wrap your mind around. This is the kinds of experiments that they're running, the kinds of stuff that they're doing, they are really exceptional. And so in a lot of ways, the reasons they're accepted is not because men are being exceptionally tolerant of women or something. It's because they kind of have to accept them because they're so brilliant. 

Olivia Campbell  22:50  
That's true. Yes. Spectroscopy, which most of them specialize in, atomic physics, more broadly, were the specialties of these women. And it's it was hard for me to understand. You know, I don't have a physics background. So I hope that what I learned about it, and the fact that I was coming from a place of not knowing made me a good translator for, you know, common readers to understand what I was talking about. I tried to use a lot of analogies, tried to find ways to sneak the science in there without it being really overwhelming. You know, I don't want to have a lot of, like, equations or, you know, real heavy science stuff is going to turn people off. But, yeah, I really wanted to show how, just how incredible their minds were. Like, these women were brilliant. They were working with Einstein. They were working with other brilliant people on the area that we know of. Their names should be just as known right there, they are cracking those mysteries of how the world works in just as profound ways, and I wanted just to really show that as best as I could. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:55  
So I think it's easy from the perspective of looking back on the rise of Nazism to think like, "Well, people must have known what was coming, right?" Like we know now what happened and how evil it was, but it it's easy to see in the book how it kind of snuck up on the people of Germany and and certainly the people in the rest of Europe and in America. Could you talk a little bit about that? Even these women, these scientists, they're they're staying in Germany probably longer than they should have, even the ones who themselves are Jewish, because they just, they don't realize how big a threat they are facing until it's almost too late. 

Olivia Campbell  24:43  
I mean, I hate to make this parallel, but if you think about today, like, if you think, "Oh, it's going to be fine, right?" And what if suddenly, one day it's not fine, we would not have seen it coming, right? I don't want to be alarmist or anything, but yes, it's, you know, we have Hitler being the whole propagandist of the Nazi Party in the 20s before, way before he comes into power, sort of planting these seeds and ideas and the youth programs and, you know, and at universities about anti semitism, misogyny, you know, these really old school patriarchy ideas. And so it has a long time to kind of simmer and become accepted, become the normal, especially in certain, you know, among certain groups, right? So these ideas are, you know, they're foul, but they're somewhat becoming acceptable. And then as we move toward the Nazis coming into power, you see people going, "Oh, well, the government has changed hands before. Everything's always been fine. It always give it a few years, it'll switch back to the more liberal government. You know, it's, it's just temporary. This is, you know, they're gonna go away eventually. This will be fine. It's not a big deal." And so Hitler didn't come into power and start murdering people. That's not, you know, it's not what happened. He, I mean, he did murder some of his opponents that were high profile political opponents, but in general, he wasn't like, "Okay, let's murder all the Jewish people," as soon as he came into power, right? He started out with taking away this right and that right, and just slowly building to where it becomes acceptable to be, you know, fully rejecting Jewish people from society. And the pace, the slow pace of that was made it really hard for people to recognize exactly where this is going. Some people did. Some of the people in my book really saw where this is going. I know Einstein definitely saw, "Okay. I see where this path is going. I'm out of here quickly, right?" He got out before it got real bad. It was easy for him because he was a Nobel Laureate. He, you know, could have gone anywhere he wanted to. Anyone would have been happy to have him. Other people, Lise Meitner stayed way too long, even though she was Jewish. She really wanted to believe that it wasn't going to get as bad as it did, right? She loved Germany. She loved her life here. She loved what she'd built. She'd been at her career for very long time. These aren't young women, you know? These are older women who are had very well established themselves in their careers, and they they didn't want to believe that it would ever get anywhere as bad as it did, right? So, and that delay cost them a lot, right? They got really close to not surviving the Holocaust because they waited so long and had such faith that, "Oh, it will be okay." And the Nazis were so good with propaganda too. So people outside of Germany had no idea how bad it was getting, even, you know, for as a as it was progressing, and people's rights were really being, you know, entirely revoked. They were really good at sort of spinning and keeping, keeping a lid on what was actually happening in the country. So, you know, America might not have really realized what was at stake until much later, until, you know, until war came.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:08  
So you mentioned that Lise Meitner was Jewish, but it wasn't just Jewish people, right, who were at risk. And so of the four women that you profile, only two of them have Jewish ancestry. Could you talk a little bit about that and why, why it's not just the the Jewish people in Germany who are at risk or whose academic careers might be thwarted by the rise of Nazism?

Olivia Campbell  28:38  
So yes, two of the women were Jewish, and two were not. Lise, didn't consider herself Jewish. She had Jewish ancestry, but wasn't practicing in the Jewish faith, so she didn't consider herself Jewish. But that didn't matter, of course. To the Nazis, she had Jewish grandparents, so she was Jewish, the end of story. So she was at risk. I think that, you know, she was really convinced that she was going to be able to sit it out. So even the two women who weren't Jewish, they one of them, Hertha, her main mentor, was Jewish, and basically he was the only reason she had the job that she had. The deal with her being hired at the university was that as long as her supervisor, Franck, was there, she could, she could stay there. If Franck left, she was out of luck. She was out of a job. So this was the case for many, many women in the country, because they were so new in this, you know, in academia, in sciences, their employment was tied to a male supervisor who was acting as their, you know, supporter, their guaranteer that, "Oh, she's going to be fine. This is going to work now. She's a good worker. I will protect you." So once that protection is gone, they're immediately fired by the other supervisors who really didn't want them there in the first place. They're very much against women working, maybe women in academia, maybe women scientists. They're against women, basically. So even if they weren't Jewish themselves, they were almost all of them out of jobs. Like only a few women academics were able to keep their jobs throughout the Nazi era in academia. And a lot of that was their supervisor. A lot of it was they just didn't want to support the Nazis. They didn't want their work to go to supporting this regime. And they said, "Okay, I'm out." That was, you know, Hertha didn't have a job anymore because of her supervisor, but she also her supervisor was Jewish. She felt very much like an ally to him and like they you know, she didn't want her work to be supporting people that would treat him so terribly. So she it was she owed it to him to leave the country, even if she could have found something. Most of them were would have been faced with finding, like a school teacher job or some other, some really lower position that their experience and expertise was not, you know, it would not be being used at all to be like a super specialized atomic physicist and then go teach, like, general science to high school. You know, what was? What would that be? As far as, like fulfillment or anything? So that was not, you know, a prospect that any of these women were happy about. So they mostly left the country, and, you know, dispersed these amazing research groups that had been built up over decades. We lost a lot of great science. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:35  
Could you talk a little bit about the process of trying to leave the country? So there were some groups that were helping, or attempting to help, the women or any refugees from Germany, but there were real challenges in trying to there were monetary challenges, there were visa challenges. So could you talk some about that, that process and the what they were facing?

Olivia Campbell  31:58  
It was quite an ordeal. I mean, there were definitely extra avenues, extra protections for academics, because they were considered more valuable, which is a questionable ideal that I also touch on in the book. I think it's just really looking at, you know, how how useful someone is. And that's not, that's really eugenics. But so you had to have a job offer basically out of the country, like they're, they're really the only way to get a visa. The visa list early in the Hitler's reign, you maybe could have gotten that a little bit faster. But as as time went on and things got really, really bad, there was, you know, 1000s and 1000s of people on these visa lists for the US and Canada, and you know, any, basically anywhere you could escape to. Some people escaped to nearby countries, right? Like, "Oh, I'll go over here." Well, then suddenly the Nazis are they get recaptured when the Nazis start annexing countries around them. And that's what happened to Lise, is that she was living in Germany, but they, when they annexed Austria, her Austrian passport was suddenly, you know, null and void. It didn't mean anything. So she was trapped. But yeah, so most of the people were trying to go to Canada, to the US, to the UK, and it was really you had to find a job. You had to have someone hire you sight unseen, and say, "Okay, this university is going to give you this position." And a lot of times there wasn't money for that. So you needed these aid organizations to say, "Okay, we'll vouch for you for your salary for a year, if this institution will say, we have a place for you, we can, you know, give you housing, room and board, you know, and let you teach whatever classes for a year or something." That would get you out of the country. And even it just took so long, you know, the back and forth, the letters with the aid agencies and all the different universities. And just most of the men looked like much better candidates because they had been in their careers for much longer. They had been allowed to progress freely and to become supervisors, to become, you know, being a teacher for a much longer time. Women were only granted the right to become, you know, certified university lecturers much later. So they didn't have the sort of experience that looked attractive to any organization, you know, outside of Germany, because they had been held back because of sexism. So that misogyny literally starts killing women, because they these universities are like, "Oh, we'll take all these men of this certain age, right?" That's what they're looking for. And because the women, they were had been forced to be, you know, unpaid, basically volunteers for a long time, and then they were maybe still being an assistant to someone, and they didn't have their own lab. They didn't have, you know, their own students, or they had only taught for a year or two. This is not someone that you want to hire that looks good on paper, right? So it really was about what you brought to the table, rather than you're about to get murdered, right? Like there wasn't that. There was also the, you know, universities and the US government, when they were looking at giving out visas and jobs, they're wondering if people are spies, right? Are they communist plants? Are they, you know, a Nazi spy that things are going to come and so this was a whole extra level, you know, of that they had to go through to get any kind of job offer. It was really wild to me that anyone got, got out on this path of academics, especially the women.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:43  
I was really struck by, sort of the the sisterhood of these four women, especially the ways that Hertha went to great lengths to help, I think, Hedwig and Hildegard as as they're attempting to sort of navigate how they where they can go, how, how they can keep doing science, not just teaching. Could you talk some about that? And they're all writing letters to each other and trying to support each other. And you know that that's not necessarily something I expected to see going into this story. And so I wonder if you could reflect on that a little bit.

Olivia Campbell  36:22  
Yeah, it was really interesting to see how the women, the women who got out first, were the two non Jewish women, but mostly because they were much earlier. I don't think it was anti semitism at that point playing a role. It was because the others had been stuck for so long couldn't get out, but to see Hertha, sort of, you know, take these women under her wing and really just do anything in her power. She, you know, for Hedwig, she's like nagging this nearby North Carolina University, just really, really hounding them. She will not quit until they say, "Okay, we'll give her a job for a year, right?" And she, was determined to save this person and that, you know, it's just incredible. She didn't have to do any of that. You know, she was busy with her new job at Duke. That was really overwhelming. And the fact that she could just start a new job and at the same time suddenly be helping all these other people that are trying to escape, that is really incredible. She's incredible. And then we have Hildegard, who came over and is really intense this job that she just hates in a woman's college. You know, it's just not what she's looking for. It's not the kind of science she wants to be doing. And so she's going to Hertha, saying, "Help. You know, I don't know how to navigate the American college system. I don't know, you know, where to find this, what I'm looking for. What can you do for me?" So, yeah, we have a lot of letters back and forth throughout for all of these women, and it was just fascinating. I hope, I hope I translated it well, and, you know, made it sort of come to life. So, you know, letter writing isn't exactly very exciting, but that's, you know, those are the texts I have to work with. It's the letters they were writing to each other, and it was really the length that they went to to help each other was were really, really incredible, absolutely incredible.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:15  
You mentioned earlier that Lise is probably the the best known, although nowhere near as well known as she should be. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the story of the Nobel prize that she should have gotten and did not.

Olivia Campbell  38:30  
Oh my gosh, that makes me so mad just thinking of it. Okay, so it's Lise Meitner's idea to start this research project, right? And research projects like take a very long time. They're very many years, like many, many years. And you might do the same experiment over many years and only get a result, you know, after a long time. So this is, you know, this is a long game. Science is a long game. So they've been researching this topic for a very long time, and they're taking turns, you know, shooting, trying, trying to figure out what's going on, what this reaction is, right? So they take different elements and shoot things at it, and then finally, when they they're getting finally getting somewhere, is when the Nazis come to power and Lise is forced to leave the country, right? So they've been doing this work. It was her idea to start this work. They've been doing this work for many years. Suddenly, the group is split up, and she she is forced to leave. So she lands in Sweden and is trying to continue this work for at least a few more months, maybe a few more years, because she knows there's something here, right? She knows that this is finally getting somewhere. Well, her, you know, the her collaborator, colleague, former supervisor, Otto, he stays in Germany, and that's a huge, you know, it kind of breaks their friendship that him staying there, but he continues to do the research in the lab. And she and then, like, communicating with her, right? So he's like, writing her letters about what he finds. He finds this really crazy reaction happening. He can't figure out what's going on. He can't there's no he's he's a chemist. She's a physicist. So he can't chemically explain this. So he asks her if she can explain this with physics, and she does. She figures it out with her physicist nephew. They're walking and talking, and she, like realizes what has happened. And so she she discovers nuclear fission is what had just happened. So it was her baby, it was her experiment. Yes, it was Otto that made the final experiment, she was the one that interpreted it. Well, it's Otto that gets the Nobel Prize and all the glory and all his name. And he really downplays her role, first of all, because he's worried that the Nazis are going to go after her, because if he, you know, brings her into this. But even when it's okay again, after the Nazis leave, he still downplays her role in this. And there are other collaborators, just like livid with him that he, you know, he was really adamant that Lise, it was Lise that that did it. I think there's a quote in the book that talks about how Lise is famous for winning Otto the Nobel Prize. That's what she's famous for. But, yeah, it for, if you, if you look at all the information there, it was definitely a co prize situation, right? But that's not what went down. She, she did not ever win a Nobel prize that she absolutely deserved to. I, it makes me so mad. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:41  
Yes. Makes me very mad now too. So you talk at the very end of the book about sort of the the important takeaway of studying these women's stories. So I wonder if you could just reflect for a minute on that sort of what, what we get from studying their stories and why it was important to you to tell these stories.

Olivia Campbell  42:08  
I struggled a lot emotionally writing this book. It's a lot. It's heavy. I don't think I will ever write a book that has to do with the Holocaust ever again. I don't know how people write lots of World War II books. I don't know how people make it, like a cozy, you know, inspiring fiction thing. I know people really enjoy that genre, but I don't. This was heartbreaking to write. I think these women's stories, like we were talking about it, kind of shows how far people will go to help each other and how important it is to, you know, to show up when it counts. How how much we lose to hate, you know, how much is lost, even not just the human cost. So many people died, and we lost all of that collective knowledge, but we also the people that survived were so, you know, dispersed, so spread out that we lost those scientific groups, right, that had worked together, and were getting somewhere. We lost all that could have been for even for the people that stayed alive. I like to think it's a hopeful story, because it focuses on the people that survived. But I think with that hope there, it's hope in the face of horror that, you know, there has to be that horror for this level of of tenacity and hope to sort of emerge. So it's, it's a it's complicated.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:42  
It's an incredible book, and I would love to encourage people to pre order. Can you please tell them how they can do that?

Olivia Campbell  43:48  
Oh, yes, it's available wherever you want to buy a book, Amazon, bookshop.org, I hope to be working with my local independent bookstore, due town bookshop again to provide signed copies by mail, online ordering. Barnes and Noble audio book is will be out also at the same time. Got a great, great reader for that. Yeah, I'm excited. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:15  
Olivia, thank you so much for joining me.

Olivia Campbell  44:17  
Thank you so much for having me. It's been fantastic. 

Teddy  44:52  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @unsunghistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!