Two Nobel Prize-winning physicists smuggled their medals out of Germany (and had a friend dissolve them in acid) to keep them out of Nazi hands.
Chilean opposition leader Maria Machado tried to curry favor with the U.S. last week by offering to share her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize with U.S. president Donald Trump. Her insistence prompted the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which awards the annual Nobel Peace Prize) to issue a reminder last week that while a Nobel laureate can do what they like with the medal and the prize money, the award itself is non-transferable.
A laureate cannot share the prize with others, nor transfer it once it has been awarded,” wrote the committee in a recent press release, which did not mention Machado or Trump by name – but which, honestly, didn’t have to. “Regardless of what may happen to the medal, the diploma, or the prize money, it is and remains the original laureate who is recorded in history as the recipient of the prize.”
But the medal itself remains a deeply symbolic disk of gold. That’s probably why four physicists during World War II went to such great lengths to keep their Nobel Prize medals out of the hands of the Nazis. Here’s the absolutely wild story.
Hidden In Plain Sight
The morning the Nazis invaded Denmark, physicist Geroge de Hevesey shut himself in a lab at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, frantically mixing chemicals. Into a fuming flask, he carefully placed two heavy gold medals. While the sounds of marching troops filled the streets outside, Hevesey watched as twin golden portraits of Alfred Nobel, each set beneath a Latin inscription meaning “for the peace and fraternity of nations,” swirled and disappeared into the orange fluid.
He gave the solution one more good stir, then placed the jar on a shelf and walked out of the lab. There it would sit until years after the end of the war.
The two Nobel Prize medals belonged to a pair of German physicists, Max von Laue and James Franck, who had entrusted them to Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1933 as the National Socialist Party consolidated its control over Germany.
“Hey, Can You Watch This For Me?”
James Franck (with his colleague Gustav Hertz) received the 1925 Nobel Prize for an experiment that revealed how electrons behave. Eight years later, the Nazi regime gained power in Germany and almost immediately passed a law firing all Jewish employees from Germany’s civil service. That included professors at the country’s public universities, like Franck – who was Jewish but technically exempt from the new law because he had served in World War I. But Franck was too furious at the regime’s actions to stick around.
(That turned out to be a solid decision; two years later, in 1935, the regime passed the Nuremberg Laws: a set of laws designed to exclude Jewish and Roma people, people of color, and immigrants from public life in Germany. The laws stripped these people of their citizenship and most of their legal rights. Being a veteran would not have protected Franck from the Nuremberg Laws or the horrors that followed.)
Franck resigned his position at the University of Goettingen in protest and stayed in Germany just long enough to help most of his former colleagues find new positions overseas, safely beyond the Nazis’ reach. Then he fled to Denmark, to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, a prestigious center for quantum physics research lead by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. In 1934, Franck moved on to the United States, where he eventually became part of the Manhattan Project; he left his Nobel Prize medal in the care of Niels Bohr.
Physicist Max von Laue also visited Bohr’s Institute in 1933, but unlike Franck and many others, von Laue was able to return home and his work at the University of Berlin. Because von Laue and his family weren’t Jewish, Germany still considered him a citizen – and from that position of relative safety, he pushed back against the regime as much as he could, both publicly and in secret. But before leaving Denmark, he deposited his medal for 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics (for his research on x-ray diffraction) with Bohr.
Why The Nazis Hated (Modern) Physics
James Franck was just one of many scientists fleeing Germany in the 1930s, seeking safety and academic freedom. In Berlin, von Laue worked with his friend, chemist Otto Hahn, to help as many Jewish scientists as possible escape the country. Several of them ended up, at least briefly, in Copenhagen, at Niel’s Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics. Bohr helped as many scientists as possible find more permanent postings at universities and laboratories overseas, but in the meantime, they could carry on their research at the Institute, supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation in the U.S. (which Bohr had helped negotiate).
At various times in the 1930s, the Institute’s ranks included Hilde Levi (who pioneered radiocarbon dating), Arther Robert von Hippel (who helped develop radar during the war), Edward Teller (who worked on the Manhattan Project and eventually developed the hydrogen bomb), and James Franck.
Meanwhile, von Laue tried (largely in vain, in the long run) to take a stand against the Nazi regime in academia. As part of the Nazis’ whole antisemitic package, the regime had declared war on… wait for it… most of theoretical physics, including quantum mechanics and atomic physics. Several of the leading figures in early 20th-century theoretical physics, like Albert Einstein, happened to be Jewish, and the Nazis – along with a lot of the old guard of theoretical physics, who had built their careers on the idea that light waves travel through an invisible substance called luminiferous ether – just couldn’t stand it.
(It’s worth a side note that several of the prominent scientists who fled Germany ended up working on the American atomic bomb program, the Manhattan Project. Along with being horrific human rights violations, the Nazis’ antisemitic and racist policies also pretty much hamstrung their own national security. U.S. policy may be well on the way to repeating that mistake, some analysts suggest.)
How To Dissolve A Nobel Prize
For his vocal opposition to the party line, von Laue received official reprimands and lost some of his academic positions (in addition to a professorship at the University of Berlin, von Laue had been an advisor to Germany’s metrology institute since 1922; he was fired from that position in retaliation for his efforts to block a prominent Nazi scientist from joining the Prussian Academy of Sciences).
But von Laue would have been in much worse trouble if the regime discovered his Nobel Prize medal in Niels Bohr’s hands. Under the Nazis, sending gold out of Germany was the next best thing to treason, and von Laue could have faced prison time or even outright execution if he had been caught. The medal had his name etched into its shiny surface, so the moment an occupying soldier saw it, von Laue’s head could have been on the chopping block. That’s why, when German forces marched into Copenhagen on that April morning, Niels Bohr was beside himself with worry about two absent colleagues’ Nobel Prize medals.
“I suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea, as the medal might be unearthed,” wrote de Hevesey decades later, in his 1962 book Adventures in Radioisotope Research. “I decided to dissolve it.”
The Nobel Prize medals are cast in solid 18-carat gold: 196 grams of it. Gold melts at around 1,000 degrees Celsius, but melting the medals down would have left a 400-gram lump of gold for the enemy to find and, presumably, ask pointed questions about at gunpoint. Hevesey needed to make the gold disappear completely.
Gold is a notoriously difficult metal to dissolve, because it doesn’t oxidize the way copper, silver, iron, and other metals do. One of the few substances that can get the job done is called aqua regia: a mix of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid. That’s what Hevesey was mixing in one of the Institute’s labs while German troops were marching past outside.
The Nazis searched the Institute, as Bohr had expected them to. The whole time, the two Nobel Prize medals sat in plain sight on a shelf in Hevesey’s lab – if the soldiers had only been able to see the tiny atoms of gold floating in the solution of acid. But they saw only a plain jar of orangeish liquid on a laboratory shelf, which was exactly the sort of thing they expected to see.
It took seven years after the end of the war for von Laue and Franck to get their Nobel Prize medals back. In 1950, Hevesey precipitated the gold out of the acid solution and returned the medals – deconstructed down to the molecular level – to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Two years later, Franck received his re-cast medal during a ceremony at the University of Chicago, becoming the first person on record to be awarded the same Nobel Prize twice.
