Lise Meitner

CODEX Entry 5803: Lise Meitner

 

An Austrian Jew and the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden. Lise Meitner worked extensively with Otto Frisch, and her team developed the process of nuclear fission. Despite this the Nobel prize for this work was given to Otto Hahn, a non-Jewish male, and President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and of the Max Planck Society.