American Scientist

SISTERS IN SCIENCE: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. Olivia Campbell. 384 pp. Park Row, 2024. $32.99.

Olivia Campbell’s newest book, Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History, while immersive and compelling, simultaneously evokes a palpable sense of dread in the reader. Campbell’s first book, Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, detailed the lives of three women doctors during the Victorian era. This book explores the stories of four women physicists: Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen.

The book is organized into three main sections that can be roughly described as before, during, and after escape from Nazi Germany. The first section, “Women Scientists Encounter Nazism,” describes the early 1900s, as each of these women struggled to enter the scientific establishment of a decidedly sexist Germany. Although usually considered the birthplace of the modern research university, Germany barred the doors of its institutions to German women until 1908—even then, additional barriers took years or decades more to fall, such as the ability for women to achieve habilitation, or the certification necessary to teach at the university level. Achieving it requires essentially doing a second PhD-level research project along with experience supervising students. Despite these hurdles, Kohn, Meitner, Sponer, and Stücklen all built promising careers as physicists in the early part of the 20th century.

Meitner was the eldest and would become the most famous of the four. After years of being paid as an assistant and a grader, she earned her habilitation in 1922, and in 1926 she became Germany’s first woman full professor of physics. Meitner was a pioneer of atomic and nuclear physics. She developed new ways of isolating isotopes, leading to the discovery of multiple new ones, including protactinium-231. She, along with Otto Hahn, also had the honor of naming that element.

Kohn’s early work included methods to determine the excited states of atoms. Kohn, like Sponer and Stücklen, was a spectroscopist. Spectroscopy was an immensely active field, and was home to many women physicists who helped drive the development of quantum physics.

Stücklen studied a variety of phenomena, including the potential for sparks to jump gaps between electrodes and the absorption spectra of hydrocarbons. She worked at the University of Zurich in Switzerland as a lecturer and research assistant in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sponer was interested in the properties of molecules, and her work bridged the fields of chemistry and physics. She was one-half of the eponymous Birge–Sponer method, which is a way to calculate the dissociation energy of a molecule; that is, the strength of its chemical bonds.

Under the Third Reich, these four women lost everything: their livelihoods, stability, friends, and more. Their most famous male collaborators and colleagues could often use their fame to leave Germany and find positions elsewhere. But physicists of lesser international standing, of the “wrong” gender, and especially those who were Jewish, struggled to find any positions outside Germany. But eventually, if they wanted to live, they had to leave.

The book’s second section, “Escape and Physics,” reads like a thriller, describing the escapes of all four women, thanks to a small network of courageous academics and organizations. These women faced barriers they had encountered all their lives: sexism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and the ambivalence of bystanders. Only now, they were fighting for their lives.

Campbell details the nail-biting stories of how these women managed to escape despite the refusal by numerous countries to accept their passports, denials for fellowships and jobs, and accusations of espionage by university professors simply because of the women’s Jewish heritage. But the most nerve-racking story is that of Meitner, whose next-door neighbor and fellow scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin was a fervent Nazi who tried to thwart her escape. She eventually managed to flee under secrecy, thanks to a former colleague working as a spy for the British.

“Flourishing or Floundering in New Lands,” the book’s final section, explores the women’s lives after leaving Germany, when they were all able to rebuild their science careers, albeit with plenty of setbacks.

Meitner became none other than a codiscoverer of nuclear fission. Her 1939 paper, coauthored with Otto Robert Frisch, was the result of an earlier collaboration with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann that had continued even after Meitner fled Berlin. Meitner’s contribution was the decisive insight that Hahn and Strassmann’s experimental results were the product of an atom splitting into two like a water droplet—a concept never before thought possible. Hahn was reluctant to acknowledge Meitner’s important role; he won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry while Meitner was acknowledged as a Mitarbeiterin, a subordinate woman assistant.

Oddly enough, my biggest criticism of Campbell’s book is her understatement of the prejudices of the time. For example, Germany’s eugenics laws were inspired by those already present in the United States: Eugenics was a well-established and accepted scientific discipline. Campbell correctly notes instances of prejudice in the United States, but does not provide the same big-picture overview of how institutionalized these prejudices were as she does with Germany. She differentiates race science from “real science,” which has the effect of minimizing the reach and impact of bigotry in the sciences:

Now [the Nazis’] racial pseudoscience could flourish, and their backward ideas further spread across the country under the guise of real science. The Nazis twisted science to a hateful purpose: promoting eugenics, supporting white supremacy, and looking for new, ever more terrible ways to inflict harm and pain on fellow humans.

But as much as we today would like to believe that race science and eugenics were a fluke, or the result of bad people corrupting good science, those fields were widely acknowledged and accepted as legitimate scientific study, including by “good” people. After the war, the United States famously recruited many Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, often turning a blind eye to their pasts, such as Hubertus Strughold and Wernher von Braun.

Xenophobia, antisemitism, and sexism are still prevalent today. Campbell’s book reminds us of what happens when these hatreds go unchecked, while at the same time, bringing the long-overdue stories of these notable women to life. Sisters in Science is a well-researched account of a history that is all too relevant for us today.