Niels Bohr
Assistance to refugee scholars

The rise of Nazism in Germany prompted many scholars to flee their countries, either because they were Jewish or because they were political opponents of the Nazi regime. In 1933, the Rockefeller Foundation created a fund to help support refugee academics, and Bohr discussed this programme with the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Max Mason, in May 1933 during a visit to the United States. Bohr offered the refugees temporary jobs at the institute, provided them with financial support, arranged for them to be awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, and ultimately found them places at institutions around the world. Those that he helped included Guido Beck, Felix Bloch, James Franck, George de Hevesy, Otto Frisch, Hilde Levi, Lise Meitner, George Placzek, Eugene Rabinowitch, Stefan Rozental, Erich Ernst Schneider, Edward Teller, Arthur von Hippel and Victor Weisskopf.

In April 1940, early in the Second World War, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Denmark. To prevent the Germans from discovering Max von Laue 's and James Franck's gold Nobel medals, Bohr had de Hevesy dissolve them in aqua regia. In this form, they were stored on a shelf at the Institute until after the war, when the gold was precipitated and the medals re-struck by the Nobel Foundation. Bohr's own medal had been donated to an auction to the Finnish Relief Fund, and was auctioned off in March 1940, along with the medal of August Krogh. The buyer later donated the two medals to the Danish Historical Museum in Frederiksborg Castle, where they are still kept, although Bohr's medal temporarily went to space with Andreas Mogensen on ISS Expedition 70 in 2023-2024.

Bohr kept the Institute running, but all the foreign scholars departed.
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