The story of George de Hevesy’s (Hevesy György) buried treasure sounds faintly familiar; I think I’ve heard it before. But clearly it isn’t repeated often enough to be common knowledge, and so the story bears repeating.
Earlier I’ve written of the heroic self-smuggling of European scientists out of Europe before and from beneath the advancing Nazis. Most were enemies of the Reich, if only by circumstance—Jews, communist sympathizers, homosexuals, or at least intellectuals—and therefore in personal jeopardy, which does not diminish the heroism of what follows. Knowing the German regime’s suspicions, and that many of them could be under surveillance, they circulated letters about the splitting of the atom. No talk of sustained chain reactions, or practical applications, or megabombs; no suggestion of fleeing to England or the States; just the sharing of innocuous-looking professional knowledge.
It was enough. The greatest physicists and chemists of Europe were able to connect the dots and realize they’d suddenly become valuable military assets, and began to smuggle their talent off the continent, along with the world’s most vital military intelligence, concealed in their brains. What with one thing and another—late arrival of the post, experiments that needed to be finished, the lack of practical skill to which genius is prone, a need to assist others in the exodus, surprise at the speed of German advance—these escapes were often somewhat slapdash.
Left behind in the hurry and confusion when German invaded Denmark were Max von Laue’s and James Franck’s Nobel prize medals. Hevesy, who would win the Nobel himself later that year, feared the Nazis would seize them, either as status symbols or for their value as metals, so he dissolved the medals in a vat of acid. Returning to his lab after the war, he found the vat safe on the shelf, precipitated the gold back out of solution, and gave it to the Nobel committee, which had the medals recast from the original gold.
The technique is so technical, the chances of success so slim, and the circumstances so romantic that the story reads like something out of the golden age of science fiction, wherein heroes using the power of Science! single-handedly defend the earth from alien depredations.
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