
How aqua regia saved Nobel Prize medals from the Nazis - J3L2404
http://www.aschoonerofscience.com/?p=1710
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jws
The page is fiction, but it documents fact at the bottom:

 _This be fiction based on a true story. George de Hevesy is credited with
dissolving two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia and storing them during the second
world war, where they remained unnoticed despite careful searching by the
Nazis. The gold was later recovered and recoined, and presented back to the
two owners. George de Hevesy won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his
work on radioactive isotopes._

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srean
Interesting set of events. But the artificial dramatization really reeks of a
cheap B grade pulp. I am sure the fictionalization could have been done more
tastefully. It evokes Sam Spade or Tracer Bullet more than a working chemist.

    
    
      ...taking gold out of Germany was almost a capital offense,
      carrying a punishment not to be sneezed at. George was
      certainly not sneezing, but his palms were sweating as if
      he had a fever and his heart was pounding like a drum....
    
      Perhaps in the near future he would be holding a Nobel
      Prize of his own.
      
      But for now, these two Prizes were all he had, and they
      were getting smaller.

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blahedo
It's a neat story, and of course by the time the Germans were almost there,
disposing of the gold was the only option. But it's a strange interpretation
of the word "saved" (or perhaps "medals") in the title that makes the claim
that this process actually saved the medals themselves, since they had to be
recoined later.

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pedanticfreak
A more factual account of the medals:

<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/about/medals/>

The relevant excerpt:

Professor Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen had been a
refuge for German Jewish physists since 1933. Max von Laue and James Franck
had deposited their medals there to keep them from being confiscated by the
German authorities. After the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, the medals
were Bohr's first concern, according to the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy
(also of Jewish origin and a 1943 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), who worked at
the institute. In Hitler's Germany it was almost a capital offense to send
gold out of the country. Since the names of the Laureates were engraved on the
medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious
consequences. To quote George de Hevesy (Adventures in Radioisotope Research,
Vol. 1, p. 27, Pergamon, New York, 1962), who talks about von Laue's medal: "I
suggested that we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as
the medal might be unearthed. I decided to dissolve it. While the invading
forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue's and
also James Franck's medals. After the war, the gold was recovered and the
Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Frank with new Nobel medals."
de Hevesy wrote to von Laue after the war that the task of dissolving the
medals had not been easy, as gold is "exceedingly unreactive and difficult to
dissolve." The Nazis occupied Bohr's institute and searched it very carefully
but they did not find anything. The medals quietly waited out the war in a
solution of aqua regia.

