In the 1990s, the American chemist Ruth Lewin Sime worked on a comprehensive biography of Lise Meitner. It was released in 1996 under the title “Lise Meitner - A Life in Physics.” Sime sought an explanation as to why Lise Meitner was not considered for the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, which Otto Hahn alone received.

Sime squarely blamed Meitner's colleague Hahn. Her book not only placed Lise Meitner on a pedestal, but also unmasked the very popular Otto Hahn as a characterless man, one who had suppressed Meitner. As a result, her performance was overlooked by the Nobel Committee, and would otherwise have been forgotten in the postwar years. In America, the opinion was held that Hahn carried out the ideas of Meitner, because he himself did not know what to do, and then, in his duplicity, had kept silent about this aspect.

In this sense, this Meitner biography is a tell-all book. The sensational theses found a high degree of resonance in renowned German dailies and weekly newspapers. The book combines the scientific form with a novelistic style of writing, which has certainly promoted the dissemination of its ideas.

In 1997, Prof. Dr. Martin Trömel (of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt/Main) inspired his student, Vera Morgenweck, to undertake an examination paper that would compare these theses with historical sources. This work is available for download on these pages, along with multiple scientific materials and two published essays (in German).

The task was to investigate the theses by studying the wide range of existing sources. This topic required the use of the scientific methods of both my academic subjects—chemistry and history. The "tools of the historian" were required to be applied as well as all that I had learned about the basics of radiochemistry through an internship at the Institute of Nuclear Chemistry at Mainz. There I got valuable support from the successor of Fritz Straßmann, Prof. Dr. Günter Herrmann, who also knew Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn personally.

While the work was being created, I delivered a lecture at the seminar by Prof. Trömel on the basics of radiochemistry and nuclear chemistry. This knowledge is essential for understanding the scientific publications of Hahn and Meitner. The main contents and materials of the presentation will also be made available for download on these pages at the manuscript "Overview of the history of radioactivity research and theoretical foundations - an introduction to the literature" (in German).

The work was submitted in September 1998. Because of the interdisciplinary issue, Prof. Trömel consulted another evaluator: the science historian Prof. Dr. Walter G. Saltzer of the Institute of History of Natural Sciences at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. Accordingly, they came to the following assessment of the work: “Very good.” Prof. Herrmann also got a copy of the finished work. His comment was: "My compliments!"

After the quality of the work was determined, we (Prof. Trömel and myself) sent it to Ruth Lewin Sime to California. She did not respond to this.

Based on this examination paper, Prof. Trömel created with me a less extensive joint publication for the magazine NTM (International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine), which appeared in 2000. The publisher sent a preprint to Ruth Lewin Sime and asked her for her own response. She now responded to our work with an aggressive article, in which we were openly defamed as incompetent, morally indifferent and nationalistic. This prompted us to write a replication in the next edition of N.T.M., which was published in 2001. The manuscript “Keine Distanzierung Hahns von Meitner” analyzes Sime’s special kind of reasoning.

The events surrounding the discovery of nuclear fission are relatively well-documented, but the extensive sources are scattered in a very far and varied manner. The result was that these theses of Hahn’s uncongenial behavior toward Meitner have been widely accepted by journalists and even historians, and disseminated without investigation.