Hilde Levi

Study in Berlin

Hilde Levi was born in Frankfurt am Main and moved from Munich to Berlin in 1928 to study. Her older brother was already living there, so she did not feel completely unprotected and had a companion for her visits to the Max Reinhardt Theatre. She was particularly attracted to the city of Berlin, rather than the university where she studied chemistry and physics. She found its laboratories old and unbearable. Once the physics department even caught fire after an experiment with petrol in which she was involved.

Hilde Levi completed her studies with a doctorate at the beginning of 1934. This was still possible at the time; it was only in April 1937 that Jewish students of all subjects were banned from doing a doctorate.

Research at the Niels Bohr Institute

As Hilde Levi was convinced that she had no professional future in National Socialist Germany, she made contact with Denmark via the women's organisation "International Federation of University Women" and found a position at the internationally renowned Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in early 1934, shortly after completing her doctorate. Niels Bohr had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his research into the structure of atoms.

At Bohr's suggestion, Hilde Levi was initially a research assistant to James Franck, a Jewish Nobel Prize winner who had left Germany a year earlier. The two became friends and travelled together in cabs in their spare time. From 1935, Hilde Levi was involved in the studies of the Hungarian professor George Hevesy on radioactivity.

Escape to Sweden and return

After Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940 and Danish Jews were threatened with deportation in 1943, Hilde Levi fled to Sweden. She quickly found a job again at Stockholm University. After the Second World War, she returned to Copenhagen and conducted research in the field of radiobiochemistry at August Krogh's institute until her retirement in 1979.

After a research stay in the USA, she developed the first apparatus in Europe for determining the age of archaeological finds using the isotope Carbon-14 and, together with James Franck and George Hevesy, was involved in numerous scientific publications.

After her scientific career, she became involved in the history of science, published a biography of George Hevesy in 1985 and was a frequent visitor to the Niels Bohr Archive until the end of her life.

Hilde Levi died in Copenhagen in 2003.