Hahn, Meitner and the discovery of nuclear fission

With every passing year our communal memory of world war two depends more on archived words and pictures, and less on shared recollections of lived experience. But although many events of that era are now significant only to historians, there are two – the Holocaust and the first nuclear explosion – which still overshadow us all today. In the list of distinguished scientists whose lives were touched by those two cataclysms, the names of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner stand out prominently.