Niels Bohr

He received the Nobel Prize in 1922, "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms." He himself grew up in the Church of Denmark and left it on 16 April 1912, before his civil marriage to Margrethe Nørlund; his biographers call him an atheist, and he never called himself a Jew in any religious sense. He appears on lists of "Jewish Nobel laureates" chiefly because the Nazis put him there—and that has to be said.

He escaped on the night of 29–30 September 1943 by sea to Sweden, having been warned of his arrest; from Stockholm he was flown to Scotland in the bomb bay of an unarmed Mosquito—the helmet would not fit over his head, he lost consciousness from lack of oxygen and came round only on the descent, on 6 October.

"Bohr saved the Danish Jews" is an exaggeration. Documented: in Stockholm he obtained an audience with King Gustaf V and pressed for a public declaration, and on 2 October Swedish radio announced the offer of asylum, after which some seven thousand two hundred people were ferried to Sweden. The Danish resistance and the fishermen did the saving, Swedish policy was already turning, and historians divide over whether his step was decisive. The exact formulation: he added weight at a decisive moment.

And one more error, present in half the popular books: the medals dissolved in aqua regia by George de Hevesy at his institute belonged to von Laue and Franck. Bohr had given his own away in early 1940, to a collection for Finland.