Fritz Strassmann

Fritz Strassmann was a German chemist who worked with Otto Hahn in Berlin and, in December 1938, carried out the precise radiochemical analysis that identified barium among the products of neutron-bombarded uranium, the experimental result that Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch then interpreted as nuclear fission. Strassmanns meticulous chemical separation techniques were essential to establishing that the uranium nucleus had genuinely split rather than merely lost a small fragment, the finding that opened the possibility of releasing nuclear energy on an industrial scale. Unlike Hahn, Strassmann later refused to work on any German nuclear weapons project during the Second World War and sheltered a Jewish colleague at personal risk. His experimental partnership with Hahn is recognized as one half of the discovery that made nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible.