Hans Bethe

Hans Bethe, whose mother came from a Jewish family, lost his university post in Germany under the 1933 Nazi racial laws and emigrated via Britain to the United States. He explained how stars generate energy through nuclear fusion — the reactions that power the Sun — work honored by the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. During the war he led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, and afterward became a leading advocate for arms control.