The Anschluss—the annexation—made Meitner a German citizen to whom all the ugly anti-Semitic laws applied that the Nazi state had been accumulating since 1933. “The years of the Hitler regime . . . were naturally very depressing,” she wrote near the end of her life. “But work was a good friend, and I have often thought and said how wonderful it is that by work one may be granted a long respite of forgetfulness from oppressive political conditions.”
