| When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, Hungarian chemist (and later Nobel laureate) György Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prize medals of Max von Laue and James Franck in auqa regia (nitro-hydrochloric acid). The two German physicists had sent their medals to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen a few years earlier to avoid their seizure by the Nazis. The solution was kept safely on a shelf until after the war, when the gold was retrieved and sent to Stockholm to be re-cast into Nobel Prize medals. |