Physicist

I split the atom, and my partner got a Nobel Prize for it.
I was born in Austria in 1878 to a family of non-practicing Jews. As a young adult, I was baptized Lutheran.
I entered the University of Vienna in 1901 and obtained my PhD in 1906. Then I was drawn to the study of radioactivity.
In 1917, while I was still in my thirties, I was given my own physics section in the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry. In 1934, my partner, Otto Hahn, a chemist, and I investigated the very heart of the atom, its nucleus.
Unfortunately, my rise in the scientific world coincided with Adolf Hitler’s political rise.
Although I was of Jewish descent, I had been baptized a Protestant and loved my country. Nevertheless, I was dismissed from teaching and my name was suppressed. I hung on without protest, hoping the unpleasantness would be temporary. But as restrictions on "non-Aryan" academics tightened, I finally slipped across the border with only a small valise carrying a few summer clothes. I was 59. I continued to advise Hahn through letters from Sweden.
At my direction from afar, Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann more closely analyzed the byproducts of the neutron-bombardment experiments. To their amazement, the elements weren't heavier than uranium, but lighter. "Perhaps you can come up with some sort of fantastic explanation," Hahn wrote me. Within days, collaborating with my nephew Otto Robert Frisch, also a noted physicist, I worked out a theoretical model of nuclear fission.
Hahn published the chemical evidence for fission without listing me as a co-author, possibly because of the political situation in Nazi Germany, or possibly because he convinced himself that he had not been inspired or guided by me.
Historically, I came to be known as Hahn's junior assistant, when in reality I had been his equal partner at the Institute for 30 years.
With my name missing from the key experimental paper on nuclear fission (previously Hahn and I always shared the credit for our joint efforts), Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
With the passing of time, my reputation was resurrected, and in 1966 Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Itogether were awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. I also received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics Society in 1949.
My legacy is instead a permanent abode on the periodic table. In 1994 an international commission agreed that element 109, artificially created in Germany by slamming bismuth with iron ions, will be named after me.