Von Hippel has an inspiring life story. He was involved in both World Wars, and had to leave Hitler's Germany because of his Jewish wife Dagmar, who was the daughter of the Nobel prize winner James Franck. With the rising tide of anti-Semitism and the coming of the Nazis, marrying a Jew was risky, but von Hippel had taken a stand as an anti-Nazi. He wrote a counter declaration for the Youth Movement, for which he had taken a pledge to live a life of purity, responsibility and mutual helpfulness. The Youth Movement's emphasis on friendship and involvement in outdoor activities also guided von Hippel's life — he was cross-country skiing up to age 95, and walking a mile a day even into his 100s.
Von Hippel served in World War I as an army private. After the war, he studied subjects from classical physics to quantum mechanics at the University of Göttingen, then a “Centre of the Scientific Revolution”. Convinced that theoretical physics was a calling reserved for geniuses, he instead became a PhD student in the more practical Institute for Applied Electricity. He finished his thesis in 1924, having designed and built a new type of thermo-microphone that allowed transmission of radio broadcasts free from frequency distortion. After a period working as Max Wien's assistant in Jena, he took a one-year Rockefeller fellowship in 1927 at the University of California at Berkeley. Von Hippel's European schooling and early professional life put him in close association with many of the major leaders in physics, including Bohr, Sommerfeld, Heisenberg, Wien, Courant, Debye, Born, Franck, Hertz, Hilbert, Pohl, Pauli, and in America with Loeb, Oppenheimer and Einstein.
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