By digging deep I found some mentions of Martina Saginor in an essay—in German—on women at the Institut für Radiumforschung in Vienna. I didn’t want to wait for Max or Lotty to translate the article for me, so I took the file to the reference desk, where they called up a kid from the back who read German. With his wire-rimmed glasses and white shirt under a sweater-vest, he made me think of William Henry, the young wannabe criminologist in The Thin Man.
He said he was Arthur Harriman; I said I was V. I. Warshawski. When I explained that I was a detective, trying to machete my way through seventy or so years of undergrowth to the trail of a dead physicist, Harriman became even more like William Henry. “We’re hunting a missing person? Was she a German spy? Do I need to know how to use a gun?”
“You need to be able to read German, which I don’t.” I handed him my laptop, with the German essay on the screen.
“This sounds interesting,” Harriman said after he’d scrolled through part of the article. “The Institut für Radiumforschung, that was the Radiation Research Institute. Vienna wanted to compete with Paris and Cambridge and Copenhagen in the quest for the secrets of the atom. What’s amazing is that forty percent of the Viennese research staff were women, compared to practically none in the U.S. or the rest of Europe—even including Irène Curie’s lab, which hired a lot of women.”
He scrolled down the page until he got to Saginor. “Your lady taught chemistry and math in the Technische Hochschule for girls from 1926 to 1938. In between she went off to Germany, to G?ttingen, to do a Ph.D. in physics, and then she became a researcher at the IRF. G?ttingen was where Heisenberg developed the special algebra of quantum mechanics. Everyone in physics came there at some time or other. Oppenheimer, Fermi, everyone.”
“Does it say anything about Saginor’s personal life?” I asked. “Did she have children, a husband, any of that kind of detail?”
He read through to the end of the essay. “Nothing about her personal life. After Germany annexed Austria and imposed the Nazi race laws, Saginor lost her high school teaching job, but for some reason the IRF didn’t fire its Jewish staff right away. Not clear why. Then in 1941 Saginor got detailed to the Uranverein.”
“Which was?”
Harriman clicked on a couple of links. I waited while he read some other documents, his lips moving as he translated to himself. “It means ‘Uranium Club’ literally, but these were the research locations where Germany tried to develop the physics and engineering to build an atom bomb. There were six Verein labs in Germany, one in Austria; your lady got sent to one in the Austrian Alps.”
He read some more, still muttering to himself. “So. In 1942, with things going badly on the Russian front, Germany was running out of money for its bomb project. Besides, Hitler never really believed splitting the atom was possible. Shows why it’s a mistake to let your research be dictated by a dictator.”
He gave a half-grin at his little pun, but became serious again as he finished reading. “Sorry to say, but Saginor got shipped east in 1943, after the reactor in Austria was shut down. Saginor was sent first to Terezín, then put on a forced march going east from there, probably heading for Sobibor. She must have died along the march route, since that’s the last record of her.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push away the image of a poorly clad woman dying in the snow. “Does that mean that before she died, she worked on the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project?” I asked. “I didn’t know they had one.”
“Oh, yes. It was a mad global arms race,” Harriman said cheerfully.
“But—was she doing weapons work in Vienna, at this IRF place?”
“No, no.” He put down my laptop. “She was like everyone else doing physics in the thirties: she was trying to understand the interior of the atom. In the essay you found, the one about women at the Radiation Institute, one of her old coworkers says Saginor was a dedicated researcher.”
He looked at the screen again and clicked back to the first article. “She used to come into the Institute at the end of her high school teaching day and start running experiments. The woman they quote in the article says that Saginor never seemed to eat—they served coffee and cakes in the common area, but Martina could hardly bear to leave her lab. This other woman thought Martina’s main interest had been in neutron interaction with heavy nuclei, but thirties physicists, chemists, geologists, they all crisscrossed each other’s interests all the time.”
He tapped the screen. “I can see why she was drafted into the Uranverein, although it was as slave labor. Saginor may have been one of the early believers in fission, because already in 1937 she seemed to be experimenting with different materials, trying to come up with a way to capture the resonance cross sections of uranium and thorium without a lot of background noise.”