• fullsquare@awful.systems
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      24 hours ago

      this can be dealt with

      After the Nazi invasion of Denmark this placed them in danger; it was illegal at the time to send gold out of Germany, and were it discovered that Laue and Franck had done so, they could have faced prosecution. To prevent this, de Hevesy concealed the medals by dissolving them in aqua regia and placing the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_de_Hevesy#World_War_II_and_beyond