Johannes Stark

Johannes Stark was born 15 April 1874 in Germany and built his early reputation on precision work in spectroscopy, discovering the Stark effect - the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields - which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919. By 1924 he had become a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and alongside fellow laureate Philipp Lenard he anchored the Deutsche Physik movement, an effort to cleanse German institutions of Jewish physicists under the banner of "Aryan science." The physics was secondary to the purge. After the war a denazification court found him guilty as a "Major Offender" in 1947, though the judgment was reduced to "Lesser Offender" on appeal two years later. He died 21 June 1957.