At one of the university festivities Nernst met a retired general whom somebody had brought along as a guest. Learning that Nernst was a physicist, the old man recalled that many years ago at the famous officers' training school at Lichterfelde they had had a cadet who had proved 'utterly useless at military life'. This was particularly sad since he had come from a good old Prussian family, and the fellow had then decided to study physics. The general felt that Nernst would probably never have heard of him, a certain Herr von Laue. Nernst told the general that not only did he know Laue but that Laue had received the Nobel Prize. At this the old man's eyes lit up and he said how glad he was for the family that the cadet whom they had to send away had after all proved 'not completely useless'.

Based on K. Mendelssohn's biography of Walter Nernst and cited by J. Medawar & D. Pike, Hitler's Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime, Arcade Publishing, New York (2001), 268 pp.