George Placzek

He worked with Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, Werner Heisenberg, Victor Weisskopf, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Lev Landau, Edoardo Amaldi, Emilio Segrè, Otto Frisch, Leon van Hove, and many other prominent physicists of his time.

[3] During his stay in Landau's circle in Kharkiv around 1937, Placzek witnessed the brutal reality of Joseph Stalin's regime.

His first-hand experience of this influenced the political opinions of his close friends, in particular, fathers of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.

[4] Later, Placzek was the only Czech with a leading position in the Manhattan project, where he worked from 1943 till 1946 as a member of the British Mission;[6] first in Canada as the leader of a theoretical division at the Montreal Laboratory and then (since May 1945) in Los Alamos, later replacing his friend Hans Bethe as the leader of the theoretical group.

Unlike many trailblazers of nuclear physics, George Placzek did not leave his recollections or life story notes.