[2] In 1906, Lenz graduated from the Klinger-Oberralschule, a non-classical secondary school in Frankfurt, and went to study mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen.
During World War I, he served as a radio operator in France and was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class in 1916.
[8] At Hamburg, Lenz trained Ernst Ising and J. Hans D. Jensen; his assistants there included Wolfgang Pauli[9] Pascual Jordan,[10] and Albrecht Unsöld.
[11] Together with Pauli and Otto Stern, Lenz built up the Institute into an international center for nuclear physics.
They maintained close scientific and personal exchanges with the institutes for theoretical physics at the Universities in Munich (Sommerfeld), Göttingen (Max Born), and Copenhagen (Niels Bohr).