Paris, 1940: The French capital is occupied by the Wehrmacht and the Nazis are very much interested in getting their hands on the research of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie for their own uranium project. German physicist Wolfgang Gentner is ordered to the Collège de France to report on their findings and supervise their work. But the Joliot-Curies are long-time friends of his, and the assignment marks the beginning of a covert collaboration.
Shortly before Hitler seized power in 1933, Gentner and Frédéric Joliot-Curie met at the Institut du Radium in Paris. Gentner was doing research on artificial radioactivity together with Marie Curie’s daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric – experiments that would earn the Joliot-Curies the Nobel Prize.
In 1940, Gentner returned to Paris for the German uranium project. He was supposed to supervise Joliot-Curie’s research and provide the Nazis with important findings for the construction of an atomic bomb. But his French colleague had begun to work undercover for the Resistance, and the laboratory became a center of the movement. Even as he pretended to cooperate with the Nazis, Gentner constantly came up with new pretexts to prevent the Germans from entering the laboratory and to secure the release of French Resistance fighters from the clutches of the Waffen SS – a double game in which Gentner risked everything and saved his friends’ lives on more than one occasion.
