21. Early in atomic science Lénárd was a force to be reckoned with, and he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1905 for his work with cathode rays. After the First World War he strayed off the reservation, becoming more German nationalist than scientist, and he was among the first to join the Nazi Party. He came to despise the English physicists, whom he believed had stolen the prime credit for atomic and then nuclear physics from Germany, and he became the chief proponent for “Deutsche Physik,” or strictly Aryan physics. This would tend to exclude the revolutionary theories of Albert Einstein and other extremely important scientists of Jewish heritage, and it would cripple German physics through the crucial years leading into the Second World War.