I was born on the 2nd of July, 1906. I was born in Strasbourg, but I grew up in Frankfurt. I came from an academic family. My father was Professor of Physiology at the University of Frankfurt. As a boy I was interested in numbers and mathematics but I wanted to study something which was closer to nature, and therefore I began studying physics. I began my studies in Frankfurt at the university in the physics department.

[Q] In what year?

That was in 1924. I came to the attention of Doctor Meissner who was a spectroscopist and was the equivalent of a Reader in the physics department. Meissner told me that it was useless for me to take my Doctors degree in Frankfurt and that instead I should go to Munich to study with Arnold Sommerfeld. Sommerfeld had been the teacher of Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Ewald, and a number of other people of that quality, and he had the most extensive school of theoretical physics in Germany.