There's a minor misunderstanding, but the actual story is even more remarkable. George de Hevesy got his Nobel in 1943, but in 1940, Max von Laue and James Franck, who lived in Germany, sent him their gold Nobel medals so he can hide them (he lived in Denmark at the time and worked at the Bohr institute).
So he dissolved the medals in a mix of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and stored the peach/orange liquid in a jar on a shelf in the laboratory. George de Hevesy fled to Sweden in 1943.
He came back to his Denmark lab following the war, and found the jar where he left it on the shelf. It went unnoticed by the Nazis.
After the war, de Hevesy retrieved the solution, precipitated the gold, and sent it to the Nobel Foundation, which recast the medals for the original winners.
