He graduated from the municipal gymnasium as valedictorian in 1938, giving his speech in white tie and tails. Little did he know that he would wear the exact same suit to accept, at 61, a Nobel Prize in Stockholm many years later.

He entered the University of Utrecht to study physics. There, he took an experimental physics course with Leonard S. Ornstein, who allowed him to assist a graduate student with his Ph.D. research project. That led to Dr. Bloembergen’s first publication of a scientific paper in 1940.

That same year Adolf Hitler launched a massive airborne invasion westward. Without warning, German troops parachuted into Holland and took control of the nation. The next year, Dr. Ornstein, a Jew, was removed from the university at the same time that Jewish students were expelled. (Dr. Ornstein died six months later from what Dr. Bloembergen had said was stress and malnutrition.)

Though Dr. Bloembergen was not Jewish, he was still a potential target for deportation or even death; the Nazis were deeply suspicious that any student could be part of the Dutch resistance.

Despite studying under German occupation, he received the Dutch-equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in 1941 and the equivalent of a master’s degree in 1943, mere weeks before the Nazis closed the University of Utrecht. After graduating, Dr. Bloembergen spent the next two years hiding from the Nazis, including during the “hunger winter” of 1944, when food was scarce and many died of malnutrition.

“I remember eating bitter tulip bulbs to fill my stomach. They were hard and indigestible despite hours of boiling,” he wrote in his book, “Encounters in Magnetic Resonances: Selected Papers of Nicolaas Bloembergen.” “I read through the book ‘Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung,’ by H. A. Kramers, by the light of a storm lantern.”

The Allied forces liberated Holland in 1945, and Dr. Bloembergen later left the shambles of Europe for the United States. He enrolled in Harvard and worked under Dr. Purcell on nuclear magnetic resonance. Dr. Purcell would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952 for his work with NMR.