Title

List of Displaced German Scholars and Supplementary List of Displaced German Scholars

Authors

Object ID

2022.1.12ab

Object Name

List - Booklets

Date

1-1-1936

Files

Description

a: 125 page list printed in Great Britain by Speedee Press Services, London, Autumn 1936; cover - page 9 scanned

b: Supplemantary List,16 page, London, August 193; cover - page 7 scanned

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Within months of his appointment as chancellor in 1933, Hitler’s government issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Political opponents of the Nazi Party, and anyone in government positions with at least one Jewish grandparent were summarily dismissed from their jobs. University professors in Germany’s best universities, judges and police officers lost their positions. The so-called “Arian paragraph” would apply to lawyers, physicians, musicians and other civil servants. At every level of civil society and public life, Jews were persecuted through the gradual, methodical, yet inexorable rollout of laws and regulations restricting their civil and political liberties. As this noose of incremental persecution tightened, academicians began to emigrate. Stepping into the breach was the British Academic Assistance Council (AAC), giving needed support and assistance to the growing number of scholars and academicians whose plight only increased with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws; the 1938 Anschluss; and the devastation of the Kristallnacht pogrom shortly thereafter.

Faced with the loss of their careers and livelihoods, fearful of losing their lives, and concerned for the welfare of their families, Jewish scholars became increasingly resigned to their fate in Germany, and the exodus of Jewish scholars increased. The AAC would eventually evolve into the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), but its mission would continue: to help refugee scholars-based on their specific curriculum vitae- find employment in the UK, the USA, and other countries. Several of the more than 1500 academic refugees from Germany and Austria would win Nobel Prizes. Several refugees had already earned them. Many of these emigres would make important contributions to the scholarship and the culture of their adopted countries and have an enormous influence in their respective fields. For example, the current New School for Social Research in New York, had been the home in the 1930’s to the University in Exile -a haven for over 180 scholar-refugees and their families. Though a number of these refugees would find positions in other universities, many would remain as permanent faculty after the University in Exile had been incorporated into the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science in 1934.

The remarkable role played by the AAC academics in rescuing Jewish emigre academicians imperiled by the Nazis and helping them find new homes and institutions where they could continue their careers, would stand in stark contrast to the lack of support- and frank betrayal -on the part of their academic colleagues in the Reich who were either afraid of reprisals or given to “Gleischsaltung”;i.e., “working toward the Fuhrer” in establishing totalitarian control over Germany. A notorious example of this duplicity was that of Martin Heidegger, a world-renowned philosopher, author of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), and rector of the University of Freiberg, given to sporting a Hitler-style mustache and proudly wearing his Nazi pin. Heidegger signed every letter dismissing Jewish faculty members, including that of his own mentor Edmund Husserl - the renowned phenomenologist who had been Heidegger’s most important advocate: born a Jew but later in life baptized into the Lutheran faith. Some of Heidegger’s most eminent students were forced to leave Germany and find positions elsewhere, including Herbert Marcuse and Hanna Arendt. Heidegger would remain unrepentant for the rest of his life.

[Related item: 2022.1.13]

Dimensions

9 3/4 x 7 6/8"

Keywords

Refugees, British Academic Assistance Council, Emigres

Subcollection

Early, Post, Rescue

Recommended Citation

"List of Displaced German Scholars and Supplementary List of Displaced German Scholars" (1936). Bulmash Family Holocaust Collection. 2022.1.12ab.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/1859