Exodus from Nazi Germany before WW II

In Germany, there were more than half a million Jews living in Germany in 1933. By the time the war started, that number had reduced to 214,000 so approximately 300,000 migrated out of Germany to other countries. Unfortunately, many who migrated were eventually caught up in the war as the Nazi tyranny spread.

When Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, his Nazi regime immediately began mass dismissals of Jewish scientists, judges and other scholars and resulted in the loss to Germany of much of its best scientific talent. Of the 100 Nobel prizes in science awarded from the first one in 1901 until 1932, 33 went to Germans or scientists in Germany, Britain had 18 and the USA 6. In the next 27 years Germany won 8 of the science prizes and Britain 21. The first two chapters of this book summarise the advanced and productive state of German science before 1933 and then the disastrous effects of the coming to power of the Nazis. After the exodus of dismissed Jews from the old and respected Göttingen university, a German government minister asked the great mathematician David Hilbert about the state of mathematics in Göttingen "now that it is free of Jews." "Mathematics in Göttingen?", Hilbert retorted, "There is really none any more."

The AAC, the Academic Assistance Council, that later became the SPSL (Society for the protection of Science & Learning) and survived for a total of 25 years, was started by people like Sir William Beveridge (director of the London School of Economics) and G. M. Trevelyan (Master of Trinity College, Cambridge) in response to these dismissals. Its formation appeal was supported by the British Press and the Royal Society and during its existence it helped over 2000 exiled scholars.

Much of the book tells the stories of some of the best known physicists, mathematicians, biologists and chemists, who fled to Britain, or in some cases to America. Most of these were Jewish, though a few non-Jewish scientists fled because they opposed the Nazi regime or had Jewish wives. Among the stories are those of Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger (not Jewish), Max Born, Fritz Haber, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Hans Krebs, Max Perutz, Ernest Chain, Richard Courant, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi (Jewish wife).



Max Perutz, who shared the 1962 Nobel prize with John Kendrew for their work on haemoglobin, wrote the foreward to this book. In it he says "According to the authors, their [the scientists'] emigration was Hitler's loss and Britain's and America's gain. As one of the scientists included in the book, I must protest. ... the gain was mine. Had I stayed in my native Austria, even if there had been no Hitler, I could never have solved the problem of protein structure. ... We all [the exiled scientists] owe a tremendous debt to Britain."

Some of the refugees were also interned in the Isle of Man, Canada or Australia and Max Perutz's account of his internment, first published in the New Yorker in 1985, is reproduced here. He tells how they were treated relatively well, organised a "university" with courses in mathematics, astronomy, several languages, gave concerts and made furniture and clothes.

The authors have special interests in this subject and are well qualified to write such a book. Jean Medawar is the widow of Sir Peter Medawar a Nobel prize-winning scientist. She sensed the danger from the Nazis when she took a holiday in the Black Forest in 1932 and saw swastika flags flying illegally. She was also an undergraduate at Oxford at the time that some of the refugee scientists were there. David Pyke was born in 1921, the son of a non-practising Jewish father who was highly politically aware. He spoke on "The rise and possible fall of Adolf Hitler" in a speech competition at his school in 1934, but the text has been lost.

Several factors determined the ebb and flow of emigration of Jews from Germany. These included the degree of pressure placed on the Jewish community in Germany and the willingness of other countries to admit Jewish immigrants. However, in the face of increasing legal repression and physical violence, many Jews fled Germany. Until October 1941, German policy officially encouraged Jewish emigration. Gradually, however, the Nazis sought to deprive Jews fleeing Germany of their property by levying an increasingly heavy emigration tax and by restricting the amount of money that could be transferred abroad from German banks.

In January 1933 there were some 523,000 Jews in Germany, representing less than 1 percent of the country's total population. The Jewish population was predominantly urban and approximately one-third of German Jews lived in Berlin. The initial response to the Nazi takeover was a substantial wave of emigration (37,000–38,000), much of it to neighboring European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland). Most of these refugees were later caught by the Nazis after their conquest of western Europe in May 1940. Jews who were politically active were especially likely to emigrate. Other measures that spurred decisions to emigrate in the early years of Nazi rule were the dismissal of Jews from the civil service and the Nazi-sponsored boycott of Jewish-owned stores.

During the next two years there was a decline in the number of emigrants. This trend may partly have been due to the stabilization of the domestic political situation, but was also caused by the strict enforcement of American immigration restrictions as well as the increasing reluctance of European and British Commonwealth countries to accept additional Jewish refugees.

Despite the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935 and subsequent related ordinances that deprived German Jews of civil rights, Jewish emigration remained more or less constant.

The events of 1938 caused a dramatic increase in Jewish emigration. The German annexation of Austria in March, the increase in personal assaults on Jews during the spring and summer, the nationwide Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom in November, and the subsequent seizure of Jewish-owned property all caused a flood of visa applications. Although finding a destination proved difficult, about 36,000 Jews left Germany and Austria in 1938 and 77,000 in 1939.

The sudden flood of emigrants created a major refugee crisis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a conference in Evian, France, in July 1938. Despite the participation of delegates from 32 countries, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept additional refugees. The plight of German-Jewish refugees, persecuted at home and unwanted abroad, is also illustrated by the voyage of the "St. Louis."

During 1938–1939, in an program known as the Kindertransport, the United Kingdom admitted 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children on an emergency basis. 1939 also marked the first time the United States filled its combined German-Austrian quota (which now included annexed Czechoslovakia). However, this limit did not come close to meeting the demand; by the end of June 1939, 309,000 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews had applied for the 27,000 places available under the quota.

By September 1939, approximately 282,000 Jews had left Germany and 117,000 from annexed Austria. Of these, some 95,000 emigrated to the United States, 60,000 to Palestine, 40,000 to Great Britain, and about 75,000 to Central and South America, with the largest numbers entering Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia. More than 18,000 Jews from the German Reich were also able to find refuge in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China.