The flight of Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Austria after 1933, and from the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe in the years that followed, was one of the largest forced migrations of talent in modern history. The big names are well known. Sigmund Freud was 82 years old and dying of cancer when he left Vienna for London in June 1938, three months after the Anschluss. The German embassy made him sign a statement that he had been well treated. Freud added a sentence in his own hand: “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” He died in Hampstead in September 1939, weeks after war broke out.
Albert Einstein was already in Princeton when Hitler took office in January 1933. He had been giving lectures at Caltech, and on the way back his ship was diverted to Belgium. He never returned to Germany. The Prussian Academy of Sciences voted to expel him; he resigned first. He took up the post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton that he would hold for the rest of his life.
The bigger picture
Behind those two were many others. Around 2,000 academics were forced out of German universities between 1933 and 1939, mostly Jewish but also including non-Jews who had spoken against the regime. Hannah Arendt left in 1933 after a short arrest by the Gestapo, lived in Paris through the 1930s, was interned by the French in 1940 and escaped via Lisbon to New York in 1941. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the founders of the Frankfurt School, moved their institute first to Geneva and then to Columbia in New York. Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann (whose wife was Jewish) ended up in California. Erwin Panofsky, the art historian, went to Princeton. Erwin Schrodinger to Dublin.
The physicists who would build the American atomic bomb were heavily drawn from this group. Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Leo Szilard were all Hungarian Jews who had studied or worked in Germany before fleeing. Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls all came out of central Europe. Enrico Fermi, who was not Jewish, left Italy in 1938 because his wife was Jewish and the Italian Racial Laws had just been passed.
Where they ended up
Most of the survivors went to the United States, which had the universities, the funding and the willingness to take them. Some went to Britain, where the universities were less able to absorb them but several found posts at Oxford, Cambridge and the new University of Manchester. A small number went to Palestine, where the Hebrew University of Jerusalem had been founded in 1925 and was actively recruiting. Others went to Latin America, particularly Argentina and Mexico, and to Turkey, whose universities took in around 200 Jewish refugee academics in the 1930s.
What it meant
The intellectual centre of the Western world shifted across the Atlantic in the 1930s. American science, philosophy, social science, art history and economics were transformed by the influx. The German-speaking academic world that had dominated European thought from the early nineteenth century was finished within a decade. The German universities, after 1945, were rebuilt with American help, but they never fully recovered the standing they had before the regime drove out the people who had made them.
See also
- Hannah Arendt
- Italy
- Belgium
- Adolf Hitler
- Jewish Nobel Prize Winners Before the War
- Jewish Contributions to European Civilisation
- Jewish Museum Berlin
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards