The German Genius

Jones hurried to Vienna, having taken soundings in Britain about the possibility of Freud settling in London, but when he arrived, Jones found Freud unwilling to move. He was persuaded only by the fact that his children would have more of a future abroad.
    Before Freud could leave, his “case” was referred as high as Himmler, and it seems it was only the close interest of President Roosevelt that guaranteed his ultimate safety. The Nazis insisted that Freud settle all his debts before leaving and sent through the exit visas one at a time, with Freud’s own arriving last. When his papers did at last materialize, the Gestapo also brought a document, which he was forced to sign, which affirmed that he had been properly treated. He signed, adding, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.”
    In 1934, Bernhard Rust, the Third Reich’s education minister, asked David Hilbert, the mathematician, how Göttingen—the home of Gauss, Riemann, and Felix Klein, and a world center of mathematics for 200 years—had suffered after the removal of Jewish mathematicians. “Suffered?” Hilbert famously replied. “It hasn’t suffered, Minister. It doesn’t exist any more!” 37
     
     
    After Hitler’s inquisition had become plain for all to see; emergency committees were set up in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland, of which two may be singled out. In Britain the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) was formed by the heads of British universities, under William Beveridge of the London School of Economics. By November 1938 it had placed 524 persons in academic positions in 36 countries, 161 in the United States. Not only mathematicians were helped, of course. A group of refugee German scholars established the Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad. This sought to place colleagues in employment where it could, but also produced a detailed list of 1,500 names of Germans dismissed from their academic posts, which proved useful for other societies. The Emergency Society also took advantage of the fact that in Turkey, in spring 1933, Atatürk reorganized the University of Istanbul as part of his drive to Westernize the country. German scholars (among them Paul Hindemith, as we have seen, and Ernst Reuter, later mayor of West Berlin during the blockade) were taken on under this scheme and a similar one, in 1935, when the Istanbul law school was upgraded to a university. These scholars established their own academic journal since it was so difficult for them to publish either back home or in Britain or the United States. The German journal in Turkey lasted for only eighteen issues, which are now collectors’ items. It carried papers on anything from dermatology to Sanskrit. 38
    A more enduring gift from Hitler was a very different periodical, Mathematical Reviews. The first issue of this new journal went largely unremarked when it appeared—most people had other things on their minds in 1939. But, in its quiet way, the appearance of MR, as mathematicians soon began calling it, was both dramatic and significant. Until then, the most important mathematical periodical, which abstracted articles from all over the world, in dozens of languages, was the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete, launched in 1931 by Springer Verlag in Berlin. In 1938, however, when the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, a board member and Jewish, was dismissed, several members of the international advisory board resigned. An article in Science reported that papers by Jews now went unabstracted in the Zentralblatt and American mathematicians, watching the situation with alarm, considered buying the title. Springer wouldn’t sell but suggested two editorial boards, which would have produced different versions of the journal, one for the United States, Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet Union, the other for Germany and nearby countries. American mathematicians were so incensed by this insult that in May 1939 they voted to establish their own journal. 39
    As early as April 1933, officials at the Rockefeller Foundation began to consider how they might help individual scholars. Funds were found for an emergency committee, but it had to move carefully; the Depression was still hurting, and jobs were scarce. In October that year, Edward R. Murrow, vice chairman of the committee, calculated that upward of 2,000 scholars, out of a total of 27,000, had been dropped from 240 institutions. That was