Germany’s academic purge began before the Second World War in Europe. On 7 April 1933, the Nazi government introduced a civil-service law that enabled the removal of Jews and political opponents from public employment. Universities were among the institutions affected. People could lose their positions because of the regime’s ancestry rules or political demands, not because their research or teaching had failed. Some initially qualified for exemptions; exclusion did not happen to everyone on the same day. [1] [2]
The damage extended beyond the dismissal of famous professors. The system also restricted who could teach, study and receive support for research. This chapter follows those decisions into individual working lives, including those of James Franck, Emmy Noether and Fritz Haber. Their responses differed, as did the responses of their colleagues. Understanding those differences explains more than a simple statement that Germany “lost its best minds”. [5] [7] [10] [11]
Part 2 established the wider comparison between Germany’s losses and America’s scientific mobilisation. Part 3 now examines the first break in that story: how persecution changed the rules inside German institutions in 1933–1935. The evidence supports serious institutional damage, not the claim that all German science stopped or that the purge alone decided the war. Leaving a position also did not guarantee safety or a new career abroad. That unresolved problem carries the narrative into the next chapter. [14] [15]
Previous chapter: Part 2 — How Scientific Talent Reshaped America and Germany. Next chapter: Part 4 — Finding a Place to Work. Begin the book: Part 1 — Prologue.
A Letter That Praised Her Work—and Ended It
In May 1933, a German research organisation described an employee as reliable, capable and valuable because she understood its operations. It was also dismissing her.
Käte Schabbehard had worked for ten years with the Library Committee of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft, a predecessor of today’s German Research Foundation. A letter dated 12 May reported her classification under the new ancestry rules, acknowledged her professional qualities and announced that notice of termination was being served. The DFG reproduces the episode in its institutional history. [4]
The contradiction is the point. Good work had not become invisible. It had become insufficient protection.
We should not invent what she felt when she received the notice, or pretend that this administrative record tells us her whole life. What it does reveal is a decision-making rule. An institution could recognise useful knowledge and still choose exclusion. The loss did not require an inability to recognise competence; it required another criterion to take precedence over it.
The previous chapter considered national power at a distance: researchers crossing borders, laboratories expanding, governments organising knowledge. Here we move closer. Before expertise could be relocated, careers were interrupted in particular offices and departments. Before another country could gain a researcher, an institution had to cease providing that person with a place to work.
That is where the detailed story begins—not with a weapon, but with the authority to decide who belonged.
7 April 1933: Exclusion Given an Administrative Form
The title of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service suggested the recovery of proper administration. Its first section authorised the discharge of civil servants even where the existing law would not otherwise have supplied grounds. Section 3 ordered the retirement of officials classified as being of “non-Aryan” descent. Section 4 permitted dismissal on political grounds. The wording made the new standards enforceable through the machinery of public employment. [2]
These were not scientific categories. The regime’s language about ancestry belonged to its racist ideology. Throughout this chapter, references to its classifications describe the machinery of persecution; they do not endorse the classifications as valid accounts of human difference.
The law also contained conventional-sounding provisions about qualifications and administrative organisation. Reading it only through that vocabulary would miss the decisive change. The state was not simply asking whether someone could perform a job. It was determining whether that person was permitted to remain in it regardless of demonstrated ability. [2]
For a university, the difference is fundamental. A judgement about the quality of a lecture or an experiment concerns the work. A decision that disqualifies its author through ancestry concerns membership. Once the second decision overrides the first, evidence of excellent work cannot reliably answer the accusation. The institution is no longer operating with a common professional standard for everyone.
There were initial exemptions from the ancestry provision. These included officials already in service before August 1914, certain First World War front-line veterans, and those whose fathers or sons had been killed in that war. Their existence helps explain why some scholars were immediately vulnerable while others were initially protected. It does not mean the policy respected equal rights. [1]
An exemption asks whether a particular person can remain despite the rule. Equal treatment asks whether the discriminatory rule should exist at all. Those are different foundations for a working life.
They also create different choices for colleagues. Someone temporarily protected could regard the exception as a private escape from the immediate danger. Alternatively, that person could refuse to separate their own position from the treatment of others. The law did not make those responses identical or inevitable. The events at Göttingen would expose the difference.
11 April: What the Forms Asked
The implementing regulation of 11 April 1933 translated the law’s categories into administrative requirements. Under its ancestry provision, even one Jewish parent or grandparent could bring a person within the exclusionary classification. Officials not already in service on 1 August 1914 had to establish their ancestry or an applicable military-service exemption through documents. The regulation also required information about political affiliations. [3]
Birth certificates, parents’ marriage certificates and military papers were among the specified forms of proof. An academic appointment was thus connected to an inquiry that did not measure the quality of a discovery, a lesson or a contribution to a department. Family records and political history acquired direct professional consequences. [3]
A form can make a policy look like a sequence of small tasks. Identify the person. Collect the records. Apply the category. Issue the decision. Yet dividing the process into administrative steps does not remove responsibility for the result. It distributes the work necessary to produce it.
This is an analytical point, not a claim that every administrator had the same motive. The records of a particular case are needed to distinguish initiative, compliance, hesitation and resistance. What the regulation establishes is the process officials were instructed to use. What an institution subsequently did with those instructions is a further historical question.
The distinction protects the account from two opposite errors. We should not imagine persecution as nothing more than a personal decision by one leader, with no institutional work beneath it. Nor should we hide the leaders’ decisions inside the claim that an impersonal bureaucracy somehow acted by itself. The policy and its implementation belong in the same explanation.
Göttingen: When Protest Met Its Colleagues
On 17 April 1933, the physicist James Franck asked to be released from his professorial duties at Göttingen in protest against the removal of Jewish scholars. His First World War service initially protected him from dismissal under the ancestry provision. His resignation was therefore not simply another instance of the state removing someone who lacked an exemption. He declined to use his own protection as a reason to continue under the new conditions. [5]
That distinction matters to the human history and to the counting. A career could be displaced through formal dismissal, withdrawal of rights, coercive conditions or resignation in protest. Grouping these outcomes together may be useful for studying institutional loss, but it must not erase the different decisions that produced them.
Franck did not receive a united show of support. On 24 April, the Göttinger Tageblatt published a declaration signed by 42 academics that condemned his action as sabotage and accused him of obstructing the government’s work. Göttingen’s own historical account records the declaration and identifies it as part of the university’s accommodation to National Socialism. [6]
Here the university was not merely a location on which government power descended. Members of its academic community publicly supported the political direction against a colleague who objected. The declaration supplies evidence of that support; it does not require us to imagine conversations or assign an identical private motive to all 42 signatories.
Political exclusion becomes easier to understand when we examine the alternatives that people actually took. Franck’s response demonstrates that opposition was possible. The counter-declaration demonstrates that academic distinction did not guarantee solidarity. Neither observation turns every person who remained into the same kind of actor.
There is a further institutional consequence to consider. If colleagues publicly condemn a protest against exclusion, the dispute is no longer confined to whether one person keeps a position. It concerns which objections can be voiced without attracting hostility from the professional community itself. That is a change in the conditions of cooperation, even before we attempt to measure any effect on publications.
We should be precise about the limit of this inference. The declaration does not tell us exactly how many later questions went unasked or how many people chose silence. It does show which side its signatories publicly supported. That is enough to reject the comforting picture of a uniformly resisting university whose only role was to suffer outside interference.
Emmy Noether: The Removal of Permission to Teach
Emmy Noether’s position reveals another route by which an institution could lose a scholar. Her career had already encountered barriers because she was a woman: at Göttingen, she had initially taught under David Hilbert’s name before obtaining her own teaching qualification in 1919. In 1933, Nazi persecution removed her permission to teach. The earlier barriers and the new exclusion were different historical problems, but both concerned who was allowed to participate in academic life. [7]
A ministry telegram dated 25 April 1933 ordered the immediate suspension of six Göttingen academics. The accompanying administrative notation includes Max Born, Richard Courant and Noether among those to be notified. A reproduction of the document, identified as held in the Göttingen University Archive, preserves the administrative form of the intervention. [8]
A suspension is not necessarily the same legal step as final dismissal. A teaching authorisation is not identical to a salaried chair. Those distinctions can appear small in a broad account of exile, but they matter when explaining how exclusion worked. The state could reach people through the particular permission, appointment or institutional relationship on which their work depended.
Noether’s case is also useful because the continuation of her work can be followed in her own correspondence. In a letter from Bryn Mawr dated 6 March 1934, she described a seminar involving three women students and a lecturer working through algebra. The American Institute of Physics reproduces the letter in translation alongside other correspondence. It is evidence of teaching resumed elsewhere, not a fictional reconstruction of her life in exile. [9]
The move did not make her earlier mathematics cease to exist. Published work could still be read. The loss to Göttingen was more specific: her continuing presence as a researcher and teacher was no longer available there in the same way. The receiving institution acquired an opportunity to work with her; the original institution had broken that relationship.
This is why a scientific purge cannot be measured only by asking whether books remained on library shelves. A publication records a result. A working scholar can develop the next question, respond to a student’s misunderstanding and recognise possibilities that the published result does not yet contain. Preserving the text does not preserve every relationship around its author.
Noether’s later seminar should not be used to make the transition sound effortless or inevitable. It tells us that this particular continuation happened. Explaining how a position was found and supported requires another part of the story. That is the distinction between observing a destination and understanding the route to it.
Fritz Haber: The Director Asked to Remove His Own Staff
At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, the problem reached the person responsible for directing a research community. Fritz Haber was instructed to dismiss staff targeted by the new racial policy. His own removal had not been demanded. On 30 April 1933, he submitted his resignation and requested retirement from 1 October rather than accept those instructions. The institute’s historical account records both the demand and his response. [10]
The difference from Noether is important. She was deprived of the permission to continue teaching. Haber was being required to exercise his authority against people working under him. A director could therefore become an instrument through which the policy reached a laboratory, or could refuse that role at the cost of his own position.
His decision does not require us to turn his whole life into an uncomplicated moral example. The same institutional history documents his direction of Germany’s first large-scale chemical-weapons attack in 1915. Recognising his refusal in 1933 does not erase that earlier responsibility. Historical explanation can acknowledge a particular act without converting its author into a flawless character. [10]
For the argument of this chapter, the organisational issue is clear. A research director is not only a person with specialist knowledge. The role also involves selecting colleagues, assigning work and deciding which abilities a project requires. Interfering with those decisions changes the practical formation of the team.
A laboratory can retain its formal name while losing the working judgement through which its staff were assembled. It can also retain some personnel and continue producing results while other lines of work are disrupted. Those possibilities are compatible. The important question is which capabilities were preserved, which were redirected and which were lost—not whether the institution can be labelled entirely alive or entirely dead.
Placed beside Franck and Noether, Haber prevents a single administrative label from taking over the story. One scholar resigned despite a temporary exemption. Another lost the right to teach. A director refused to carry out exclusions among his own staff. The shared context was persecution; the paths through it were not identical.
Closing the Entrance as Well as Removing the Teacher
The purge was not only a question of who already held a position. On 25 April 1933, the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Higher Institutions introduced discriminatory controls over admission. Its provisions tied the permitted share of students classified as “non-Aryan” to population proportions, with specified exceptions. The translated text shows ancestry being used to regulate entry into education as well as continued employment. [11]
This was not yet an absolute prohibition on every Jewish student attending every institution. Calling it that would erase the sequence of tightening restrictions. Its significance here is that access could be restricted through identity rather than an assessment of what the applicant could learn. [11]
Removing teachers and restricting students operate at different points in the development of knowledge. The first affects people already able to contribute. The second can prevent someone from reaching that stage within the institution at all. Their eventual effects cannot be read from a single list of famous emigrants.
Research support formed another point of exclusion. In a June 1933 letter, the Notgemeinschaft acknowledged that the civil-service law did not itself govern its fellowships, but explained that it had nevertheless withheld fellowships from applicants classified as “non-Aryan”, applying the educational restrictions by analogy. This was an institutional extension of exclusion, not merely the automatic operation of one dismissal provision. [4]
The practical difference between a formal right and a usable opportunity becomes visible here. Someone might possess knowledge and still be unable to continue the work without a stipend, equipment or a recognised appointment. Looking only for a dismissal notice would miss other ways in which participation could be obstructed.
At the same time, we must resist inventing the achievements of people whose opportunities were denied. We cannot know that a particular excluded applicant would otherwise have made a major discovery. The defensible claim is that the institution restricted the opportunity to learn or investigate on discriminatory grounds. That loss of opportunity matters without a fictional future Nobel Prize attached to it.
There was also a question of where support went. The DFG’s account of institutional conformity describes the promotion of politically favoured research and the interaction between scientific ambitions and the new regime. Exclusion and preferential support could operate together: some people were removed while other participants and priorities gained opportunities. [12]
A purge is therefore not adequately described as subtraction alone. It changes the allocation of authority and opportunity. To understand the institution that emerges, we must look at who can enter, who receives support and which purposes the surviving organisation is encouraged to serve.
1935: Why an Exemption Was Not Security
The exceptions written into the 1933 law did not provide a permanent settlement. The First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, issued on 14 November 1935, ordered Jewish officials to retire by 31 December. Its provision for former front-line soldiers concerned pension treatment, not a continuing general right to remain in public office. [13]
The 1935 regulation also used a more elaborate classification system. Its definition of a Jew should not simply be substituted for the broader “non-Aryan” ancestry rule used in the 1933 implementing regulation. Both belonged to discriminatory policy, but precise descriptions must identify which rule applied at which date. [3] [13]
This sequence explains why a statement that someone was initially exempt cannot be treated as the end of their story. A person could comply with the requirements operating at one moment and still face new restrictions later. The practical value of an exception depended on the authorities continuing to recognise it.
For the historian, this creates a duty to follow time carefully. A name on a university list in 1933 does not establish uninterrupted security throughout the following years. A departure in 1935 cannot automatically be described as an immediate response to an April 1933 order. Decisions, restrictions and individual circumstances have to be reconstructed in sequence.
The distinction is especially important in a book about war. These acts were being carried out before the European conflict began in 1939. They were not consequences of German cities being bombed or of Germany losing the war. They were consequences of the regime’s political choices, later entangled with wartime events.
That chronology changes the causal claim. We are examining a country that entered the war after having damaged parts of its own intellectual institutions—not a country whose scientific losses can all be attributed to the destruction inflicted by its enemies.
Measuring the Damage Without Inventing a Total Collapse
Michael Grüttner’s study of expulsions from German universities places the wider purge at around one-fifth of academic teaching staff. Its period is 1933–1945. The figure must not be presented as the number dismissed in April 1933 alone, or as the proportion of Germany’s entire skilled workforce that moved to America. The study also documents sharply different outcomes among those expelled, including successful careers abroad, murder and suicide. [14]
A separate DFG historical overview, drawing on research based on studies of 15 universities, reports a proportion of approximately 19 per cent relative to the teaching body in the winter semester of 1932–1933. Stating the baseline matters. A share of an earlier academic workforce is not interchangeable with a share of everyone who taught at any point over the next twelve years. [18]
Nor can a percentage of staff removed be converted directly into the same percentage reduction in scientific output. Fields differ; departments have different concentrations of expertise; replacements and surviving networks matter. The appropriate measure depends on whether we are asking about research, teaching, a particular institution or the national economy.
This is where the research introduced in Part 2 becomes useful without needing to repeat its entire survey. Waldinger’s study of mathematics doctoral students finds that faculty quality affected later academic outcomes. His separate study of established scientists finds no general local peer effect on the productivity of those who remained. The two results concern different people and relationships. They caution against assuming that every loss produced an identical effect throughout a department. [16] [17]
The evidence therefore supports a more exact question: which relationships carried the loss forward? A student deprived of appropriate supervision, an established researcher maintaining collaborators elsewhere and a department trying to rebuild a specialism need not follow the same trajectory. Treating them as equivalent would obscure the mechanism we are trying to understand.
German research also did not simply stop. The DFG’s history describes research serving the regime’s ideological ambitions and later wartime purposes, including the willingness of scientific participants to support those aims. A society can retain technical capabilities while corrupting priorities, excluding capable people and directing research towards destructive ends. [15]
That combination is more troubling than a story in which persecution immediately makes every institution useless. It means organisations can continue functioning, producing and attracting support while committing profound injustices and losing capabilities they might otherwise have sustained. Continued output is not proof that exclusion caused no damage.
Equally, documented damage is not proof that the purge determined every later military result. To establish that stronger claim, we would need to show what additional capabilities would otherwise have existed, when they could have been used and whether they would have changed the outcome. This chapter establishes the first part of the argument—the mechanisms of exclusion—not an alternative history of victory.
What Was Lost Before Another Country Gained It
The easiest version of the story is also the most misleading: Germany expelled researchers; America received them; the knowledge changed sides. It leaves the interval between the first event and the second almost empty.
But dismissal and successful relocation are different outcomes. The former can be recorded in a notice. The latter requires another institution willing and able to provide work, alongside whatever arrangements make entry, residence and family life possible. A receiving country’s gain must be demonstrated through those later relationships, not assumed from the originating country’s loss.
Noether’s correspondence makes the distinction tangible. Before reporting on her seminar at Bryn Mawr, she had written about invitations and arrangements involving more than one possible destination. The letters show a process of finding a workable appointment, rather than a researcher being automatically assigned to a new country by the fact of exclusion. [9]
Institutions abroad could also impose barriers. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents restrictive American immigration quotas and demanding visa requirements during 1933–1941. American scientific institutions could benefit from particular refugees while the wider immigration system continued to obstruct many people seeking safety. These facts can coexist; neither should be omitted to make the national comparison simpler. [19]
We also need to distinguish knowledge that can be preserved in writing from the circumstances that allow further work. A published result does not need its author to remain in the same office. An unfinished investigation may depend on equipment, collaborators and practical judgement that cannot be reconstructed merely by moving a set of books.
That is a distinction between forms of continuity, not a claim that every displaced scholar lost the same things. A mathematician and an experimental researcher might face different practical requirements. A senior scholar and someone at the beginning of a career might have different professional connections. We should investigate those differences rather than imagine migration as the movement of identical units of expertise.
The same caution applies to the larger moral account. A successful appointment abroad can be a gain for the receiving institution and a rescue for the person concerned. It does not establish that persecution increased humanity’s total knowledge. We cannot observe the complete alternative in which people continued their lives without being driven out.
The relevant loss therefore cannot be measured only by collecting the later successes that became famous. Such an account would privilege the people whose stories continued in well-documented institutions and leave less visible those whose work did not resume. Grüttner’s evidence of divergent fates is a warning against that selection. [14]
For this chapter, the conclusion is narrower and firmer. The purge changed who could remain in an institution, what authority colleagues could exercise and which routes into learning and research were open. Those changes were already consequential before any later military benefit to another country could be established.
The Door at the End of the Chapter
We began with an institution that acknowledged an employee’s competence while removing her. We have since followed a law into ancestry documents, a professor’s protest into a public counter-declaration, a mathematician’s career through the loss of teaching rights, and a director’s authority into the demand that he dismiss his own staff.
The common thread is not that useful knowledge suddenly vanished. It is that political power altered the conditions under which people were allowed to use it together.
Some damage was immediate: a position, a teaching relationship or an opportunity was lost. Other consequences depended on what followed. Could the work continue elsewhere? Would students find another supervisor? Would someone recognise the value of a scholar who no longer had the security of an appointment?
Outside Germany, people were already organising responses. The Academic Assistance Council was publicly launched in Britain in May 1933 to help displaced academics. Its history provides an early example of the practical effort needed between an expulsion and a new opportunity. That response was a beginning, not a guarantee that everyone in danger would be saved. [20]
This is the next problem in the main series. Before we return to the large American laboratories described in Part 2, we must follow the intervening work: letters, introductions, funding, permissions and appointments. We must understand how a person who had been excluded could find somewhere to live and somewhere to contribute.
A dismissal could be issued in a few sentences. Rebuilding a working life required much more.
Continue to Part 4 — Finding a Place to Work: The Rescue of Displaced Scholars. The next chapter begins with the Academic Assistance Council’s founding statement and follows the practical work between exclusion and a new appointment. The question shifts from who was forced out to who could make room.
Reading order: Part 1 — The prologue → Part 2 — The comparative thesis → Part 3 — The purge before the war → Part 4 — The rescue of displaced scholars. The prequel, sequel and final hub remain later stages of the project.
Sources and Chapter Notes
This chapter combines primary documents, institutional historical accounts and published research. Dates of suspension, resignation, retirement and relocation are not treated as interchangeable. German-language materials are paraphrased in English; no dialogue, private thoughts or reconstructed scenes are presented as fact. The legal documents are evidence of historical persecution, not descriptions of legitimate scientific classifications.
[1] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Historical context, the 7 April 1933 legislation and its initial exemptions.
[2] Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 7 April 1933. Primary text in English translation, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute. Particularly sections 1–4.
[3] First Regulation for Administration of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 11 April 1933. Document 2012-PS, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume IV, reproduced by Yale Law School’s Avalon Project. Primary document on ancestry, documentary proof and political affiliations.
[4] Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. How Research and Funding Were “Aryanised”. Institutional history reproducing records concerning Käte Schabbehard and discriminatory fellowship decisions. The page uses both Käte and Käthe in its treatment of the personnel record.
[5] University of Göttingen. Protest gegen die Entlassung jüdischer Wissenschaftler. Institutional account of Franck’s resignation request on 17 April 1933 and his initial veteran exemption.
[6] University of Göttingen. Rücktritt von James Franck und sogenannte “Gleichschaltung” der Universität. Institutional history documenting the counter-declaration published on 24 April 1933.
[7] Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO. Emmy Noether, 1882–1935. Biographical chronology covering teaching barriers, the 1919 habilitation and Nazi withdrawal of teaching permission.
[8] Cordula Tollmien. Telegramm des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung vom 25. April 1933. Reproduction and transcription of a primary document identified as held by the Göttingen University Archive; includes the notification annotation.
[9] American Institute of Physics. Context and Sources: Emmy Noether at Bryn Mawr. Reproduced correspondence, including Noether’s letters of 7 September 1933 and 6 March 1934; translations credited to Patrick Charbonneau.
[10] Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. Historical Review of the Fritz Haber Institute. The demand to remove targeted staff, Haber’s resignation request of 30 April 1933, and the institute’s earlier chemical-warfare history.
[11] Law against Overcrowding of German Schools and Higher Institutions, 25 April 1933. Document 2022-PS, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume IV, reproduced by the Avalon Project. Partial primary-text translation, including discriminatory admission rules and exceptions.
[12] Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. An Organisation Conforms. Institutional history of political accommodation, leadership and funding priorities.
[13] First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, 14 November 1935. Document 1417-PS, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume IV, reproduced by the Avalon Project. Particularly Article 4 on public office, retirement and veterans’ pensions.
[14] Grüttner, Michael (2022). The Expulsion of Academic Teaching Staff from German Universities, 1933–45. Journal of Contemporary History, 57(3), 513–533. Author’s institutional research record and abstract.
[15] Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Science and Scholarship Before and During the War: Race Research and Ideological Subservience. Evidence of continuing research and participation in the regime’s purposes; not evidence that exclusion was harmless.
[16] Waldinger, Fabian (2010). Quality Matters: The Expulsion of Professors and the Consequences for PhD Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany. Journal of Political Economy, 118(4), 787–831. University research record.
[17] Waldinger, Fabian (2012). Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany. Review of Economic Studies, 79(2), 838–861. University research record.
[18] DFG, GEPRIS Historisch. Vertriebene Antragstellende: Die “List of Displaced German Scholars”. Historical research guide explaining the 1932–1933 baseline and the university studies behind the reported estimate.
[19] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Immigration to the United States, 1933–1941. Admission quotas, documentary requirements and barriers to refuge.
[20] Council for At-Risk Academics. Our History. Institutional account of the Academic Assistance Council’s launch in May 1933 and its work supporting displaced academics.