The Academic Assistance Council

The AAC was established in London in 1933 by Lord Beveridge (Figure 1), as a result of these events in Germany.

Figure 1 Lord Beveridge. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

Galsworthy's remark ‘The English are slow, you must always give them time for new ideas’Reference Bentwich⁸ was thus disputed with the creation of the AAC. We must remember that, as had been demonstrated under Queen Elizabeth and Cromwell, opening the doors of asylum was an ancient British tradition.

Sir William Beveridge, later Lord Beveridge, then Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) and Political Science, and later architect of Britain's welfare state, was in Vienna at the time of the first dismissals of academics in March 1933. With him was his colleague from the LSE, Professor Lionel Robbins. This distinguished pair of British academics read in a newspaper, whilst sitting in a café, about the suspension of 12 important Jewish scientists from German universities. Beveridge realized that all this knowledge and experience had to be saved, and that the dignity of the German academics must be upheld for the benefit of the entire learned world.

Oscar WildeReference Wilde⁹ once observed that ‘It is personalities, not principles, that move the age’ – and how much more true this is when large personalities such as Beveridge and Robbins and many others also have principles. They cut short their visit to Vienna and returned to London, but not before meeting a brilliant scientist, who happened to be in Vienna at the time. It must be remembered that Austria was not yet under Nazi control (the Anschluss took place in 1938) and it sheltered refugees from Germany in its own right, including a remarkable Hungarian of Jewish origin, the nuclear physicist Dr Leo Szilard (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Dr Leo Szilard. Reproduced with permission from the Egon Weiss Collection.

Szilard somehow always turned up in the right place and at the right time in the 1930s – a true man of destiny it would appear.

Many Hungarians had the reputation of being so extraordinarily talented and able (in whichever sphere they worked) that the joke went round ‘If you enter a revolving door in front of a Hungarian you would inevitably emerge behind him’. To reinforce this point, when a young Hungarian once introduced himself to Szilard as simply ‘I am a Hungarian’ (the rest being understood), he received the uncompromising reply ‘It is not enough to be a Hungarian – you also require talent.’

Szilard tried to persuade Beveridge to create a ‘university in exile’ for dismissed academics. Beveridge, however, felt that this was not a practical proposition and suggested instead that those academics affected by the Nazi dismissals should be placed in existing universities in the free world. It was Beveridge who proposed the formation of an academic assistance council to achieve this important aim when he met Professor George Trevelyan (Figure 3), later Master of Trinity, during a weekend in Cambridge in May 1933. As a result, Szilard moved to London in 1933 to support this new endeavour, but by 1938 Szilard had settled in the USA to deal with other urgent matters. Szilard later worked with Fermi, another distinguished atomic physicist and refugee from Fascist Italy, in Chicago on the atomic bomb.

Figure 3 Sir George Trevelyan. Reproduced with permission from CORBIS.

It was Szilard who persuaded Einstein (Figure 4) to write the famous letter to the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. Given these rather forceful credentials, it is little wonder that, during his years in London, Szilard was highly active at the office of the AAC – prodding, encouraging and pressurizing those he worked with, probably also driving them to despair, but all in a good cause. There is no doubt that Szilard was a key player in this story, but he had no real influence in England, and he rightly left it to Beveridge and his powerful British colleagues to handle the Establishment. That proved to be the right way forward.

Figure 4 Albert Einstein. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Society.

Beveridge was a famous man in his field, but he went right to the very top when it came to finding someone to take on the Chairmanship of the Council that he wished to bring into being. This was Lord Rutherford (Figure 5), by birth a New Zealander. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908, he was a past President of the Royal Society and he was Britain's most famous elder scientist. In political terms he was a Tory – but, as time went on, he had increasing sympathy with the warnings about Germany and its intentions that were coming ever more forcefully from the Churchillian side of the Conservative party.

Figure 5 Lord Rutherford. Reproduced with permission of CORBIS.

Ernest Rutherford was 62 at the time and not in the best of health. His wife and doctor advised against his taking on any new task, but he realized the crucial importance of this work and so took on the Chairmanship nevertheless. As head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge he had already moved on to the role of inspiration to a younger generation of scientists. Amongst these was his colleague James Chadwick, who was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935.

Rutherford died in 1937 and was succeeded as President of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), as the AAC was then known, by Dr William Temple, Archbishop of York and later Archbishop of Canterbury (Figure 6). It was Temple who, in 1942, together with the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Dr Joseph Hertz, jointly founded the Council for Christians and Jews to combat anti-Jewish bigotry. It should be noted, then, that leading members of the British clergy took an active part in supporting the mainly Jewish dismissed academics.

Figure 6 Dr William Temple (Archbishop of York – later Archbishop of Canterbury). Reproduced with permission from Lambeth Palace.

In a powerful speech, Dr Temple said:¹⁰

Inspiring words spoken in 1939.

Beveridge selected a much younger and more energetic man to be Vice-President of the Council, Professor A.V. Hill (Figure 7). A.V. Hill was a Nobel Prize winner – he had shared the 1922 award with the German Otto Meyerhoff. Hill (or ‘AV’ as he was universally known) was one of the founders of biophysics together with Hermann Helmholz. However, in the eyes of the distinguished physiologist Starling at University College London (UCL), AV was a mathematician and physicist and ‘did not know a word of physiology’! When Hill, who had been appointed to a professorship in physiology at UCL, arrived there from Manchester after his Nobel Prize had been announced, he was carried by the students shoulder high to his new department and, on the way, they stopped outside Starling's room, shouting ‘We want Starling! We want Starling!’ Starling appeared – somewhat startled at the noise – and the students shouted ‘Who said he didn't know any physiology?’ Starling replied, ‘I said he didn't. He doesn't know a damn word!’ They all had a marvellously good-humoured time laughing and joking and this boisterous scene was actually photographed. Try to imagine this sort of scene in Nazi Germany!

Figure 7 Professor A.V. Hill. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

When the AAC was formed in 1933, Hill was Professor of Physiology at UCL. He was particularly active during the war years in the defence of fellow scientists persecuted by the Nazi regime. He was a brilliant physiologist, great humanitarian and highly effective Member of Parliament in the 1940s. He fought strongly for the refugee academics, with great success in and out of Parliament. Hill wrote movingly of the ‘brotherhood of science and learning’. One of his co-workers was Sir Bernard Katz, another refugee academic from Leipzig, who was subsequently to receive the Nobel Prize.

Professor Blackett (Figure 8) was a prominent member of the scientific and political Left and had a strong following among the younger members of the scientific community. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1933. Blackett stated that ‘Science in Germany was being deliberately used for war preparations, and for anti-working class activities. Scientific fact is being distorted to accord with Nazi teachings’. In his earlier years, Blackett had been strongly against the use of science for military purposes, but from 1935 onwards he worked with Sir Henry Tizard and A.V. Hill on the Committee for Scientific Survey of Air Defence that gave birth to radar, the system that was of immense importance in defending Britain against the German air assault in 1940.

Figure 8 Lord Patrick Blackett. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Society.

Blackett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948 for his investigation of cosmic rays. In 1965 he became President of the Royal Society and in 1969 a Labour peer, dedicated, as ever, to Left-wing causes.

If Blackett was a man of the Left, it was Beveridge's gift to be able to engage with the Right wing as well.

Next we come to a colourful personality, Professor Frederick Lindemann FRS, later Lord Cherwell or ‘the Prof’ as some called him with a certain amount of sarcasm (Figure 9). He had been head of the Clarendon Physics Laboratory in Oxford since 1920. He was of German non-Jewish origin. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow scientists he was actively involved with politics and was anti-Communist to a degree that made scientists like Blackett regard him as a wealthy capitalist reactionary! Churchill was a friend of Lindemann's, to whom he turned for scientific advice. ‘The Prof’ was violently anti-Hitler, which endeared him to Churchill, but he was also capable of anti-Semitic remarks and his biographers remain divided about his feelings towards Jews. Being a very wealthy man – inherited money, it should be added – he went around in Germany in his Rolls Royce clearing out whole departments of their best scientists, including such luminaries as Kürti, Mendelssohn and Franz Simon – later anglicized to Sir Francis Simon, who joined the Clarendon Laboratories.

Figure 9 Lord Cherwell. (Page 352 of Statesmen of Science by J. G. Crowther (1965, London, The Cresset Press)).

Nevertheless, Cherwell was appalled by Hitler's dismissal of Jewish scientists, and, in the words of the biographer David Zimmermann,Reference Zimmermann¹¹ ‘he was a rare example of a person who, in the face of great injustice, could put bigotry to rest’. Cherwell had excellent contacts with industry and he did not wait for the work of the newly established council to get under way. Zimmermann makes the interesting point that ‘Cherwell viewed Hitler's foolishness as an opportunity to transform the Clarendon Laboratories in Oxford into a world centre for low temperature physics’.

The date of the first official meeting of the AAC was 23 May 1933; the speed with which the enterprise had been arranged was largely thanks to Beveridge's energy and help of the Royal Society, which generously offered the newly born Council valuable office space: two rooms in the attic of Burlington House, Piccadilly, where the Royal Society was then based.

Berlin book burning

Events in Germany, less than a fortnight earlier, had confirmed that the AAC had been formed none too soon. I refer to the notorious burning of books in Berlin on 10 May 1933 (Figure 10) – an event just as ominous in its own way as the dismissal of the scientists. It was presided over by Berlin's Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels. Like a Pagan High Priest, he intoned the words ‘Ich übergebe den Flammen’ (I consign to the flames), and oversaw the destruction of so-called degenerate books title by title, in each case naming the author, who was either Jewish or a political opponent of the regime.

Figure 10 Burning the books – Berlin, May 1933. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

During the Third Reich period, some 18,000 works that did not conform to Nazi ideology were burned. This was the same city of Berlin which, until Hitler came on the scene, was considered one of the great cultural and scientific cities of the world, if not the most prominent.

Now a word about some of the books that escaped the Nazis, books that were saved by the forethought of a handful of scholars whose commitment to learning often placed the survival of their books above their own lives. The 15 years of the Weimar Republic had produced outstanding achievements in the Sciences and the Arts, and many other activities of human endeavour, but the looming threat of Nazism was taken seriously, and at a surprisingly early stage, by certain institutions with Jewish backgrounds.

Looking into the future with astonishing accuracy, certain institutions decided to transfer their important collections from Germany to England. The first and perhaps most significant of these was the Hamburg-based Warburg Institute, the brainchild of the art historian Aby Warburg, which had a unique collection of 70,000 items pertaining to the Renaissance. The Institute transferred its collection to London even before Hitler came to power. Prominent British academics were associated with this transfer, which took place in 1933. The collection was, and remains, a very important source for the study of art in its relation to classical and medieval thought. When the prominent art historian Ernst Gombrich came to England during the 1930s, he was closely involved with this institute.

Books that would certainly have qualified for burning were those of the Wiener Library, established by Dr Alfred Wiener. This comprehensive collection of literature from the beginning of the Hitler period, including books about Nazi racial and political theories, was originally housed in Amsterdam. In 1939, it was moved to London, where it remains.

All these transfers to London were possible only with the active and enthusiastic collaboration of British experts, for which we have to be immensely grateful. British concern for what was happening in Germany was thus already apparent before the Nazis came to power.

Another important collection was the transfer from Frankfurt to London of the Hirsch Music Library, which contained 15,000 volumes and included priceless autobiographies and first editions of works by Mozart, Beethoven and Purcell. This was the result of a life-long involvement with the collecting of valuable musical editions by the industrialist Paul Hirsch, who moved to Cambridge with his entire library in 1936 when he was already in his mid-50 s. This library later passed to the British Library, immeasurably enriching its holdings. Hirsch himself came as a refugee to England, where he died in 1951.

That great novelist and man of letters Stefan Zweig, hounded out of Austria, also eventually bequeathed his world-famous collection of manuscripts, many with a significant musical content, to the British Library. Thousands of musicians in Britain have benefited from the collecting skills of Hirsch and Zweig. Skills that were honed in Germany and Austria in more civilized times, and eventually immeasurably benefited British musical scholarship.

The book-burning episode was very important because it showed the Nazis – in their true light – to those who were not yet convinced that this was indeed a regime of darkness and ignorance and fear. That this book burning took place in the Opernplatz (the Opera Square) of the capital city is a cruel irony for those who love music.

Let me now briefly attempt to describe Berlin in cultural terms before the Nazis came to power.Reference Kohn¹²

Cultural Berlin

Berlin had hosted the orchestral and opera conductors Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber and Leo Blech. The same high standard applied to the theatre, headed by the renowned director and producer Max Reinhardt, and to the visual arts, headed by Max Liebermann, the leading German Impressionist and President of the Academy of Arts. Paul Klee lived and worked in Berlin, although his art was soon to be denounced as ‘Entartet’ (degenerate) by Geramny's new Nazi masters, alongside hundreds of other members of the artistic avant-garde. Berthold Brecht and the composer Kurt Weill were particularly hated and had to flee, and did so to the USA.

Those scientists who had been active in Berlin included Einstein himself as well as Max Planck, Walter Nernst, Fritz Haber, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Warburg and many others. Younger scientists, the future Nobel Laureates such as Hans Krebs and Ernst Chain,Reference Kohn¹² would make their names later and elsewhere. Berlin was home to a galaxy of stars, but most of those mentioned above were forced to emigrate from Germany.

The books burnt included works by Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, H.G. Wells and many others. Among these were the works of Jewish writers and poets of the past, once heroes of German culture, who were now cast as retrospective villains.

One of these was Heinrich Heine (Figure 11), the German–Jewish poet whose lyrics were set to music by composers such as Schubert and Schumann. His poems were the basis of hundreds of German songs – that precious world of Lieder which had always represented the most civilized face of German culture to the outside world. The Nazis were the kind of people who liked to talk of German cultural values and the protection of German art, while at the same time displaying shocking ignorance and a catastrophic lack of good taste. There was a school of Nazi painting, Nazi sculpture, Nazi music, even the ideal Nazi man and Nazi woman. But nothing they touched has proven to be of any enduring artistic merit, coming as it does from the sterile soil of totalitarian bigotry.

Figure 11 Heinrich Heine. Reproduced with permission from CORBIS.

Many volumes of the composers Schubert, Schumann and Brahms were all edited by a famous scholar, Max Friedländer, who was probably the greatest Lieder scholar of his time and who was stripped by the Nazis of his academic titles and honours in Berlin before dying a broken man in 1934. Friedländer was a world authority on Dichterliebe, the great lyric song cycle to Heine's Jewish poems by the Aryan composer Robert Schumann. Heine's words had to disappear and the Nazis employed some terrible modern poet to put new words to the cycle.

It was Heinrich Heine who, elsewhere, wrote the prophetic words ‘Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen!’ (‘Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings!’). You would think, with hindsight, that Beveridge and the other supporters of the AAC would have made the same instinctive connection as Heine, without perhaps articulating it in so many words. But, as we will see, this took some time – an indication perhaps of the unimaginable enormity of future Nazi crimes.

Consensus

In 1933, of course, the members of the AAC were careful not to say anything too inflammatory. Their aim was to build as broad a consensus as possible. Beveridge and Hill had at first wished in their public statements to criticize the German government, but their more cautious colleagues, including Rutherford, persuaded them that rhetoric and polemic should be avoided, including anything that would have enabled the Council to be labelled by its enemies as a ‘Jewish pressure group’.

When Einstein came to London to address a large crowd at the Albert Hall in May 1933 in order to raise funds for the AAC, enormous care was taken to avoid direct public criticism of the new German government.

The reason for this was the danger that the Council might be placed on the list of proscribed organizations with which it would have been illegal for German citizens to correspond. This would have made their rescue work all but impossible. When collecting signatures for the Council's initial letter in The Times they had neither avoided Jews nor did they actively seek them out. There was a lot of discussion about this at the time. It was taken as understood that the majority of those scholars helped were German Jews, but there were academics throughout Europe – in Fascist Spain, Portugal and Italy for example – who were losing their jobs for political, if not racial, reasons.

The Royal Society felt that for political reasons the committee should not have any Jewish members in order for it to function smoothly. The AAC was something typically British in its understatement, where work was undertaken with little fuss but in deadly earnest. It is perhaps for this reason that the truly extraordinary work that it accomplished has been underestimated to this day.

At least Heine, who died in 1856, was unable to suffer personally from the Nazi destruction of his books. For modern writers it was a different story. In his book The World of Yesterday, the Austrian novelist Stefan ZweigReference Zweig¹³ (Figure 12), a later hate-figure for the Nazis when they took over Austria, devastatingly sums it all up:

I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the Ages. Never has any generation experienced such moral repression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.

Figure 12 Stefan Zweig. Reproduced with permission from CORBIS.

Nazi ‘culture’

The Nazi's abysmal attitude towards cultural standards may be illustrated with an infamous saying attributed to Göring, but actually stolen by him from a play performed in Berlin in 1933: ‘When anyone speaks to me of culture [Kultur], I want to reach for my gun’. In Göring's deranged mind the word ‘culture’ was invariably associated with Jews!

In addition, Göring stole the cynical statement ‘Wer Jude ist entscheide ich’ (‘I decide who is a Jew’) from Karl Lueger, a former Mayor of Vienna. This expression was very appropriate when Göring, as is well known, personally intervened to allow Otto Warburg,Reference Krebs¹⁴ the distinguished Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, to remain untouched throughout the War in his laboratories in Dahlem in the locality of Berlin, although he was of Jewish descent. The reason for this extraordinary exemption from dismissal was Göring's conviction that Otto Warburg was the man to solve the problem of cancer – a disease that terrified him.

Support for the Academic Assistance Council

A letter with 41 signatories was sent to The Times and other leading newspapers in support of the AAC in May 1933 (Figure 13). Göring would presumably have wished to gun them all down, and not only because they were all exceptionally cultured people.

Figure 13 Academic Assistance Letter, 22 May 1933. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. A typed list of the names mentioned in this figure is available at www.journals.cambridge.org/ERW.

It should be explained here that a ‘letter to The Times’ in England is most important to influence public opinion, and one could not have put together a more powerful and distinguished list of British Establishment personalities.

We have already mentioned Beveridge, Rutherford and A.V. Hill. No fewer than seven present or future holders of the Order of Merit (OM), the highest British honour, put their name to this document. Amongst these were the following:

1. 1. Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins OM, a biochemist awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1929 for his work on vitamins; he was the president of the Royal Society between 1930 and 1935.

2. 2. Sir J.J. Thompson OM FRS, a physicist; he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906.

3. 3. Sir William Bragg, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915.

4. 4. Sir Robert Robinson, a younger man who was to be appointed OM in 1949 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1947.

There were several historians who were signatories to the letter: Herbert Fisher OM, and G.M. Trevelyan OM, who was to become one of the most famous proponents of history recounted from the point of view of ordinary people. Other historians on the list were Sir Robert Rait, Charles Grant Robertson and the legal historian W.S. Holdsworth. F.G. Kenyon was Director of the British Museum, a famous Egyptologist, and Secretary as well as President of the British Academy.

Sir Samuel Alexander OM was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the only person on the list who was Jewish, although the German-born physicist Arthur Schuster had been born to Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity – something that would, in Hitler's eyes, have made no difference at all to his racial status!

Female scholars and academics included the physiologist Winifred Cullis, and the prison reformer Margery Fry. That there were so few women is an indication of the times, and that all sorts of enlightened social developments that we now take for granted were still only at an embryonic stage. Theology was represented by the Scottish scholar George Adam Smith. The Classics provided a scholarly backbone of a different kind: the famous scholar and translator Gilbert Murray and the equally distinguished classicist Alfred Edward Housman, who was also a world famous poet. Hundreds of settings of his poems for voice and piano have increased his renown among musicians.

After talking about a List of Honour, let me now tell you about another list obtained from Gestapo files and reproduced from the Manchester Guardian of 15 September 1945 (Figure 14). It provided names of individuals in Britain to be rounded up and, presumably, eliminated in the event of this country being overrun by the Nazis. Many of these are well-known establishment figures.

Figure 14 Nazi ‘blacklist’ of names, Manchester Guardian, September 1945. Reproduced with permission from Guardian News & Media Ltd 1945.

I have left the most topical name on the list until last – at least the most topical in terms of the financial turmoil we face today. This was the distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes (Figure 15), who was working on his magnum opus entitled The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,Reference Clarke¹⁵ published in 1936. He sympathized with Beveridge's plan to help the German academics without, however, devising a way to fund it.

Figure 15 John Maynard Keynes. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

The inevitable onslaught

With hindsight, we can now see that 1933 was the beginning of the inevitable onslaught that would lead to the Second World War and systematic genocide. And yet, at that time, six years before the war, most people would have dismissed any suggestion that lives were actually in danger. Not even a man of the greatest scientific imagination, such as the Nobel Laureate Professor A.V. Hill, who, as we have seen, played a major role in the establishment of the AAC, could as yet foresee the full evil of the Nazis. Hill wrote to Lord Beveridge in 1934, stating that ‘It is not that these academics will perish as human beings, but that as scholars and scientists, they will be heard of no more, since they will have to take up something else in order to live.’

At that time, almost incredibly, there was no fear on Hill's part for the lives of the dismissed scientists. The only thing that seemed clear then was that knowledge and learning were threatened by the petty-minded and vindictive edicts of a racial nature, and that much important scientific work was in danger of being lost because dedicated people with fine minds were being denied the chance to work. As we know only too well, those who had not left Germany before the outbreak of war in 1939 did, in fact, perish.

One experience that should have alerted Hill to the real nature of the Nazi regime was an exchange with Professor Johannes Stark. Stark was a well-known physicist and Nobel Laureate. He was also a strong supporter of the Nazi Party and, in fact, was regarded as the scientific ‘Gauleiter’ of the regime. Soon after the establishment of the Nazi regime, he took Hill to task, in correspondence published in the scientific journal Nature, for denouncing the Nazis for persecuting Jewish and ‘dissident’ scientists. Stark's contention was that there was ‘no factual basis for Hill's remarks’, but the Nazi government had been ‘obliged to protect itself against disloyal persons’. He even went so far as to write to Lord Rutherford, a Nobel Laureate of the greatest distinction and former President of the Royal Society, asking him to stop Hill making ‘dangerous statements’.

Stark was under the impression that, in Britain, Rutherford had the same dictatorial authority that he himself enjoyed under the Nazi system. And, furthermore, he should have known that Rutherford was the first President of the AAC in 1933. Although this correspondence dealt with serious matters, Hill dismissed it with some humour, remarking ‘laughter is the best detergent for nonsense’. But Hill perhaps did not realize that humour was no laughing matter for the likes of Stark.

An event occurred in 1936 involving prominent members of the AAC that is worth recording.

It was the occasion when Germany's oldest university, Heidelberg, founded in 1386, was celebrating its 550th anniversary. As one could imagine, the Nazis wished to make international propaganda out of this occasion and the students’ motto was ‘the days of supremacy of intellect are over’. It should be noted that the words ‘intellect and culture’ to the Nazis were invariably associated with Jews. This anniversary coincided with the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Heidelberg invited universities from other countries to join the celebrations and thus hoped to legitimize the Nazi's repugnant acts of discrimination.

This led to a vigorous debate again in the columns of The Times, initiated by a letter from the Bishop of Durham (Figure 16), Herbert Hensley Henson, in which he strongly opposed the acceptance of the Heidelberg invitation, having regard to the manner in which it and other German universities were persecuting scholars on racial grounds. Henson was a leading Anglican priest, a strong opponent of ‘appeasement’ to Hitler and uncompromising in his condemnation of the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany. He was one of Winston Churchill's staunchest allies.

Figure 16 Bishop of Durham (Herbert Hensley Henson). Reproduced with permission from Lambeth Palace.

The Bishop of Durham was strongly supported by, amongst many others, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (Figure 17), the Nobel Prize-winning Cambridge biochemist.

Figure 17 Frederick G. Hopkins. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Society.

An opposing view was held by other establishment figures, such as Sir Josiah Stamp and Sir Ian Hamilton, the latter claiming that the rise of Hitler was all the fault of the Versailles Treaty, and urged the British universities to ‘go and see’ for themselves before they severed ties with German universities.

Beveridge entirely agreed with the Bishop of Durham in this raging debate and said there was no need to go to Germany to see how the universities were acting, when so many of their Jewish academic colleagues had been driven into exile, as anyone with his eyes open could readily see.

It was, of course, clear that the Heidelberg celebrations were not an academic but a political affair, which was confirmed with speeches by the Rector and Goebbels. Beveridge's view was fully endorsed by A.V. Hill, Gowland Hopkins and Frederic Kenyon, and few people had any doubts as to the correctness of the line taken. At these celebrations, the flags of 32 countries whose universities and colleges had sent delegations were hoisted. However, the British Union Jack was absent. Every one of the British universities had stayed away to their great credit, inspired by these already-mentioned great highly principled men.

Of course, there was, as one might expect, a lack of universal support in Britain for the admission of refugees or providing financial aid. While attempting to raise funds for the AAC, Lord Rutherford received the following letter from a fellow member of the House of Lords:

This kind of covert anti-Semitism, sometimes quite blatant, was a feature of life on both sides of the Atlantic. The case of Breckinridge Long,Reference Newton¹⁶ in charge of the State Department's Immigrant Visa Section between 1940 and 1944, comes to mind. Long did his utmost to impede the flow of refugees from Nazi Germany into the USA. He met his match, however, in the person of Eleanor Roosevelt, who did her level best to circumvent his influence by appealing directly to the President, who objected, nevertheless, to Eleanor labelling Breckinridge Long a Fascist. It would seem that Breckinridge Long was finally dismissed when the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, directly intervened with the President.

By the summer of 1933, the work of the AAC was in full swing. A committee, mainly of scientists, was quietly and persistently going through the paper work, considering each case without fear or favour, including those of people with worthy, rather than exciting, academic credentials. Rutherford now wrote to the vice-chancellors of all the British universities: ‘We shall be glad to hear from you if your University is in a position to find openings for any of those recommended men and women’. He also asked for financial assistance. Most of the vice-chancellors responded positively, if cautiously. They were prepared to make facilities available, but were less certain about the granting of funds. One university blamed the economic malaise; others refused without giving any reasons.

Tess Simpson (Figure 18) was at the centre of the AAC and of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), as the Council was renamed in 1937. Under her watchful and sympathetic eye, this specialist employment exchange for displaced academics had over 2000 members registered on its books and grew into a powerful international force for good, making contacts with similar organizations all over the free world.

Figure 18 Dr Tess Simpson (June 1995). Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

The memoirs of Tess Simpson, entitled Refugee Scholars,Reference Simpson¹⁷ are a wonderful source of information about the period. She had worked in Breslau and Vienna and was fluent in German. She was Jewish by birth, although she never said so, perhaps for some of the political reasons already mentioned. She seemed proud to be part of a huge national effort to save the academics, rather than part of a specifically Jewish organization. Music was very important to her. She was a fine violinist and chamber music player. Through her interests in the arts she made friends with a range of refugees who were not scientists, such as the distinguished art historian Ernst Gombrich, the great Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch, the violinist Max Rostal, the members of the Amadeus String Quartet, the architectural historian Nicolaus Pevsner and the philosopher Karl Popper.

In November 1938, during the notorious Kristallnacht, the Nazis burned down more than 1000 synagogues in Germany, and arrested thousands of Jews. As a result, the British government agreed to admit 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany, who were absorbed by kind and generous British families or placed in hostels.

Concluding remarks

Of course, we have touched on only the very beginnings of the ACC, known incidentally in modern times as CARA – the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. In confining ourselves to the years before 1938, we have not reached the annexation of Austria, much less the war itself, and the numerous problems that arose with the internment of all German nationals. The AAC, A.V. Hill and Tess Simpson, and many other scientific personalities, were able to take many of these people out of internment and place them in employment. After the war there was ever-continuing work with academics from many other countries who found themselves unable to make their living because of political pressure of very different kinds. It was an endless struggle, and what has been done by CARA and its antecedents since its modest beginnings is beyond praise.

Sir Hans KrebsReference Krebs¹⁸ (Figure 19), the distinguished Nobel Prize-winning refugee biochemist, quoting Karl Zuckmayer, the author and himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, said ‘Home is not where a man is born, but where he wants to die, where he wants to carry out his life, and bring it to a close as is ordained. It is where he has put his roots down into the earth, which he has broken by his own toil’.

Figure 19 Sir Hans Krebs. Reproduced with permission from the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

Another distinguished refugee from Hungary, Arthur Koestler,Reference Koestler¹⁹ described the culture of the British as ‘A civilisation which admired character instead of brains, stoicism instead of temperament, nonchalance instead of diligence, the tongue-tied manner, instead of the art of eloquence’.

According to Koestler, it is the European with his brains and temperament, his hard work and his eloquence who seems the easier person to admire – rather than the hearty, inexpressive emotionally relatively cold British stereotype.

Sir Hans Krebs summed upReference Krebs¹⁸ for us all what it had been like to live in England and to have become part of the family of British scientists. Here, he defines the British way of life as he experienced it in Hopkin's laboratory in Cambridge, and these wise and perceptive words have reverberated round the world:

When the AAC was first established 75 years ago, from the two small attic rooms of the Royal Society at Burlington House, A.V. Hill wrote the following words, as terse and to the point as any scientific formula, and something that remains forever true and must always be remembered: