Laurel Leff - Well Worth Saving: American Universities Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe

Well
Worth
Saving

American Universities
Life-and-Death
Decisions on Refugees
from Nazi Europe

LAUREL LEFF

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941098
ISBN 978-0-300-24387-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the refugees, then and now
and
To the memory of my father, Ernest Leff,
a World War II combat veteran who
was proudest of his fights for justice and for peace

The telegram that landed on Princeton professor Rudolf Ladenburgs desk on May 7, 1940, was short and to the point. If an American university did not agree to hire Hedwig Kohn right away, the former University of Breslau physics professor would be loaded onto a train and shipped to Poland. Deportation Poland a question of weeks, the telegram said. It came from a Swedish economist who, along with a German exile physicist, had arranged for Kohn to be able to enter neutral Sweden but only if her stay was temporary. Swedish authorities needed proof that Kohn had a job waiting for her in the United States.

For six years, Ladenburg, who was himself a German migr, had been working to find faculty positions for Kohn, his former student, and other physicists dismissed under the Nazi regime. So far he had not had any success finding a place for Kohn. The fifty-two-year-old Kohn was still in Breslau, without any means of support. Ladenburg knew he had until mid-June or Kohn would be sent to Poland, and that means practically death.

Princeton would not hire Kohn, for many reasons, starting with the fact that the university appointed only men to its faculty. So Ladenburg turned to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), whose contacts at womens colleges seemed the best hope. As soon as she

Throughout the Nazi era, American universities made many choices similar to the one that faced the seven womens college presidents in May 1940. Should they hire scholars trying to escape Nazi-dominated Europe and thus restore their careers and ease their path to immigrating to the United States? Or should universities during a decade of economic depression allow budget and other concerns to lead them to reject the thousands of applicants banging on their doors? Those who received positions at American institutions of higher education could obtain non-quota visas that would spare them the long waiting lines, both literal and metaphoric, emerging all over Europe. Some universities made the choice to hire refugee scholars, knowing what those scholars were suffering in Europe. Immediate deportation was not always in the offing, but a life of privation and persecution certainly was. Many universities, however, did not.

This book examines the American academys response to the immense moral, practical, and scholarly challenges posed by the decimation of Europes academic elite during the 1930s and early 1940s. From 1933 until the end of World War II, desperate scholars besieged American universities. They had been fired from university posts for being Jewish or politically suspect or had been forced to flee when Germany overran their newfound havens. Some Americans helped in their questindividual professors acting out of friendship, a sense of morality, or professional pride; and academic organizations seeking to preserve science, scholarship, and universal principles. Others stood in the way: faculties who feared competition from foreigners and Jews; administrators who worried about budgets, bureaucracy, and negative publicity; and State Department officials who sought to limit immigration, including of people with distinguished academic pedigrees. Ultimately, universities decided which scholars were worth saving, in the unfortunate phrase of the time, and the State Department decided whether they were to be saved.

The promise of a non-quota visa exerted a powerful pull on those seeking to escape Hitlers Europe. Immigration law in the United States allowed scholars or clergy and their wives (wives did indeed mean wives, not spouses, as will be discussed later) and minor children to immigrate outside limited country-by-country quotas. During the 1930s, just 25,957 people could immigrate annually to the United States from Germany, when hundreds of thousands sought to leave. Those who qualified for a non-quota visa did not need to wait for a place within the quota. In addition, no limit existed on the overall number of non-quota visas that could be issued, while a 150,000 annual limit applied to quota visas. Close relatives of U.S. citizens and residents of countries in the Western Hemisphere could receive a non-quota visa, as could students who were at least fifteen years old and studying at a school approved by the secretary of labor.

For professors the key provision was Section 4(d) of the Immigration Act of 1924. It provided a non-quota visa to an immigrant who continuously for at least two years immediately preceding the application for admission to the United States has been, and who seeks to enter the United States solely for the purpose of, carrying on the vocation of minister of any religious denomination, or professor of a college, academy, seminary, or university; and his wife, and his unmarried children under 18 years of age; if accompanying or following to join him. To qualify under the provision, immigrants had to establish that they had been professors in a higher education institution and that they would be professors in such an institution in the United States. Refugee scholars therefore needed American universities to offer them jobs to establish that their purpose in immigrating to the United States was to carry on the vocation of professor. Significantly, the provision also enabled professors wives and minor children to receive non-quota visas.

Professors and clergy enjoyed the only professional privilege available under the restrictive immigration laws of the 1930s and 1940s,

The State Departments stinginess in interpreting the law partly explains the small number of professors to receive non-quota visas. So does the reluctance of U.S. universities to make the offers in the first place. The decision to hire a refugee scholar was an individualized one, just like any other hiring decision. The faculty of a particular academic department would assess the candidates qualifications in terms of teaching, publication, and service. The university administration would weigh in. An offer would be madeor not. Yet certain forces pushed these decisions in similar directions. The State Department defined who qualified as a professor under the Section 4(d) provision. Outside funding organizations set standards, and networks of professors backed or blackballed particular hires. It therefore is possible to detect hiring patterns that spanned departments, disciplines, and institutions. Overall, to be hired by American universities, refugee scholars had to be world class and well connected and working in disciplines for which the American academy had a recognizable need. They could not be too old or too young, too right or too left, or, most important, too Jewish. Having money helped; being a woman did not.