Today's Reading
While Jewish heritage was the main reason people were fired, it was not the only one. Those with Jewish spouses, gay people, members of certain religions, such as Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses, and those seen as politically or ideologically opposed to the Nazis or who were allies of Jewish people were also removed from their positions.
Many women were also fired simply for being women. Next, the Gestapo began issuing special IDs to Jewish and Polish students to separate them out.
Hedwig's employer was among the three universities hardest hit by the civil service law. The University of Breslau's staff was nearly halved. It and the universities of Berlin and Frankfurt accounted for over 40 percent of Germany's expelled faculty members thanks to the large Jewish communities in these cities and their historic institutions' openness to hiring Jewish professors.
By the end of 1933, nearly half of all Germany's fired academics had fled the country. Out of a job and with nowhere else to turn, some dismissed civil servants died by suicide.
Upon her firing, Hedwig immediately got to work penning pleas for assistance to help her find a job outside of Germany. In addition to reaching out to the British Academic Assistance Council, Hedwig wrote to her former colleague Rudolf Ladenburg, who had recently joined the faculty at the prestigious Palmer Physics Laboratory of Princeton University in New Jersey.
Rudolf immigrated to America in 1931 and had since become the de facto go-to resource for scientists pushed out of work by Hitler's wrath. Rudolf compiled an assistance application for each scholar who contacted him and sent it to the newly formed US Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.
The organization could help find money to fund positions at American institutions for academics on the run from Hitler. Competition for these awards was incredibly steep since thousands more displaced scholars applied than there was funding to assist.
In November 1934, Rudolf placed Hedwig's name second of twelve on his latest list of displaced German scientists he was recommending to the US Emergency Committee for assistance.
"She did some very good research work and had quite a few young physicists working under her direction. She gets no salary now. I can recommend her very heartily as a teacher as well as a research worker,"6 Rudolf wrote about Hedwig.
Such a personal recommendation from a prominent figure in American physics education was an incredible blessing, something few refugee academics could boast. Enclosed with the list and letter were Hedwig's CV, a list of her research publications, and testimonials from no less than five professors who had worked with her.
Rudolf wished he could have secured Hedwig a position at Princeton with him, but the school employed only male professors for the all-male student body at the time. (Hannah Arendt, another Jewish scholar who fled Hitler's Germany, would become the first woman to lecture at Princeton in 1958, and only then as a visiting professor.)
Rudolf then penned a letter to twenty-five of his fellow émigré scholars, many of whom had only recently escaped Nazi Germany and found positions at American universities. The letter, written in German, asked if they would consider donating a small portion of their salary (he suggested between two and four percent) for two years to help support the many scientists still awaiting rescue. Hedwig was among the twenty-eight scholars listed.
Rudolf was right to bank on the likelihood that people would be more comfortable donating if they knew their dollars were going directly to others in the same profession—even if they were on tight budgets because they'd just fled themselves.
The resulting pot of funds Rudolf collected became the German Scientists Relief Fund. It aided quite a few scientists by providing sums of around $300 to $800 to help cover travel costs to get out of Germany or to bolster incomes so that foreign universities didn't have to shoulder the burden of an entire salary themselves.
Larger aid organizations were inundated by thousands of applications, only a small fraction of which they could fund. But the German Scientists Relief Fund was a small outfit that could help a targeted group of scholars, a ragtag startup of scientists helping scientists. But would it be enough?
CHAPTER TWO
Hedwig Discovers Science
Hedwig was born on April 5, 1887, in Breslau, then one of the largest cities in the German Empire. Today, the town is called Wroclaw and falls within the boundary of Poland. She was Helene and Georg Kohn's second child. Their oldest child, Kurt, had just celebrated his second birthday the month before Hedwig was born.
Georg made a good living as a wholesale cloth merchant, while Helene brought the perks of being a member of the wealthy Hancke clan of Breslau. The family were members of the town's vibrant Jewish community, nearly 20,000 strong in 1900.
Her parents immediately recognized that Hedwig was a bright girl and prioritized her education just as equally as they did their son's, and she was lucky to have such support. While basic elementary education covered ages six through fourteen or fifteen, they agreed that Hedwig would benefit from schooling beyond that.
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