On the same day that the second American atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, an article appeared in the Washington Post titled "Nazi Boomerang."1 Its author claimed that Germany's women scientists had had the last word after being persecuted with particular severity by the Nazi regime. According to the article, it was Lise Meitner's discovery of atomic fission that permitted development of the atomic bomb, which was now finally bringing the fascist Axis powers to their knees.
The article cited Meitner, an Austrian Jew, as an example of how women had successfully fought for the freedom of the sciences and the survival of women scientists in Europe. When the Nazis removed Meitner from her position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1938, she fled to Copenhagen, eventually finding her way to the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm with the help of the Swedish Association of University Women. Meitner made her groundbreaking calculations in Swedish exile, supported by a grant from the Swedish university women.
Today, we know that Meitner had nothing to do with the invention of the atomic bomb.2 What interests me is not why this Washington Post correspondent sought to justify the dropping of Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by referring to the crimes of the Third Reich against women. Rather, I would like to know how women mobilized on behalf of this claim. The article is noteworthy because it directs our attention to an international network of women that has received little notice and even less systematic examination in the scholarship on education and emigration during the Third Reich.3
Meitner was only one among many women who found support that saved her life and enabled her to continue her career as a scientist. The International Federation of University Women (IFUW) went to great lengths to facilitate the flight of women academics out of the territories dominated by the Nazi regime, and to help them establish a new existence elsewhere.
In this essay, I examine the long-neglected topic of organized academic refugee aid to women. I explore its origins, introduce its main actors, show who sought - and who could obtain - help. This international network analysis is part of my project on the history of gender, education, and international relations in the West from the late nineteenth century to the present. Here, I investigate how and to what extent university women in Germany, the United States, and other Western countries succeeded in creating an efficient female equivalent to the male concept of a homo academicus - on the personal, institutional, national, and international levels. In order to "normalize" professional and academic careers for women, academic women's organizations, such as the American Association of University Women (AAUW) founded in 1881, the British Federation of Women Graduates (BFWG) founded in 1907, and their German counterpart, the German Federation of Women Academics (Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund or DAB) founded in 1926, explicitly dedicated themselves to nonpartisan aims. These organizations and their international umbrella organization - the IFUW - provide the institutional framework of my comparative study of the policies and culture(s) of professionalization.
The emigration of scholars from Nazi Europe has often been described as a story of remarkable successes. Despite many personal tragedies it seems evident that - compared to other social groups - a considerable number of scientists not only managed to flee but also re-established their careers thanks to the "efforts of the international community of scientists."4 Scholars agree that the generous support of the Academic Assistance Council founded in 1933 in London (in 1936 it was renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning or SPSL), the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German/Foreign Scholars in New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaftler im Ausland (Emergency Aid Group of German Scientists Abroad) allowed the "biggest intellectual exodus" in modern history to flourish in the countries of refuge.5 Female scientists and professionals appear only on the margins of these accounts, even though we know that at least 50 percent of all female German lecturers (Privatdozenten) were dismissed and persecuted.6
Because women - with rare exceptions - did not profit from the efforts of the best-known representatives of the "international community of sciences," it is often assumed that they either found their way without help or, more likely, that they did not succeed in continuing their careers once abroad. The refugee aid of the international network of women academics, however, permits us to evaluate the notion of a "female academic world citizenship" in times of extreme hardship. Specifically, my analysis of women's international networks allows an analysis of the personal and institutional bonds to which professional women had access.
My starting point is the extensive correspondence of the International Relations Office of the AAUW. Between 1933 and 1945 about 140 mostly German-speaking women academics turned to this committee for help with emigration, support in their search for new jobs in the United States, and funding of their interrupted research. The correspondence is an impressive compilation of evidence on how persecuted scholars responded to the burden of being stripped of their rights, what support they hoped for, and the extent to which American women were willing and able to mobilize on their behalf.
This essay is organized in two parts. First, I briefly sketch the history of the network operating in this international community of women academics, illustrating its international scope, political objectives, organizational networks, and personal connections. Second, I explore what happened when European women academics turned to the AAUW for help, including their motivations and their successes and failures.
The idea of an international society of female academic citizens goes back to World War I. The United States' entry into the war in April 1917 triggered a wave of anti-German sentiment in that country. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae, as the AAUW was known from its founding in 1891 until 1919, was not unaffected by these sentiments. The need to dissociate from all things German was manifested throughout American society. This was especially true when it came to schools and educational policy, where long-admired German educational ideals and models were suddenly abandoned. At the same time, the organization grew more aware of its European connections, and particularly to its wartime allies.7 In this context, education became a central factor in the policies of the Anglo-American alliance, evolving after the German capitulation into a project for securing the peace. American and British university women played an important role in this development: As visible representatives of a civil educational ideology, they were not merely tolerated in the arena of international peace politics but genuinely courted as well as given political and financial support.
In 1919, the same year that the League of Nations was established, the first eight national societies of women academics - in Canada, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States - formed the IFUW. The new federation enjoyed a close relationship with the Institute for International Education (IIE) in New York, also created in 1919 with funds provided by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Throughout its existence, the IFUW was financially dependent on the AAUW. In 1919 the AAUW boasted 12,000 members and always had more money than any other national organization. During the first years the IFUW would even have been inconceivable without the American women and the IIE, which provided office space, office supplies, and a paid office manager. The International Relations Committee of the AAUW took on the lion's share of the organization's developmental burdens. Thanks to another generous donation from the Carnegie Endowment and successful fundraising, particularly because the founding of the IFUW brought the AAUW a great many new members, the IFUW was soon on sound financial footing.8 Poorer European societies received official support, for example, the French and Spanish governments paid the travel costs of their delegates because high political value was placed on the federation in the realm of international relations.9
At their inaugural meeting in London the IFUW's founders agreed on concrete educational policy objectives: It would work internationally to achieve the opening up of all colleges and universities to women, it would claim equal pay for equal work, and it would assert the right of married women to have a professional career. In addition, the IFUW would work to make it possible for women scientists around the world to fully actualize their capabilities. Above all, however, the IFUW would promote the uniformity of educational systems and the international exchange of women students, teachers, and researchers, a goal that would be achieved by means of fellowships, the building of clubhouses, and an emphasis on international hospitality. "Standards" and "Hospitality" committees undertook the pursuit of these objectives.
A generous donation from a wealthy American woman, Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, and general enthusiasm for this international project made it possible to implement the ambitious plans by the early 1920s. A palatial villa in the center of Paris (Reid Hall, run by American women) and a venerable old property in London (Crosby Hall) were dedicated with great fanfare in 1922 and 1926, respectively. They offered accommodation, good, inexpensive cuisine, stimulating conversation, and a proper clubroom to hold approximately fifty visiting academics at a time.10 By 1928 the IFUW had collected enough money to offer its members fellowships for postgraduate and advanced studies; between 1928 and 1941 thirty-five year-long fellowships were granted.11
The political mission and the opportunities for international contacts made membership in the IFUW attractive to women academics in many countries, and the federation expanded from eight to twenty-two member countries in its first three years. The issue of whether to admit a German society, however, was a matter of considerable controversy, at least at the time the IFUW was founded. It was only after lengthy discussion that the newly appointed board agreed to set aside reservations and devote itself to "genuine internationalism," which included the possibility of integrating Germany and Austria into the network at the appropriate time.12 The Austrian women were allowed to join in 1922, and the German academic women followed in 1927. Soon thereafter, Lise Meitner, Anna Schoenbohm, Ilse Szagunn, and Agnes von Zahn-Harnack all were elected to IFUW committees.13 Connections forged in the last years of the Weimar Republic - at various council meetings and delegate assemblies also attended by German Reichstag deputies Marie-Elisabeth Lüders and Gertrud Bäumer - firmly anchored the German women academics in the international academic community, dominated though it was by the Anglo-Americans. By the end of Weimar, the German academics were so successful at overcoming reservations about their country that the delegate assembly of the IFUW convention in Edinburgh in 1932 unanimously accepted an invitation to hold the next convention meeting, in 1936, in Berlin.14
This meeting never took place. The Nazi "seizure of power" in January 1933 was followed by the partial dissolution of the DAB. By the spring of 1933, all that remained of this once substantial academic umbrella organization of nearly 4,000 members was a group of approximately two hundred. The new chair, a "Frau Matthias," was completely unknown in the international arena. As she confidently announced to the very irritated board of the IFUW at its meeting in Budapest in 1934, she intended to "reorganize" the DAB according to the "new spirit" of the time.15
As many members of the IFUW board reported in retrospect, this Budapest meeting was a dramatic political event they would not soon forget.16 The British member, as well as the chair of the newly established Palestinian federation, had heard in great detail from the numerous German academic women refugees, predominantly Jews, about this new spirit. After pointed questioning of the two German delegates regarding the attitude of the Third Reich toward its intellectuals, freedom of thought, and international peace, the board passed an amendment to the IFUW's bylaws that unmistakably spelled out the conditions under which they were prepared to continue the membership of the German member organization. The new bylaw stated that: "No federation shall be admitted or retained as a member of the IFUW which debars qualified university women from membership by reason of their race, religion, or political opinions."17 In 1936 the remnants of the German organization, now "synchronized" with the Reichsbund deutscher Akademikerinnen, terminated its membership in the IFUW.18 The IFUW's planned meeting in Berlin was moved to Krakau.
Connections between many former members of DAB and the American and international federations remained in place, albeit on an informal level. The secretary of the International Relations Office of the AAUW, historian Esther Brunauer, had taken a sabbatical from Washington for the year of 1933 in order to conduct research in Berlin. Funded by the Oberlander Trust, she had planned to explore further her dissertation topic, a study on the German and Austrian peace proposals during World War I. On her arrival in Berlin, Brunauer changed her topic. As a guest of Berlin university women, she experienced the "Nazi revolution" first-hand, reporting on thought-provoking evenings at Meitner's apartment, where she was staying. Shortly after her arrival on the night of February 27, 1933 (only hours before the Reichstag went up in flames), she was at home with the famous physicist when colleagues brought the news of Gertrud Baumer's removal from the Prussian civil service; she then stayed for an all-night discussion of the grim political situation.19 Brunauer decided to travel throughout Germany, to meet as many people as possible from the old as well as from the new regime. Toward the end of her stay she even managed to get an appointment with Hitler.20 Brunauer recorded her impressions in a book entitled The Nazi State and in numerous articles for the AAUW journal. Interest in her impressions was so great that she practically drowned in invitations to lecture after returning to the United States.22 (Brunauer also was a source for the previously cited Washington Post article.)
The center of activity for refugee aid prior to 1938 was not in the United States, but Europe, especially western Europe. The British organization was among the most active; by 1933, the English university women had made it their federation's highest goal to provide assistance to German colleagues who had been removed from offices and positions of respect.23 Together with the IFUW (and financed through a special Emergency Fund for Displaced Women Scholars), they established a service agency, which the IFUW systematically publicized as the contact address for women scholars throughout Europe. The federation's guest house served increasingly as accommodation for women academics who had lost their livelihood on the continent and could hope to find at Crosby Hall not only room and board but also modest financial support as well. The money came largely from charity bazaars and donations from the local chapters of the organization. Local chapters also adopted individual women refugees, supplying them with life's necessities and with social contacts.24
Brunauer's experiences in Germany had a crucial impact on AAUW refugee policies, even though until 1940 she had to operate without her own budget. However, the international AAUW fellowships for 1934-5 and 1935-6 went explicitly to German scholars in exile, permitting Gertrud Kornfeld,25 a photochemist from Berlin, and Elisabeth Jastrow, an archeologist, to continue their research outside Germany. Kornfeld, who, after 1933, had kept her head above water at the University College of Nottingham with the help of the British federation, used the money to attend the University of Vienna for a year. Jastrow went to southern Italy.26 In the United States, the AAUW's International Relations Office was engaged to find teaching positions for German women scholars at American colleges and universities. In some rare cases, they succeeded in doing so, as in the case of physicist Herta Sponer, who started in her new position at Duke University in February 1936.27
In 1941 the desperate refugee situation led the AAUW to resolve that the organization should "provide all aid possible to resist the totalitarian aggression."28 On the basis of the resolution the American branch created a War Relief Committee to promote the refugee aid program as well as manage a newly established fund. By the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, the American branch had gathered more than $30,000 in donations from its members; only a fraction of the money was used for refugee aid in the United States. During the next five years, $12,000 went to England, $5,000 to Palestine, $2,000 to Switzerland, and $1,000 each to Canada and Sweden, with smaller amounts distributed to other prominent refugee stations: France, Lisbon, and Shanghai. The committee distributed a total of $8,000 to refugees in the United States in the form of small grants and interest-free loans.29
The refugee case files of the AAUW's International Relations Office contain a wealth of material about aid recipients and applicants. In order to characterize the sample of the 140 women academics who requested aid, I would like to present some of the results of a preliminary survey.
Most of these women first came into contact with the AAUW in Washington between 1938 and 1942. Nearly all disciplines were represented, led by medicine (16), physics (8), chemistry (7), history (5), law (4), and economics (4); one also reads of applicants from the fields of biology, mathematics, art history, archeology, psychoanalysis, sociology, philology, and social work. Six women worked as librarians, nineteen as teachers, four as professors. Only eight were still students. Forty-two women gave precise details about their age: more than half of those were over 40 years old, and a considerable number (12) were over fifty. I expect this higher-than-average to be typical of the entire sample.
Prominent names in the sample include not only Meitner, but also Vienna sociologist Marie Jahoda, historian Hedwig Hintze, social theorist Alice Salomon, former Reichstag duputy Adele Schreiber, Czech social democrat Fanny Blatny, and Helene Stöcker, the elder spokeswoman of the German Women's and Peace Movements. Most of the women, however, are academics largely unknown today. Among this larger group, the women, as their resumes indicate, enjoyed extremely successful and impressive careers in their countries of origin.
Well over a third, or fifty-eight of the women, lived on the European continent at the time of first contact; thirteen wrote from England. Fifty-six had succeeded in emigrating to the United States. All of the inquiries from the continent expressed the wish to emigrate as quickly as possible. These women came not only from Germany but also from Austria, Czechoslowakia, Italy, and France. The overwhelming majority of the women were being persecuted for - in Nazi terminology - "racist" reasons. However, only a few described themselves as Jews; most reported their religion to be Protestant or Catholic. They also claimed to be of "non-Aryan" descent.
In the majority of cases, namely, seventy-two, the women themselves wrote the letters to American authorities. In twenty-five cases, the connection to the Americans was made through the IFUW in London. Friends and relatives interceded in twenty-two of the cases, as did other aid organizations in ten, and colleagues in nine cases. Interestingly, most of this latter group involved physicists, with the most effective communication taking place between men already established in the United States and less well-known women arriving later. Unrivaled are the efforts of physicist Phillip Ladenburg on behalf of Hedwig Kohn, who escaped from Breslau in the summer of 1940 with the help of the AAUW and the IFUW.30
At this stage I can only draw preliminary conclusions from the material. The reasons women applied for help provide some grounds to offer initial impressions. The motivations of the women in my sample are in stark contrast to the customary notions put forth in emigration research, which generally assumes that it was easier for women to leave because they had less to lose professionally and socially. The letters also challenge another assumption in the scholarship, namely, that German Jews decided "too late" to emigrate.31
Requests to the AAUW show that the women accurately gauged when the time had come for them to leave the European continent; their decision to emigrate was by no means "delayed." Crucial to their decision was an assessment of their professional future.32 The women in question, for all their differences, were highly mobile and extremely flexible (most, but not all of them were unmarried). They responded with great creativity to the injustices of being dismissed from jobs, ostracized from their communities, and denied their rights. Many of them had already studied abroad and spoke several languages. Among those fired as early as 1933 were women who eked out an existence in other European countries with grants and contract work, such as photochemist Kornfeld.
The letters reveal that, for some women, the Jewish subculture produced in part by the social ostracism opened up professional opportunities. I presume they were more attractive and lasted longer for women than for men, especially in teaching positions. Women seem to have filled positions because their male predecessors had emigrated. Two examples here must stand for many: After her dismissal from the civil service in 1933, economist and trade school professor Erna Barschak first went to London University College for a term and then to Geneva to study psychology with internationally renowned professors. She returned to Germany in 1935 when she had the opportunity to take a position as full professor at the Jewish University College in Berlin. Her position was now approximately the same as it had been before 1933 at the state school, and she had also succeeded in maintaining her international connections. For example, in 1937 she traveled again to Switzerland and took part in a conference in England. In 1938 she worked on a book on women's psychology that she hoped to publish in English. She wrote to several friends, her two sisters, and the AAUW in September 1938 predicting the erosion of the Jewish University College. Emigrating students and teachers were disappearing, and her professional future in Germany therefore seemed to be coming to an end.33
Scientist Gertrud Schlesinger, who turned to Brunauer on the advice of Marie-Elisabeth Lüders in early 1939, had even returned to Germany in 1938 after having been dismissed from the civil service in 1933. Schlesinger fled first to France and then to the American College for Girls in Istanbul to continue her career as a teacher. However, the pay there was so poor, and the living conditions so harsh, that she accepted an offer from Leonore Goldschmidt to teach at her private Jewish school in Berlin. When this school was scheduled to close in April 1939, she wanted to emigrate to the United States.34
The request from Italy in September 1938 from Vienna resident Auguste Jellinek is the last example to support my thesis of the high degree of work-related flexibility. Jellinek, an opera singer and scholar specializing in children's hearing and speech disorders, had been conducting research at the Otology Clinic of the University of Rome since 1933. Forced again to emigrate by Italy's anti-Semitic laws, she wrote to the AAUW in September 1938: "Because I am Jewish, I must leave Italy, where I have worked successfully at several universities. I hope to secure to an affidavit from my cousin to come to the United States, but I am coming with no money and must try to find work at a university or teacher-training facility. I cannot return to Vienna.... But I have wanted to come to America for several years, and I am glad that my opportunity has come."35
Analysis of the correspondence of the AAUW's International Relations Office does not reveal an overall success story for the refugee aid program. On the contrary, sixty-two women turned to the AAUW for help without useful support. Because of the restrictive immigration policies of the United States, which were intensified in the face of the European refugee crisis in 1938, the American women often found that their hands were tied. In the Jellinek case, however, Brunauer successfully interceded with the American consul in Naples to accelerate the processing of Jellinek's visa. She got her an appointment at the consulate, and the next letter from Jellinek on October 13, 1938, was received from St. Louis. On her own initiative, from Italy, she had obtained a position with Max Goldstein, the director of the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis.36
There was also a happy ending for Schlesinger, who returned to Berlin from Istanbul in 1938. She managed to get to England together with Leonore Goldschmidt - it is not clear whether or not the IFUW was involved - and worked in the refugee school that Goldschmidt had opened there.37
Erna Barschak also made it to England with the help of the IFUW, where she found work as a housekeeper. There, she waited for her visa to enter the United States.38 It will be possible to learn more about her fate in the United States because she wrote an autobiography about her "American adventure" in 1945. To date, I have not yet gained access to it.39
Finally, I would like to convey at least a brief impression of the AAUW's efforts to assist women whose requests came from the United States. These letters describe in painstaking detail the thousands of difficulties the new arrivals confronted in the United States. Each letter reveals severe disappointment and depression about their professional prospects, which, in many instances, stood in stark contrast to the success they had enjoyed in Europe. The successes of the AAUW, notwithstanding the considerable effort, were not spectacular: The American organization placed only five women emigrants in positions at a college or university. One reads time and again that a list of names circulated at regular intervals by the International Relations Office of the AAUW brought almost no response. Whether referrals to other, career-specific aid organizations were successful remains to be examined. The seven oldest women's colleges, the Seven Sisters, were the most reliable partners in the university community.
The supreme commandment of all financial aid programs of the era was that the recipients must use the aid to become self-sufficient. The most suitable kinds of aid in this regard included loans for the establishment of a medical practice and grants for the completion of studies (social work), but not such things as research grants for liberal arts and humanities scholars. One last example will show the successful model for promoting women dedicated to careers outside of science. Archeologist Alice Mühsam applied for a grant in December 1940 at the age of fifty-one to continue her research into Greek portraits in the Roman Empire, which she had been forced to interrupt in 1938 in Berlin. The AAUW did not appreciate Mühsam's desire to find a part-time grant in order to extract herself gradually from the physically difficult cleaning work with which she had been making her living for two years. Instead, Esther Brunauer set up a consultation for her with curator Gisela Richter of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who in turn recommended that she start a new career in the restoration of antiquities. Through the joint efforts of Brunauer and Richter, Mühsam was referred to the art restorer of the Brooklyn Museum, who agreed to train the archeologist for two years in his workshop. For this position, the War Relief Committee approved a subsidy of $250 a year.40
A definitive statement about the strength of the network I am exploring - the network of the international female academic community - requires more research. In particular, I need to reconstruct the histories of other national member organizations and their umbrella organization, the IFUW. Regardless of how and whether aid was granted, the inquiries I have outlined above do provide a fascinating picture that illuminates much more than the individual stories, revealing how flexibly, resolutely, and - in more cases than one would expect - successfully women scholars went about practicing their professions.
The role of the American women in this global network can be characterized as follows: They were from the beginning the financial backbone of the organization and, although they were not able to do nearly as much as many women hoped who turned to them for help, they helped a considerable number of women scholars escape Nazi Europe. In fewer instances, they allowed women to continue careers in the United States.
The letters from women academics to their American counterparts had another interesting effect: They raised consciousness about the rising threat of fascism. In 1938 the AAUW became the first American "internationalist" organization to speak out against the country's neutrality. Two years later, the AAUW called for the United States to enter the war in Europe.41 An organization that had emerged to promote world peace among an international community of academic women demonstrated it could change with the times, recognizing that the need to respond with force to the threat of National Socialism transcended the lofty principles of world peace and internationalism.