Episode 35: Women Refugee Scientists of World War II
Hosts: Leila McNeill, Rebecca Ortenberg, and KJ Shepherd
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Falling asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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Leila and Rebecca are joined by guest host KJ Shepherd, Lady Science’s social media editor. They talk about the plight of Jewish women refugee scientists attempting to come to the U.S. during World War II and how the U.S. and academia could have done so much more to save refugees.
Show notes
About the Immigration Act of 1924
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Documents of the Jewish Council in Modliborzyce
“Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees From Nazi Europe” by Laurel Leff
Recovery The Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Era
Refugee mathematicians in the United States of America, 1933-1941: Reception and Reaction by Nathan Reingold
A Refugee Scholar from Nazi Germany: Emmy Noether and Bryn Mawr College by Qinna Shen
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 35 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. Anna isn't able to join us today, but our social media editor, KJ Shepherd, is here with us. Yay!
KJ: Hi, everyone. Howdy.
Leila: Hi. We need to give a warning here. We're recording this on November seventh. It's only a few hours after the results of the presidential election was announced, and we've got a really weird energy going right now.
Rebecca: We're all kind of having out-of-body experiences of various kinds. It's very strange. But we are happy to be here.
Rebecca: And we knew this topic was gonna be weird whatever the election shook out to be. Today we're gonna be talking about Jewish women scientist refugees who fled the Nazis during World War II and immigrated to the U.S. Many of us know the names of their male counterparts like Jared von Neumann and, of course, Albert Einstein.
Rebecca: But many women scientists who attempted to emigrate and find careers in science in America found their paths to success blocked at multiple turns. Between an immigration system that discriminated against Jews and academic institutions committed to keeping out both Jews and women, Jewish women refugee scientists coming to America struggled to find the support they needed just to survive.
KJ: And we're going to start not in World War II, but in 1917, 22 years before the war officially started. In 1917 Congress enacted new policies to limit the number of foreign-born people in the U.S., which included literacy tests for immigrants over 16 years old and barred entry to anyone from Asia except people from the Philippines and Japan.
KJ: Then in the early 1920s, Congress introduced a quota system that restricted the number of new immigrants to 350,000 per year. The quota was based on the 1910 census and set at three percent of the total foreign-born population. So when it came time to renew the Act in 1924, all the pieces were in place to craft the most restrictive immigration law to date.
KJ: The Immigration Act of 1924, signed into law by President Coolidge, extended its exclusion of Asians to the Japanese and Filipinos, which of course created tension, to say the least, in Japan. It also based its quota on two percent rather than the previous three percent of the foreign-born population. So this decreased the total number of new immigrants per year to 150,000.
KJ: And what's more, the subquotas tailored to different countries. So they granted a higher number of visas to people in Great Britain and other western European nations and a lower number of visas to people in southern and eastern European countries. And if you know anything about America's historical attitude towards immigrants, the subtext is clear. They wanted to curtail the number of Jews and Italians in the United States.
Leila: So then if we fast forward nine years to 1933, this is the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany and the Nazi Party became the ruling political body of the country. The Nazi Party enacted sweeping antisemitic laws to strip Jewish people of their civil rights, including the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 1933. The civil service law expelled Jews; other, quote-unquote, "non-Aryans"; and political dissidents from all civil service positions in the country.
Leila: And since universities were under the purview of the state, this included professors, researchers, and others in the German Academy. As a result, 12,000 scholars lost their jobs. And many of these scholars began to seek employment abroad in other European countries and in the U.S. And the U.S. government knew what was happening in Germany, but Congress didn't consider expanding their restrictive quota numbers of visas for refugees. And for Germany the visa quota was just under 26,000. And considering the hundreds of thousands who tried to leave the country in the 1930s, this doesn't seem like much at all.
Leila: And I think it's important to note here that the immigration system wasn't broken. It was working as its 1924 authors intended it to. And I think even now when we look at our immigration system in this country, we often say it's a broken system. But I think it's important to keep in mind that these systems aren't broken. They're working the way that the people who crafted them intended them to. And that's the same thing that happened in the 1930s.
Leila: And on top of the government, the American Academy also knew what was happening to Jewish intellectuals, and many in the Academy merely observed what was happening so as to not appear to be taking a political stance in the eyes of the German government. So this indifference on a systemic scale in these early days of Nazi rule shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Millions, really.
Rebecca: I do think your point about immigration systems working as they're meant to, I'm gonna underline that and put three exclamation points after it. Yeah. And that continues to be the case.
KJ: Yeah. And I don't think it's just a case of us bein' on Election Day Part Five to look at the structures around us and systems around us and not realize that things are done by design, right? That this isn't an accident. These things aren't just unintended consequences, that these things are actually often quite deliberate, especially when we want to think that there is such a thing as de facto versus de jure. Quite often it is de jure. It is quite often by design.
Leila: We think about America kind of springing into action in the 1930s, but we really just sat back and waited to see what was gonna happen for a really long time.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Interestingly, Jewish scholars had an option to come to the U.S. on a non-quota visa. And I feel like this is, again, a thing that is often very common, is in your certain professions, they let through in different ways. Under Section 4d of the Act, professors and members of the clergy could theoretically acquire a non-quota visa if they had maintained for two years a job in their progression and in their country of origin and had a job in the same profession lined up for them in the U.S.
Rebecca: I feel like this is one of those things that comes up when people are like, "Oh, God, how would I move to another country?" It's like we look and we go, "Oh, if you're a fancy doctor, then you can move to another country if you can get someone to hire you." Again, these things are actually still, I think, part of many of the sort of almost standard immigration systems, which I think is an interesting point to keep in mind.
Rebecca: Anyway, acquiring a non-quota visa would have been difficult for any scholar, male or female, for a few reasons. For one thing, American universities were rife with antisemitism, as we mentioned earlier, and they were hesitant to hire Jews, even ones that were in America. And they also weren't very keen to hire anyone foreign-born if they could hire an American.
Rebecca: Another reason was age. Universities didn't wanna hire anyone too old who might be nearing the end of their career. And they also didn't want to hire anyone too young, or else that could mean they hadn't contributed enough yet and, I guess, wouldn't be a productive member of the institution. They couldn't just do it because it was the right thing to do.
Rebecca: All of which leads to a third reason. Refugees relied upon such universities to extend a job offer to them. Even when various aid organizations like the Emergency Committee for Displaced Scholars facilitated job placement for scholars, refugees relied on universities opting in to help and on universities to let them know when they needed to fill a position.
Rebecca: So I also wanna point out that universities weren't even the ones paying the salaries for the refugee professors. The salaries could be paid for by the Emergency Committee in coordination with other philanthropic organizations. In her book Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe, Laurel Leff sums up the situation, writing, quote, "Ultimately, universities decided which scholars were, quote, 'worth saving,' in the unfortunate phrase of the time, and the State Department decided whether they were to be saved."
KJ: So like Rebecca said, it was difficult for anybody to obtain a non-quota visa, so difficult that between 1933 and 1941, only 944 professors across all disciplines received non-quota visas. And if we consider this with the 12,000 scholars who lost their jobs in 1933, that isn't a lotta visas. Usually it took someone already known and well connected in the U.S. and who had someone personally advocating for them to receive a sympathetic ear from university administrators. Cold-writing an administrator that you had never met before and asking for aid probably didn't get you anywhere.
KJ: And you couldn't just be any scientist, either. You had to be the best of the best. As Nathan Reingold points out in an article on refugee mathematicians in the U.S., the goal wasn't so much to alleviate human suffering but to save, quote-unquote, "useful intellectual contributions."
KJ: Leff sums up this tightrope walk, writing, quote, "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 cannot be too old or too young, too right or too left, and most important, too Jewish. Having money helped. Being a woman did not."
Leila: Like with everything, mostly.
Rebecca: Yeah. Honestly, to jump in here for a second, there's actually a really interesting, very specific example of this in the Science History Institute collections. I think it was last year we got a bunch of personal papers from a scientists named Georg Bredig, who is not someone you would have heard of, but basically he was friends with everyone who was a German chemist in the early 20th century who you have heard of.
Rebecca: And the interesting thing about the collection is that so he had a son who did emigrate to the U.S. earlier, and so we have a bunch of the letters that Bredig wrote to his son where literally it charts this process of "Oh, I've lost my job. Oh, they won't let me use the library anymore." And just the rights slowly getting cut away.
Rebecca: And he was older, and he didn't wanna leave. And finally his family was like, "No, really, leave" and called in every frickin' favor. And again, this is someone who knew everyone. And I think they got him a fake position at Princeton because he was one where he was so high status that they were willing to give him a pretend position even though he was in his 70s. But even that, it was in 1941 that he left because of the effort it took. And this is someone who had probably met Albert Einstein.
Leila: And that's super old because Leff says in her book that typically the cutoff was 55. That was the ideal range 'cause it wasn't that too old and not too young, like Goldilocks age. There were exceptions, but that kind of was the rule of thumb, kind of.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. From what I remember, he never taught or anything. They just gave him basically a position, and then he lived in New York with his family and died five years later or something. But yeah. And he was also one of those "not too Jewish" people. He was Jewish technically, but he was a Berlin intellectual dude. Yeah.
Leila: I think that you said that he wanted to stay in Germany. And I think that that's also something to point out with a lot of these people, is that Germany was their home no matter what was happening there. And so even though they needed to leave and wanted to leave to flee oppression, a lot of them waited out to see if they could stay and how long they could stay because it was their home, you know? That was where they lived. And I think a lot of times when we tell this story of America saving all these Jewish people and that they should be grateful for it, it's like, well—
Rebecca: Being a refugee sucks. Even if you're a very privileged refugee, that still sucks.
Leila: Yeah. And even if you had money, it's not like you could gather up all the family jewels real fast. More than likely you were fleeing with the clothes on your back and a bag. Yeah. So for Jewish women scientists who tried to obtain a non-quota visa, the odds were further stacked against them since non-quota visas required immigrants to have employment as a professor for two years in their country and to have a job in the same field secured in the U.S. Women scientists were often bound by systemic gender discrimination in universities that effectively kept them out of such positions that could ensure their survival.
Leila: Even someone like Emmy Noether, who was then and is still today recognized as one of the most significant mathematicians of the 20th century, was rejected by Princeton, which Noether called, quote, "A men's university which admits nothing female." End quote.
Rebecca: I love the "admits nothing female."
Leila: And beyond the university, gender discrimination was also baked into the Immigration Act itself. So I wanna take a look at the actual text of Section 4d to get an idea of what kind of person Congress had in mind when creating the non-quota option.
Leila: Quote, "An immigrant who continuously for at least two years immediately preceding the time of his application for admission to the United States solely for the purpose of carrying on the vocation of minister for 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." End quote.
Leila: So this visa was envisioned for men married to women. It didn't work for women because it wasn't meant to. So when we talk about saving intellectual contributions, women's intellect wasn't included in that, either.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think the most interesting part of that is the "and his wife and his children" part because, I mean, obviously the use of "he" as generic has lots of assumptions baked into it always. But there's always the person who's gonna be like, "Well, the 'he' was just generic." But it's like, no, it said "and his wife." And suddenly you're putting this person in a gendered social context and not just using a word that is meant to mean a person. Yeah. That's so specific.
KJ: It's so depressing, especially when you get into actual wartime years and you're like, "Uh, this entire country is spending all of this goddamn energy on this fucking war, and the best you can do is a dude and his wife and his minor children under 18." You know what I mean? It's that idea of just it's the person who goes to the fancy restaurant where the steak is $85 without any of the sides or the apps or the drinks or the dessert and tips 15 bucks. Right? And feels himself very generous. Like, "Oh, I did this. Good for me. Yes, yes." Like, it's just, "Okay."
Leila: I mean, obviously they didn't care. This was written to save intellect. It wasn't really created to save lives. And I think that says a lot about American science and the American Academy and what we consider to be knowledge and who gets to create that knowledge and that we don't consider the knowledge that women create to be worth saving, either.
Rebecca: So you might be wondering, if universities were closed off to women refugees, then what happened to them? Well, some of them did find positions in women's colleges rather than universities. In total, 80 women scientists and mathematicians applied for aid from the emergency committee. And by the end of the war, only four were granted aid. Four, as in one, two, three, four. As in the number of days it has almost been since the election.
Rebecca: Three of them found positions at women's colleges. Emmy Noether, the first woman to receive aid from the committee in 1933, ended up at Bryn Mawr. Hilda Geringer, a pioneering applied mathematician, also ended up at Bryn Mawr in 1939. Hedwig Kohn, a physicist specializing in radiometry, found a position at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina in 1941.
Rebecca: The fourth, Tilly Edinger, had worked as a museum curator in Germany and was closed off to possibility of a university of college position and a non-quota visa altogether. But her international reputation as the founder of the field of paleoneurology—you know, she just founded a whole field—earned her a place at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Rebecca: While these women were waiting for the wheels of the American bureaucracy to turn in their favor, they were often on the run, literally. Geringer and her daughter were about to be deported from Lisbon to a concentration camp while waiting on word of acceptance to Bryn Mawr. Kohn was fleeing from country to country in Europe. So was Edinger, who was prepared to commit suicide before being incarcerated in a Nazi camp.
KJ: And even though women's colleges were more willing to take in women scholars, they weren't without their own problems. Remember that by the 1930s, women in both the U.S. and Europe had only recently gained access to higher education, and after a long fight to win that right, Leff explains that, quote, "Some sentiments surfaced that the addition of refugee scholars would hold back the appointment of American women." End quote. Yay nativism. Oh, fuck.
Leila: And one thing to point out with all of this so that, whether they were taking in women or men, is that there was this aversion to giving any sort of money to a foreign person. And this is in the context of coming out of, and in some places still very much in the throes of, the Great Depression in the early 1930s. But there was this idea of them not being a burden. And that's one of the reasons the Emergency Committee helped pay for their salaries, was so that they wouldn't be a, quote-unquote, "public charge." So it's real gross.
KJ: Love the implication. Yeah.
Rebecca: I'm sorry. These are fancy people. And not that they were able to bring their wealth with them, but it just shows the deep irrationality of the "Oh, but these foreign people are gonna take our money."
KJ: Right. It's people who already are part of the elite where they're from. They have connections. They have status. They have networks. And then to winnow it down to four. That's the number that keeps getting me. Fucking four. Four, right? Ugh. Yeah. Okay.
KJ: And on top of that, women's colleges were not financially or materially set up to accommodate research scientists like Noether and Geringer. Women's colleges were primarily teaching institutions. And that's unlike universities, such as Harvard and Yale, that supported both.
KJ: So Geringer, for example, was the first woman in Germany to become a lecturer in applied mathematics, and she was a professor for five years at Istanbul University, where she published over a dozen research articles and books. But no university in the U.S. would take her, sometimes explicitly citing her gender as a reason, and she was never able to pick up her research again.
Leila: Yeah. And one thing also about Geringer. Earlier, I can't remember who said it, but that universities were more likely to take in scientists whose field was desirable at that time. And as an applied mathematician, applied mathematics is usually popular when there is a need for it because it is applied math, right? It's being applied to a specific thing. This was wartime. There was a need for applied mathematics. And she applied at Brown University, which was a hub for applied mathematics in the U.S., and she still couldn't get a job there. So that reasoning didn't even matter for women, about the field being applicable.
Leila: And the reality for most women scholars was that they were not eligible for non-quota visas at all. The State Department didn't qualify archivists, librarians, and researchers under Section 4d. And these were the positions women were most likely to get in the U.S. because those are gendered positions. Some were still able to emigrate on regular visas, but many were not.
Leila: And even being world class couldn't save some of these women. Leff cites the case of Marie Anna Schirmann, a physicist from the University of Vienna who was the first person to confirm static electricity between solid bodies and gases. She was also an inventor who obtained several patents for devices she used in her own research
Leila: But despite her obvious skill and brilliance, she was denied professorship at the Physical Institute of Vienna in 1930 because she was both Jewish and female, so she was forced to stay in a research position. Records from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum show that Schirmann was registered at Modliborzyce Ghetto in Poland between 1939 and 1944, where she died before the end of the war, likely in an extermination camp.
Rebecca: The story about the U.S.'s role in World War II is still largely celebratory, but we really need to be honest with ourselves about what really happened. The U.S. could have done more but didn't and instead carried on with business as usual. And when we look at the story through the experiences of women and through the lens of gender, we see even more systemic failures to do more.
Leila: One of the things that's really fuckin' me up about this is when, Rebecca, you were talking about all the things that these women went through before they even got to the U.S. They were on their way to a concentration camp before they came here and fleeing from country to country and stuff like that.
Leila: A lot of them, to make money, still had to be working in some capacity during this time of going from country to country and stuff. And then also, then when they got here, they were supposed to start working at their new jobs. I'm such a fragile, tiny baby that these last four days—five days—of waiting for election results has rendered me incapable of logical thought. That these women were able to do that, and they had to to survive, but it just blows my mind that they were able to do that.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. It's like whoever it was that was sitting in Lisbon knowing that she was gonna get sent to a concentration camp any moment, and then she got the job at Bryn Mawr. And just the kind of just day-to-day horror of not knowing whether you could be a college professor or someone in a concentration camp. Jesus.
Leila: When I was reading Leff's book, when anyone was denied a job, their rejection letters were very much like they knew that if they were denying them a job, that they were sending them to likely their death if not to waste away in a camp or a ghetto. And still the rejection letters that they got was something probably you'd still get today. Just a very much "I'm sorry we can't accept you at this time."
KJ: It is that kind of banality of evil, right? Not to bastardize Arendt, but it's that same idea of just like, "Well, it's just what we can and can't do at this time. It's nothing personal. It's we can't afford this at this time." It's like, "But you know what you know, right? And by this point, if somebody's applying for you, you know what's on the wall."
Rebecca: And the little, bitty things like, "Oh, right, because you have to have a comparable job waiting for you to get this visa." And so not to throw in some contemporary thinking about academia, but you can't get an alt-ac job that's perfectly fine. You can't become an archivist.
KJ: Well, as former academics, right? Literally, as people who have all left the Academy in various ways, it's like your mom telling you, "Can't you just apply for this job at Brown? It's right there." It's like, "No, Ma. And it’s in microbiology, no."
Rebecca: Yeah. And this feels like that but with literal life-and-death stakes. It's like, "No, you can't get this visa if you just wanna be a researcher or a librarian or a high school teacher because you just need to get outta the country."
Leila: Yeah. And there were a lot of people. I mean, there were people that were willing to do anything. There was one woman. She was an archaeologist, I think. And she ended up coming to work as a domestic. For her qualifications for that, she just cited being able to be an archaeologist and have four kids at the same time. So she was like, "I know how to manage a house."
Rebecca: Which that's legit.
Leila: Yeah. It is legit.
Rebecca: That's kind of amazing.
Leila: Yeah. But that they were willing to give up their careers and whatever just to be able to come here and live.
KJ: What's doubly heinous is the U.S. is obsessed with brainpower at this point, during the war and after the war. This is how we get standardized testing to be such a thing, is they were obsessed with brainpower and utilizing it, right? So it's not like they couldn't connect—this is a two-piece puzzle, right? It's not that difficult. It's deliberate and on purpose and something that has to be looked at right in the face.
Rebecca: Yeah. It's obviously important to study the history of people who are not the elites, but sometimes you have these moments where you're like, "Even people who are—everything that our complicated and flawed society is saying that they value for probably reasons that we don't love, you can do all the things right and still, like, 'Well, but you're a woman. Well, you're Jewish. Well, you're a weird foreigner. We don't have time for you.'"
Leila: Right. Exactly. And I've researched some of these women individually, so I can't speak for all of them, but I know that Noether and Geringer also held very left-leaning politics as well. Noether held very strong Marxist politics. And so that was yet another thing. A little too left. A little too Jewish. A little too female.
Leila: And so all of those things, both in Germany and the U.S., just kind of collided into this perfect storm of basically rejection and suffering at every turn. And I do wanna point out how shitty the universities were, the Ivies especially, but especially Harvard. I wanna take a moment to shit on Harvard.
Rebecca: Please. Please do.
Leila: All the Ivies were kind of stingy in the positions that they were handing out. But for most of the '30s, Harvard didn't accept any. There was a write-up in the New York Times that called them out for that. They listed the universities that had taken in refugee scholars, and they were all but Harvard.
Leila: And the Harvard administrator threw just a downright hissy and was like, "No, we have accepted three." But then it turned out that they weren't really refugees. They were people who were already living in the U.S. or something like that. So I just wanted to take a moment to shit on Harvard.
Leila: If you go to Harvard and you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure you're lovely because you're listening to this podcast and agree with the things that we say, so please continue to listen to the podcast.
KJ: Please, please go to our Patreon.
Rebecca: Yes, I mean, I feel like we know many people who work or went to Harvard who would be like, "Yeah, fuck Harvard."
Leila: Mm-hmm. And I also wanna head off anyone that's like, "Well, lotsa people didn't make it out and lotsa people died, so why should we care about these four women who did make it to the U.S. and got jobs?"
Leila: And I think it's really important to examine this whole story through the experiences of women because if we don't, we're not gonna see the gendered language of the Immigration Act, of the non-quota visa. We're not going to understand the gender discrimination that made it harder for certain groups to immigrate. It's really important that we do kind of zero in on those specific experiences because if we don't examine it from all these different angles, then if we try to do better, we're gonna miss that stuff.
KJ: For sure. It is something that it's like—oh, scrap the sentence. It fell outta my head. Sorry. It died on the table. I'm sorry.
Rebecca: It's that kinda day. That was a pretty great line to end on.
KJ: I think that's why I let that one die. I'm like, "No. Don't pull focus. That's a great line."
Leila: If you liked our episode today, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions for us about any of the topics we discussed, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
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Image credit: Illustration of immigrants on deck of the steamer Germanic. Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, July 2, 1887 (Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain)
