Scholars at Risk : Academic Networks and High-Skilled Emigration from Nazi Germany ∗

We study the role of networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of emigration from Nazi Germany, allowing us to estimate the causal e ect of professional networks for emigration decisions. Academics with ties to more colleagues who had emigrated in 1933 or 1934 (early émigrés) were more likely to emigrate. The early émigrés functioned as “bridging nodes” that helped other academics cross over to their destination. We show that for high-skilled migrants professional networks matter for migration decisions, while community networks do not matter at all. Furthermore, we contribute to the broader literature on networks in economics by providing some of the rst empirical evidence of decay in social ties over time. The strength of ties also decays across space, even within cities. Finally, we provide the rst comprehensive documentation of academics of Jewish origin and their fate whether they were murdered or escaped the Holocaust. ∗Becker: sascha.becker@monash.edu, Lindenthal: volker.lindenthal@econ.lmu. de, Mukand: S.Mukand@warwick.ac. uk, Waldinger: fabian.waldinger@econ.lmu. de. We thank Paul N. Courant, Luis Candelaria, Clement De Chaisemartin, Sybille Gerstengarbe, Dean Karlan, Paul Klemperer, James Kai-Sing Kung, Susanna Loeb, Andras Simonovits, Nico Voigtländer, Alina Yue Wang, and Yves Zenou for very insightful comments and conversations. We also greatly bene ted from suggestions by seminar audiences at ASSA San Diego, Frankfurt, Harvard, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Monash, Munich, NES Moscow, NYU, QUT Brisbane, Rome, Stellenbosch, Warwick, UBC, Zurich, the Ridge Virtual Forum 2020, and the CESifo Webinar on Labor Economics. Matthias Bing, Le Van Cao, Nora Fingado, Lukas Franz, Robert Johannes, Simon Kallmaier, Katharina Knuth, David Kreitmeir, Franz Oertel, and Tabea Rudolf provided outstanding research assistance. Sascha O. Becker and Sharun Mukand acknowledge nancial support by CAGE (ESRC grant no. ES/L011719/1). Volker Lindenthal gratefully acknowledges nancial support through a travel grant by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. Fabian Waldinger and Volker Lindenthal gratefully acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through CRC TRR 190 (Nr. 280092119). Scholars around the world are increasingly at risk. For example, there were 341 attacks on universities in 58 countries, in the period September 2019 to August 2020, alone (Scholars at Risk 2020). In recent years, academics have faced persecution in many countries, including Hong Kong (Normile 2020), Hungary (Enyedi 2018) and Turkey (Bohannon 2016). Throughout history, academics have been persecuted because of their ethnicity, political views, beliefs, or religion. Possibly, the most prominent example is the persecution of Jewish academics in Nazi Germany. Academics of Jewish origin in Weimar Germany were some of the greatest scienti c luminaries of the rst half of the 20th century. Nobel Laureates such as Albert Einstein, James Franck, and Max Born shaped modern physics. Fritz Haber, Otto Warburg, and George de Hevesy made some of the most important chemical discoveries of the time. Indeed, the list of prominent academics of Jewish origin cut across elds and included mathematicians such as John von Neumann and Emmy Noether, social scientists and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno and the art historian Erwin Panofsky. In many elds, German universities, especially Berlin and Göttingen, were considered among the world’s best. However, this ourishing academic culture came to a sudden halt in 1933 with the Nazi party coming to power. Jewish academics were targeted with demonstrations, class boycotts and sporadic violence. This culminated in the Nazi government’s initiation of mass dismissal of Jewish academics and political opponents. By 1939, around 20 percent of all German academics had lost their position (e.g. Hartshorne 1937, Grüttner and Kinas 2007). 1 The increasing persecution in Nazi Germany and the threat of deportation to camps, meant that academics of Jewish origin scrambled to escape through emigration. The United States and the United Kingdom received a disproportionate share of world-class academic émigrés; a gain that solidi ed the transition of scienti c leadership from Germany to the United States.2 In physics, they were instrumental in the success of the Manhattan project (Figure 1). For mathematics, Raymond D. Fosdick, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, argued in 1942 that: “If Hitler had set out, with benevolent intent, to build up America as the world’s great mathematical center, he could hardly have achieved more successfully the result which his ruthlessness has accomplished. During the last decade 131 leading European mathematicians have migrated to the United States. Of these, sixteen came from the faculty of Göttingen. The School of Advanced Study at Princeton, Brown University, New York University, Harvard, Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are only a few of the American institutions which have pro ted by this migration. ” (Foundation 1942, p. 27). 1It is important to note that dismissal did not imply emigration. Throughout the 1930s, there were no formal restrictions to emigrate from Nazi Germany. However, if emigration had taken place or was deemed imminent, the Nazis used the so-called “Reich Flight Tax” to con scate Jewish citizens’ assets. 2In the following years, they were joined by academics of Jewish origin from other European countries, e.g. the Nobel Laureates Emilio Segrè (physics) or Franco Modigliani (economics) who escaped from Fascist Italy.