Everything changed with the end of World War II. After 1945, one-third of all German researchers and teachers had to be laid off because they were tainted by their involvement with the Third Reich; another third had already been expelled or killed by the Nazi regime; and another third were simply too old. The result was that a new generation of relatively young and untrained academics were faced with the enormous task of rebuilding German science during the postwar reconstruction era. By then, "Germany, German science, and German as the language of science had all lost their leading position in the scientific community."