The Lost Scientists of WWII is a good read telling the stories of a number of scientists who applied to the British for asylum but who didn't make it: https://worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0436

One lesser-known and deeply unsettling fact from academic history is that a significant number of professors at major German universities supported the Nazi regime during its rise to power. Far from being passive bystanders, many actively embraced Nazi ideology, joined the party, or participated in the purge of Jewish and politically dissident faculty.

A detailed exploration of this phenomenon can be found in the books “Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany” by Robert P. Ericksen and “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus” by Richard J. Evans. An accessible summary is also available via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-role-o...

This isn’t just a historical footnote—it’s a sobering reminder of how institutions of knowledge can be wrong.

The most recent Veritasium video touched on this — Emmy Noether worked under Hilbert and made significant contributions to general relativity, worked at University of Göttingen (Jewish, and first woman professor) until 1933.

https://youtu.be/lcjdwSY2AzM?si=qVZdS1QTBgmMTX9r

Mathematics at Göttingen under the Nazis

Saunders Mac Lane

"Now in retrospect, the whole development is a decisive demonstration of the damage done to academic and mathematical life by any subor- dination to populism, political pressure and pro- posed political principles."

https://www.ams.org/notices/199510/maclane.pdf

This quote stood out:

  "It’s not so much that people are persecuted because of their
  beliefs, but there is a certain trend where careful reasoning, the
  search for truth, all the delicacies of having a balanced point of
  view, acting on facts, being honest about what you do and don’t
  know, your uncertainty, all these values we have in science and
  scholarship are at risk."

Isn't this epistemic crisis [0]. I think mistrust in the world increased to the extent the it got digital, but taking advantage of crisis, even conjuring untruth, mistrust and polycrisis [1] as a smokescreen strategy for taking control is also a basic Machiavelli thing, right?. This (epistemic injury) is more easily done to already traumatised people. Germans of 1930s, already reeling from recent war, were vulnerable to a rampage of anti-intellectualism and a bonfire of knowledge.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/book/26406/chapter/194768451

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20210209-the-greatest-s...