Jean Medawar, David Pyke

Richard Cohen, £20, pp 268 

ISBN 1 86066 172 6

Rating:

Within three months of Hitler coming to power in January 1933, virtually all Jews in state institutions, which included most universities, had been sacked. Anti-Semitism had been rife in Europe for years, but the scale of the purge was unprecedented; some of the best departments were decimated.

William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics and "father" of the NHS, and Lionel Robbins (later Lord Robbins), who were both holidaying in Vienna, devised a rescue plan. They got their staff to pledge a part of their salaries and rallied influential people; a letter to the Times signed by 42 distinguished scholars announced the establishment of an Academic Assistance Council with Lord Rutherford as chairman and the neurophysiologist A V Hill as secretary.

Although the British and US governments were cautious about helping because of the economic slump and widespread unemployment, individual scientists like Henry Dale, Gowland Hopkins, J B S Haldane, and J H Burn found places in their laboratories. Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) went on a "shopping trip" in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to Germany to recruit likely people for the Clarendon, which badly needed rejuvenating. From the start the Rockefeller Foundation offered invaluable financial support.

Hitler's Gift is the uplifting story of a small selection of the foreign scientists who fled to Britain and the United States to escape Nazi tyranny. Many of the physicistssuch as Albert Einstein (at one time with a price on his head), Max Born, and Erwin Schrödingeralready had international reputations. As is well known, many were recruited to develop the atomic bomb; the complex theoretical background to this is lucidly analysed in a separate chapter, for which "lay" readers will be grateful. Among the biologists, Wilhelm Feldberg, Hans Krebs, Ernst Chain, and Max Perutz (who provides a spirited foreword) were some of those who contributed to medical science.

This passionate account, by two authors with personal experience of some of the players, is an illuminating and timely tribute. And it was not only scientists to whom we owe an enormous debt: Jean Medawar writes that her late husband, Sir Peter Medawar, transplant pioneer and Nobel laureate, "used to say that the three greatest Englishmen he knew were Ernst Gombrich, Max Perutz, and Karl Popperart historian, biologist, and philosopherall from Vienna."

Alex Paton, retired consultant physician. 

Oxfordshire