With these words, Hitler closed the door on Germany’s fifty-year record of world supremacy in science. The exodus of German and Austrian scientists, mostly Jewish, that followed caused critical damage to Germany’s scientific output and brought invaluable gains to the West. The Third Reich’s losses included many of the leading physicists who later became the driving force behind the atomic bomb project. Of more than 1,500 refugees, fifteen went on to win Nobel Prizes. Among them were the co-discoverer of penicillin, the physician who revolutionized the treatment of paraplegics, and Max Perutz, who discovered the atomic structure of the hemoglobin molecule.

In this revelatory book, Jean Medawar and David Pyke tell the countless gripping individual stories of emigration, rescue, and escape, including that of Einstein, the world’s most famous scientist; Fritz Haber, the German-Jewish patriot who galvanized Germany’s war effort from 1914 to 1918, only to be forced out by Hitler; and Leo Szilard, the restless genius who disproved the scientific establishment’s belief that atomic chain reactions were "moonshine." The dilemmas of those who stayed are equally dramatic: Max Planck, German scientists’ father-figure, who could not believe the new regime would last; Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant inventor of the Uncertainty Principle, whose wartime record is still controversial; Max von Laue, revered at home and abroad for his heroic opposition to the Third Reich.

Jean Medawar and David Pyke describe the wartime internment and deportation of many refugee scientists who, although implacably opposed to the Nazis, were classed as enemy aliens by the countries to which they escaped. The invention of the atomic bomb is told in the context of the refugees’ crucial contribution. Also covered is the curious post-war Farm Hall episode, when scientists who had remained in Germany during the war were later interned in England, where their conversations were bugged by British intelligence.

The authors draw much of their material from interviews with more than twenty surviving refugee scholars to document a moving diaspora that resulted from Hitler’s policy. As one refugee scholar wrote, "Far from destroying the spirit of German scholarship, the Nazis had spread it all over the world. Only Germany was to be the loser."