1933: The Creation of the Academic Assistance Council

While travelling in Austria in April 1933, the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge learned of the Nazi decree which dismissed academics from their university posts on political and/or antisemitic grounds. Upon his return to the UK, he, along with leading British academics, including Nobel laureates Ernest Rutherford and A.V. Hill, who was also Cambridge University MP, founded the “Academic Assistance Council” (AAC) shortly afterwards. 

The AAC, whose first offices were located in the top floor of the Royal Society in London, was created to offer humanitarian assistance in the form of moral, financial and material support to scholars employed at German universities intending to flee Nazi persecution.  It mobilised networks of diplomats, academics, and university administrators to provide vital information, such as travel advice, and to arrange a safe haven with British universities by offering fellowships, stipends and institutional affiliation to refugee scholars.  In 1936, the AAC was reformed as the “Society for the Protection of the Sciences and Learning” (SPSL) and facilitated the rescue of displaced Austrian and German scholars not only to Britain, but to universities around the world.  The SPSL exists today as the “Council for At-Risk Academics” (CARA).