munich

The University of Rostock has become the first east German university formally to apologize for removing academic titles on racial or political grounds during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945. The university has said that the derecognition of academic qualifications was an “arbitrary measure” that was illegal and invalid.

The university has found in its archives 15 cases of derecognition, all involving Jewish male academics. Only one of them, Georg Cohn, still had a university post at the time. The others had fled Germany earlier, and so were automatically branded as political traitors by the Nazi regime.

The university's investigations also showed that derecognition of doctorates was first proposed by German students, not by the Nazi government. In a letter sent to the Bavarian ministry of education in September 1933, the “German student body — Bavaria district” requested that the ministry strip of their doctorates “traitors who left the country”. The proposal was eagerly pursued by ministries and universities all over Germany.

Angela Hartwig, head of the University of Rostock's archives, says that, when enquiries from Nature drew attention to the fact that the derecognitions had never been annulled, the university felt the need to compensate for the political injustice that had occurred during the Nazi era (see Nature 391, 112; 1998).