Sir

Today, when freedom of the press and academia are in the news, along with the neglect or misuse of scientific results and theories by politicians, it may be useful to remember a time when political demagogy crushed these freedoms in Germany.

At the inauguration of the Philipp Lenard Institute in Heidelberg in 1936, German scientists and politicians started a campaign against Nature that succeeded in having the journal banned from libraries.

Nature's correspondents were accused of having created an anti-fascist espionage organization in Germany and Italy, starting in 1933. It was claimed in the science journal Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft that Nature was filled with propaganda against the Nazi regime, “mostly based on democratic-liberal and Jewish feelings of hatred” (H. Rügemer Z. ges. Naturwiss. 3, 475–476; 1938). Leading articles such as “Freedom of the mind” (Nature 139, 941–942; 1937) and “Science and peace” (Nature 139, 979–981; 1937) were listed as examples.

“When the abominable Jewish journal Nature speaks of the oppression of the spirit, it only means our termination, out of a sense of responsibility, of an activity by Jews and Jews-in-spirit directed at the destruction of the foundations of Aryan science in German culture,” the Zeitschrift article concluded. The science minister, Bernhard Rust, took action.

“In the weekly science magazine Nature, appearing in London, papers are often published that contain outrageous and mean attacks on German science and the National Socialist state. Therefore, this journal must be expelled from general use in scientific libraries,” he decreed in November 1937.

And expelled it was, until the end of the Second World War.

As this example shows, restricting academic freedom is a dangerous path to take. We need to resist all attempts to go down this road in the twenty-first century.