Abstract
ON November 26 a meeting unparalleled in the history of science was held at the Royal Institution, where, in the presence of the Presidents of Poland and Czechoslovakia and General Petit (representing General de Gaulle), representatives of scientific institutions and associations from Great Britain and men of science and letters of many nations met to pay homage to the memory of the Polish professors and lecturers who had died as the result of German barbarism, and to register their protest against this crime on science and culture. Sir David Ross, vice–chancellor of the University of Oxford, who presided over the meeting, stated that the Germans are endeavouring to convert Poland into a vassal country by depriving her of her leaders, and that their brutalities fall mostly on academic life. November, 1941 is the second anniversary of the beginning of their many atrocities against science and learning, when the whole of the professorial and lecturing staff of the Jagellonian University in Cracow, the oldest in eastern Europe, was arrested and imprisoned for no other crime than that of being Poles. He described their tortures and humiliations and concluded by saying that the action of the Germans has had the opposite effect to that desired, and the suffering professors have become a symbol of martyred Poland. Dr. Gilbert Murray said that when war breaks out the first casualty is truth, but never has the lie been organized as it now is in Germany.
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Martyrdom of Polish Men of Science. Nature 148, 688 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/148688b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/148688b0