Refugee historians from Nazi Germany

In the 19th century, a large number of German academics of Jewish origin converted to Protestantism for professional reasons; Jewish historians were discriminated against by German universities for a long time. After Bismarck, German Protestantism combined subservience to the state and anti-Judaism into a nationalistic attitude that became racist and largely amenable to Nazism. The majority of German historians in the early 20th century opposed democracy and harbored antisemitic prejudices; this even characterized some converts from Judaism. Such right-wingers saw no place for Jews in Germany, and a number of them sympathized with Hitler. A smaller number of committed democrats with marginal academic positions (including non-Jews) fled, mostly to the U.S. They and younger U.S.-educated refugees contributed to the study of German history, including the Nazi rise to power. Émigré scholars also helped plan for a postwar democratic Germany. In West Germany, nationalistic historians continued to reject Germany's responsibility for Nazism. However, German reunification did not lead to a reassertion of nationalism as the lessons of the failure of the Nazi regime had been internalized. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)