BLIGHT OF WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 March 1941, Page 6

BLIGHT OF WAR

LIGHTS OF LEARNING FADING UNDER NAZI AND SOVIET USURPATION. ROCKEFELLER PRESIDENT'S LAMENT. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright I (Received This Day, 11.55 a.m.) NEW YORK, March 21. The war's toll in terms of science was given in detail today in the annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation, which complained that in the shadows that are deepening over Europe, the lights of learning are fading one by one. The president, Mr Raymond B. Fosdick, described the plight of universities and scholars in the countries over-run by Germany and Russia as appalling, and reported that the war had forced the Foundation to close its Paris office, to transfer its Shanghai office to Manila and to stop its malaria research in Egypt, sanitary engineering experiments in Turkey, scarlet fever studies in Rumania and its influenza research in Hungary. “To sit by and watch the disappearance, or decadence, or worse, the perversion, of institutions of learning which in earlier and better years wo were privileged 0 assist, is not,” he said, “an easy assignment. It is even more difficult to see brilliant men. with whose work we were associated, now driven from the posts for which they were trained. Some of them are fugitives, some are in concentration camps. Many of them are separated from their families.” Mr Fosdick said that as the German forces occupied one country after another they had followed a pattern with schools, first permitting them to continue teaching under German supervision and then enforcing a Nazi culture programme on them. In| Czechoslovakia 1 , Poland, Holland, 1 , Norway. Belgium and Paris, he said, the repression of scholastic freedom took the form of arrests, deportations and even breaking up demonstrations with machine-guns and tanks. Similar conditions prevailed in the Baltic States seized by Russia, where many professors had disappeared or were imprisoned. Mr Fosdick said the Rockefeller Foundation had spent nearly ten million dollars in 1940 in the fields of public health, natural science, social science, medical science and the humanities.