"Within the space of a few weeks, Hitler had destroyed the great Gottingen tradition forged by Gauss, Riemann, Dirichlet and Hilbert. One commentator wrote that it was 'one of the greatest tragedies experienced by human culture since the time of the Renaissance'. Gottingen (and some might argue, German mathematics itself) has never recovered from its destruction by Nazi Germany during the thirties. Hilbert died on St. Valentine's Day in 1943... his death marked the end of the city's position as the Mecca of mathematics."

The central rational for the initial Nazi assault on the Gottingen department of mathematics was its Marxist leanings, with Nazi street protests decrying the 'fortress of Marxism'. Note that 'Landau, who was Jewish, was allowed to stay because he had been appointed before the outbreak of the First World War. The non-Aryan clause in the civil-service law of April 1933 did not apply to long-serving professors or those who had fought in the war.' Later Landau was targeted for his Jewishness, forced to resign, and died in 1938 in Germany after a bried exodus to Britain.

People should be somewhat cautious in applying these historical examples to the USA today - indeed, the corruption of the American academic system began long ago in the 1980s, when Bayh-Dole legislation initiated the corporatization of research via the exclusive licensing of tax-payer funded research to private interests, who then stopped financing their own proprietary industrial research centers like Bell Labs. Now American universities are packed with shady entrepreneurs who routinely cook data and found startups in the hope of large financial payouts via acquistion by large corporations. This has lead to rampant fraud, a culture of secrecy and distrust, and various other ills.