On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Honoring the Murdered Women Scientists Whose Absence Haunts My Book
For those who survived the Nazis and those who didn’t, what made the difference? Could the stories of those who escaped tell us what the others could have done differently? These were some of the questions I set out to interrogate when writing my second book, Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. I found the harrowing stories of four women academics who escaped, but what about those left behind?
Elisabeth Wollman. Stefanie Horovitz. Marie Anna Schirmann. Henriette Burchardt. Helene Jacobi. These trailblazing women scientists were all murdered by the Nazis. Their absence haunted me deeply throughout the writing of this book. But none more than Leonore Brecher. So much so that my editor had to ask me to cut Brecher’s presence a bit. She wasn’t one of my main subjects—wasn’t even a secondary character in their stories—so she was indeed becoming a distraction to the central narrative. But I just couldn’t get her out of my head.
This scientist who specialized in butterflies, brutally murdered by the Nazis because she was Jewish. The horrific juxtaposition of a woman obsessed with butterflies shot in cold blood into an open pit. Did any butterflies or moths flit around her on her final walk into the woods? Would they have brought a small measure of cosmic comfort in her last moments or acted as a grim reminder of all the biological mysteries she was leaving behind?
What haunted me the most was that I could see little difference between her actions and those of the four women I focused on who escaped with their lives. Brecher seems to have sent just as many desperate missives as the others; reaching out to all the same agencies, organizations, and institutions looking for funding or a job to whisk her out of Nazi territory to safety. Why did she fail while others succeeded?
Born in Romania, Brecher earned her doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1916, working at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Experimental Biology under eminent biologist Hans Przibram. Her thesis discussed the pupae coloration of the cabbage white butterfly.
Like so many other women at the time, she fought sexism, anti-Semitism, and financial hardship for her entire career. When most male students would be pursuing paid research positions and professorships, Brecher endured a stint teaching girls’ school, then returned to the Institute as Przibram’s unpaid assistant. When her family could no longer afford to support her, Brecher applied to be promoted to a paid assistantship. She didn’t get it, so was forced to teach adult education courses to make ends meet.
Brecher presented her findings on butterfly pupae and rats that proved the theory of heritability in acquired characteristics at the 1922 meeting of the German Society for Genetics. She applied to pursue habilitation (certification to teach university) at the University of Vienna in 1923. By this time, she'd published over 20 scientific papers. She was rejected based on her gender and Jewish ancestry. Officially, her rejection was couched in terms of her lack of ability to “maintain the authority required of a lecturer over the students,” but in actuality, it was orchestrated by a secret anti-Semitic club of professors known as the Bärenhöhle (“bear cave”) that sought to exclude and discredit Jewish academics.
Instead, funding from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and other organizations sent her on a series of fellowships conducting research at various institutes in Germany and the UK for a few years each: the Pathological Institute at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelms University, the Biochemical Institute at Cambridge University, the Rostock Zoological Institute, Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. In 1933, the Nazis came to power and dismissed Brecher from her university work for being Jewish.
Brecher frantically reached the AAUW, the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) in Britain, the International Federation of University Women (IFUW), and the International Federation of Business and Professional Women—anyone she could think of to rescue her. All to no avail. The SPSL rejected her funding application because her field of research was too specialized and she was too old (47).
She also wrote to the recently formed US Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, asking board member Leslie Dunn for help finding a job in America, preferably in his Columbia University genetics lab. Securing a job abroad sight unseen was the key to survival for most academics. Because institutionalized sexism and anti-Semitism ensured women were held back from advancing in their careers, on paper, they looked like less qualified candidates than men. Not to mention that universities in other countries could be just as sexist.
The Emergency Committee couldn’t help her, Dunn explained, because she hadn’t already procured an American job offer. Furthermore, so far, only older, more established (and more male) refugee scientists had been successful in getting those. (So which is it? Is she too old or too young?) The chances of foreigners finding employment in America “are extremely bad just now,” Dunn told Brecher in December 1933.
But Brecher’s problems, like many European Jews, were just beginning. US quotas allowed only 603 Romanian immigrants per year. Her number on the US visa waiting list was 3,749—meaning it was six years away from being called. She continued pestering Dunn for help.
“I am not very hopeful,” Dunn eventually responded to her the following May. The Emergency Committee secretary concluded that it was Brecher’s difficult personality that made it so hard for her to secure a permanent job offer.
In the meantime, the Emergency Association of German Science had at least helped her flee Germany and secure a job back at the Institute for Experimental Biology in Vienna. But she hadn’t fled far enough. When Hitler soon annexed Austria, she was fired once again.
Brecher traveled to Wales for a temporary unpaid research role at the University of Cardiff but was forced to return to Vienna when no paid position materialized. She accepted a large demotion when she took a job teaching at one of Vienna’s Jewish schools. At least she had the company of two fellow former colleagues from the Institute: Henriette Burchardt and Helene Jacobi.
But Jewish people merely struggling to find jobs wasn’t enough for the Nazis. They wanted them dead.
On September 14, 1942, Brecher was deported to Maly Trostenets, a massive extermination camp in Belarus near Minsk. A few days later, she was among those escorted into the woods and shot into open pits. (Jacobi was murdered in Maly Trostenets on May 26, 1942; Burchardt was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 23, 1944, and murdered.)
When comparing Brecher’s actions to those of the women academics who successfully fled the Nazis, I couldn’t see much of a difference. All cases left behind a mountain of desperate letters: what else was there to do? Was Brecher’s personality really “difficult” or was she merely a confident woman with a niche scientific obsession who spoke her mind? Most women who found jobs abroad did so by sheer luck. The difference between life and death seemed to be one college administrator willing to take a chance on you.
I struggle to make sense of this because the Holocaust is senseless. So much brilliance wasted, so much potential uncultivated thanks to hatred. Brecher the butterfly woman will continue to haunt me because her story was cut short. Her life was too fleeting; gone in the blink of wings.
Further Reading
“Destroyed research in Nazi Vienna: The tragic fate of the Institute for Experimental Biology in Austria” by Klaus Taschwer. Mètode Science Studies Journal, Vol. 10, 2020.
“Worked Together in the Lab, Murdered Together in Auschwitz” by Ettay Nevo. Davidson Institute of Science Education, May 9, 2024.
“Stefanie Horovitz – the woman behind the isotope,” By Katharine Sanderson. Chemistry World, September 7, 2020.
“The Scientific Exploitation of Marie Anna Schirmann: A Study of Intersectional Discrimination in Academia during the Holocaust” by Jason Lemberg. From the book New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023.
More About Me
Olivia Campbell is the New York Times bestselling author of Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine and Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. Signed copies are available online at Newtown Bookshop and Doylestown Bookshop.
A seasoned journalist and essayist, her work centers on women’s history, science and health as it relates to women, nature/environment/ecology, quirky pop psychology, and the intersections of all these areas.
Campbell is a thesis advisor for her alma mater, Johns Hopkins University's science writing master’s degree program, and a freelance editor at Parents magazine and Everyday Health. She’s the resident “science of folklore” contributor at National Geographic. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Aeon, and History.com, among others. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband, sons, and cats.
Find out more on her website.
Fascinating piece on this Holocaust Remembrance Day. Painful to read about someone so wounded - and ultimately killed - by both sexism and antisemitism.