Abstract
In the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler and Stalin devised to partition Poland for all future. Toward their goal of enslaving the nation, the Nazis systematically exterminated the Polish intelligentsia and prohibited tertiary education to create a nation of serfs. Still, the Soviets and their lieutenants continued a policy with similar if largely non-lethal effects for another 45 years under the banner of social engineering. The fate of the Lwów School of Mathematics is a prominent example of brute atrocities but also of great resilience, enduring creativity and irrepressible revival. Among the world’s most advanced biotopes of mathematics in the interwar period, the Lwów School suffered debilitating losses from Hitler’s genocide, wartime emigration, and the post-war brain drain of defections inspired by communism. The Scottish Café was perhaps the best-known liberal scholarly hotbed of cutting-edge mathematical ideas east of Göttingen, the caliber of its patrons reflective of the most noteworthy mine of mathematical talent outside of Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Moscow in its day. It is a conclusion strikingly evidenced by the Scottish Book: three-quarters of a century later, a quarter of the mathematical challenges described therein is still awaiting resolution.
Highlights
In the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler and Stalin devised to partition Poland for all future
The fate of the Lwów School of Mathematics is a prominent example of brute atrocities and of great resilience, enduring creativity and irrepressible revival
Among the world‟s most advanced biotopes of mathematics in the interwar period, the Lwów School suffered debilitating losses from Hitler‟s genocide, wartime emigration, and the post-war brain drain of defections inspired by communism
Summary
Pol Pot was not the first to target scholars for extinction. During six short years 1939–1945, all of Poland became the scene of some of the most abominable atrocities in human history: its neighbors Germany and Russia, under cover of deception and denial (Wirtz & Godson, 2002), set out to annihilate a millennium-old bastion of occidental culture through unprecedented industrial-scale occupation, deportation, subjugation and expropriation of a nation of almost forty million, assassinating one-fifth of its population (Piotrowski, 1998), installing on its territory the extermination camps of the Holocaust, spoken of only in hushed tones even by historians seventy years after the events, and perpetuating for more than forty years after World War II socio-political engineering through restriction on education that inflicted enduring damages on Poland. Hitler certainly did not mince words about his intentions: Once more the Führer must point out that the Poles can only have one master, and that is the German; two masters cannot and must not exist side by side; all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia should be eliminated. This sounds harsh, but such are the laws of life.. Himmler was even more explicit: For the non-German population of the East there can be no type of school above the four-grade rudimentary school. From 1939–1989, a ferocious battle was waged against the elites of the Polish nation by its neighbors in at least eight chronologically distinguishable operations (see Table 1)
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