The scope of Nazi repression varied within the academic community both with respect to the scope, and with respect to intensity and long-term consequences for individual academic fields and institutions.

Based on available materials, we have, as part of the project, selected some 180 persons who were directly victims of Nazi persecution. For the purposes of this project, we define academic and scientific elites as consisting of those persons who achieved the academic title of regular or extraordinary professor, docent or private docent (roughly the equivalent of lecturer or associate professor), or were awarded these titles in memoriam, eventually those, who regularly (and repeatedly) published articles in respected contemporary academic journals. One should note that our selection therefore does not include any of the Czech students who died after November 17, 1939 in German prisons and concentration camps.

According to specialisation and profession, the largest group consists of physicians, who are followed by biologists, academics active in humanities (historians, lawyers, sociologists, and philosophers), technical specialists, and physicists. Of academic institutions, mainly the Prague and Brno universities are represented.

Typologically, one can distinguish between persons who were

 

The scope of persecution, which varied between one case and the next, also had, to different degrees, an impact on close relatives. This is described separately in individual biographical entries.

Entries include basic information about the family background, education, professional career and growth, and importance for a given academic field, and capture the consequences, which occupation had for the individual in question, the causes, progress, and implications of persecution, and eventual post-war awards, which usually took the form of post memoriam awarded academic titles. Entries are accompanied by an overview of archive materials, secondary literature, (selected) bibliography, and where available, a photography.