Mathwar/Personlist/Bernstein Felix
Felix Bernstein
(* February 24th 1878 in Halle, † December 3rd 1956 in Zürich)
Life
World War I began in 1914 but Bernstein received medical exemption from military service. However he still had to contribute to the war effort and he was made head of the statistical branch of the Office of Rationing in Berlin. The war ended in 1918 but Bernstein continued to hold government roles becoming Commissioner of Finance in 1921. Also in 1921 he was elected ordinary professor (full professor) at Göttingen and he founded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics there. In 1928 Bernstein spent time at Harvard in the United States as a visiting professor. There he worked on epidemiology, returning to the United States over the next few years to take up other visiting professorships.
On 30 January 1933 the National Socialist party led by Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler, as Chancellor of Germany, immediately announced legal action against Germany's Jews. On 7 April 1933 the Nazis introduced a law for the "Restoration of the civil service". This meant that all non-Aryans and Jewish civil servants were dismissed from their positions with the exception of those who either had fought in the Great War or had been in office since August 1914. The exemptions should have meant that Bernstein was unaffected but, like almost all Jewish academics, he was deprived of his chair in 1934. Bernstein then managed to emigrate with his family to the United States, since the anthropologist Franz Boas had obtained funds to support him for a year at Columbia University and had the agreement of the university that they would offer him a permanent position at the end of the year.