By Christy DeSmith for the Harvard Gazette

In the 1930s and ’40s, Harvard College Observatory director Harlow Shapley poured great effort into rescuing colleagues from the Nazi terror spreading across Europe

“These refugee scholars, to be sure, take some of my time from the stars,” the astronomer wrote in an appeal to a philanthropist in 1940. “But the stars will not be of much good to us if we do not preserve the minds with which to comprehend them.”

Shapley turned up repeatedly in a panel held March 21 at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. The event, “Refugees (Not) Welcome: European Exile Scholars at Harvard in the 1930s and 1940s,” covered both the indifferent responses of certain top administrators of the era and the more noble actions of Shapley and other faculty members. It was sponsored by the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History and moderated by Peter E. Gordon, colloquium chair and the Amabel B. James Professor of History.