In the fall of 1933, English physiologist A.V. Hill forcibly denounced the brutal Nazi racial policies, which the Nazi anti-Semite Johannes Stark then defended. Rutherford was drawn into the dispute in early 1934 and responded by first reviewing the long history of racial tolerance and academic freedom in England, and then by appealing for support for the Academic Assistance Council to help refugees. Among them were nuclear physicists Rudolf Peierls, Otto Robert Frisch, Maurice and Gertrude Goldhaber, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Walter Elsasser, who like many before him never forgot the first time he saw the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, knowing that he had been given the chance for a new start in life.
