After the Nazi dictatorship was established in Germany in 1933, systematic persecution of Jews began, a persecution that was extended to political opponents of the Hitler regime. Jews and liberal Germans began to leave Germany where their jobs and even their physical safety were in doubt, and when Hitler took over Austria and Czechoslovakia, the trickle of refugees became a flood. The democratic countries of Europe and America were begged to admit homeless and jobless refugees, something they found difficult to do with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of their own citizens unemployed. Nevertheless, they did what they could. Canada's record, unhappily, was not one of the best, and relatively few refugees came to this country. Those who did made a valuable contribution to Canadian life. The German scientist Gerhard Herzberg, for example, lost his job in Germany because he had a Jewish wife and eventually succeeded in finding a job at the impoverished University of Saskatchewan. Herzberg subsequently had a distinguished career in Canada, becoming the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1971. This photograph shows wives of Jewish refugees farming the Edenbridge Colony in Saskatchewan in 1939.
