It's not just the ones that left that defined a loss, but the students and university departments, the human infrastructure, that suffered as a result.

One of my astronomy professors, in a contemplative mood one day, confessed that in astronomy and physics most ground-breaking and creative work was done by young men in their twenties and thirties. He had a distinguished career in his specialty, but was ready to admit that he could best serve science now by running the department, taking care of the political and administrative trivia so the really important work could be done by his graduate students and young PhDs.

He said his reputation no longer depended on his own research, but on the research of his subordinates and his students, and in the departments and universities they would eventually work at. That is how the success of his later years would be judged and how his own career would ultimately be remembered. I always found it reassuring that a man of his stature had come to the same conclusion that I was starting to suspect myself even then, and which I am convinced of today. The role of the manager, the executive, is an essential one, and certainly important. But it is primarily a support role, not a front-line, productive one. What really matters is what goes on on the shop floor, on the front counter, in the laboratory.

Germany did not just lose 140 mathematicians. It had the heart ripped out of its mathematical body. And although I don't doubt that there are brilliant individual mathematicians and strong university departments in Germany today, I wonder if their mathematical infrastructure has fully recovered from that loss.