Abstract
Poland suffered grave losses of human life during the German occupation and these included more than two thousand scientists, scholars, artists, men of letters, and members of the professional classes, who were either shot by the firing squads of the German army or perished in concentration camps27. Philosophers constituted a large group of those who were deliberately exterminated. The generation which grew up in the inter-war period might be described with some reason as a missing generation28. In the Warsaw rising (1944) many graduates and young research workers, some of them of great promise, were killed in the fighting against the Germans or fell victim to atrocities inflicted upon the population of the devastated but unconquered city. Many libraries were destroyed or removed to Germany. Individuals suffered similar losses to their private book collections and to manuscripts of works prepared for publication.