... who headed Gebrüder Gumbel and other family enterprises in Heilbronn from 1889 until his death, frequently visited his relatives in Munich. There he talked at length with his nephew about political and social issues and related to Emil the family's liberal tradition ... Indeed, upon his death in 1930, a Heilbronn newspaper wrote of Abraham Gumbel that he had stood "intellectually at the furthest wing of leftist-oriented beliefs." Abraham's radical political ideas "were the red flag" for his brother Hermann, but they provided a pole to which young Emil, who did not get along with his father, could gravitate.

I was still young enough in 1914 to be confused by all the patriotic talk I heard around me [and felt] not quite certain about the real issues of the war.

Emil's relationship with his uncle may be counted among the factors that led Emil to his anti-war stance, since he undoubtedly shared Abraham's anguish over the death of his son (Emil's first cousin) in the first days of the Great War. This loss drove Abraham into outspoken opposition to the war and the Hohenzollern dynasty, which he blamed for the senseless conflict. Thereafter Abraham became a leading amateur investigator of the origins of the war; contemporaries regarded him as one of the two Germans most knowledgeable on the subject. Emil grew to admire and emulate his uncle's refusal to be influenced, as Emil put it, by "the prevailing opinion, that is, the opinion of the rulers," and by "the cry of the street." Emil loved and respected his model like no other: "He remained a voice in the wilderness .. He loved truth; he was upstanding and free."

Gumbel paid dearly for his outspoken and uncompromising pacifism. Only his absence spared his life when a squad of right-wing, paramilitary soldiers arrived at his Berlin apartment one day in March 1919. He was bloodied by nationalist thugs a year later in Berlin as he presided at a pacifist rally at which his comrade Hellmuth von Gerlach was beaten senseless; Gumbel gave the subsequent lectures in Gerlach's stead.

Carefully researched, this book contains a collection of documents and reports on the political murders committed in Germany since January 1919. Gumbel's sources included court records, verdicts, decisions regarding the dismissal of cases, witness statements, communications from lawyers, relatives of the bereaved, and newspaper articles. ... Gumbel compiled tables comparing the murders committed by the political left with those committed by the right, as well as the ratio of the sentences to each other. His result: 22 murders committed by the left were punished with an average of 15 years in prison, whereas 332 murders committed by the right were punished with an average of only four months.

... because the Weimar coalition was so intent on preventing a Bolshevik-style revolution in Germany, it nurtured anti-republican forces whose ultimate goal was to put an end to the republic. Despite being presented with clear evidence of this danger, Gumbel lamented that, "seldom do people allow themselves to be genuinely persuaded by the facts."

... followed the example of the French League for Human Rights, fights for pacifism, democracy, and socialism, and specifically advocates for persecuted left-wing radical journalists.

... to honour the war dead who I will not say, fell on a field of dishonour, but who nevertheless died a horrible death.

After a lengthy University disciplinary hearing, Gumbel's colleagues and the Baden Minister of Culture and Education concluded that Gumbel had not intended to insult the German war dead and that his words had not violated the obligations according to the requirements of his position as a university professor. Thus, they chose not to expel Gumbel from the Heidelberg faculty. But they were sufficiently uneasy about his rhetoric that they took the unusual step of distributing to all German universities and newspapers a document criticising Gumbel's "basic lack of tact," and his alleged inability to "identify with the interests of the university."

In the absence of effective coalition efforts to undermine Nazism, Gumbel increased his own efforts to awaken the German public to the threat that Nazi war propaganda embodied. In November 1928, he spoke and wrote about "the coming war," which he characterised as the logical consequence of Nazi political activity. Over the next five years, the economist, the statistician, and the pacifist in Gumbel's work converged. Desperate to make people aware of the effects of modern warfare, Gumbel strengthened his efforts to discredit the symbols glorifying war and military heroism and to make clear war's destructive reality. In speeches and newspaper articles, he portrayed the German people as unwitting victims of an insensitive military state and repeated his belief that genuine heroism and patriotism lay in efforts to prevent future catastrophic wars.

Our house had a small garden where I worked on Sundays. I planted berry bushes, one or two apple trees, flowers, tomatoes, and potatoes. They were always the most expensive tomatoes and potatoes in the world, but I enjoyed growing them. ... Behind the house was a small veranda, built on the same level as the kitchen, and we used to eat there. ... In the afternoons, I took the bus to the university; the bus stop was just five minutes away ... . We often went to political or academic events, a concert or a meeting, and occasionally to the cinema. The group we joined was sharply separated from the other groups at the university ... and the supporters of both factions never spoke to each other or greeted each other on the street.

On the one hand I had picnics with friends and skiing holidays in the Alps but, on the other hand, we suffered terror attacks by right-wing students against our house on Beethovenstrasse, and I was attacked by the Hitler Youth on a tram.

The men who dismissed me saved my life.

His scientific legacy, the book "Statistics of Extremes" (1958) is still standard today, every statistician knows the Gumbel distribution and the Gumbel copula and no hydraulic engineering project (such as dams or dykes) is realised without his formulas, which have also become common tools in many other areas (e.g. the calculations of breaking strengths of materials, lifetime distributions in insurance, financial losses in banking). Gumbel's political achievements, on the other hand, were largely forgotten ...

When Gumbel died in 1966, the transatlantic professional world mourned the loss of an excellent colleague. In Germany, on the other hand, he was almost forgotten, a man of whom one could have been proud because he had remained upright when others were writhing under the Nazi ideology.

In the face of the extremes of Nazism, we are usually concerned with the perpetrators and the victims, less with the roots of the violence and how it changed society. And we tend to forget the voices of those who tried to prevent the violence.

E J Gumbel was one of the best known and most hated enemies of the Nazis in his time. His notoriety was such that his name itself became a dirty word. The Nazis hated Gumbel because he uncompromisingly showed how the first German democracy sacrificed its ideals and the means by which the fascists came to power.