A historiographic study of stages, places, and forms of persecution to which the scientific and intellectual elites were subjected in 1939—1945 is an integral part of any analysis of the impact which the Nazi occupation had on the composition of the scientific and academic community in the Czech lands.

The selected sample of 180 persons constitutes a representative cross-section of the broad range of reasons which motivated the German occupation authorities in their repressive actions against prominent representatives of scientific and intellectual life in the Czech lands in 2nd half of 1930s and 1st half of 1940s. These motives include the racial ideology, an attempt to undermine the very basis of a national community, efforts to suppress any national resistance, as well as a ‘mere’ elimination of persons whose existence was discomforting to the Nazi occupation regime for political or other reasons. The broad range of persecution of representatives of scientific and intellectual elite, and the spectrum of motivations -- national, racial, as well as political or ideological -- is reflected also in the topography of places where members of these intellectual and scientific elites suffered and died. The intellectual elites met their end in police custody and detention, prisons, places of execution, and in concentration camps, but also in Jewish ghettos and Nazi death camps, which were located on the territory of the occupied Czech lands, in the occupied eastern lands, and even on the territory of the Third Reich itself.

A study of the topography of terror and its particular manifestations in cases of selected representatives of scientific and intellectual elites helps make sure that a historiographic research of Nazi persecution does not lose sight of the particular human stories, of the immense suffering of particular individuals and their families. Jointly with an analysis of instruments of power of the Nazi occupation authorities and of the functioning of its persecution apparatus, this approach is also a necessary precondition of a sociological analysis looking at the destruction of the character of an individual within a system of state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime.