The Last Months of Gerhard Gentzen in Prague

Abstract

Paul Bernays (1888–1967) did not throw away any letter he had received, but carefully kept all of them. This is why there are 5,800 letters stored in his estate at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich (where he had lived after being expelled from Nazi Germany—from Göttingen). His office was a veritable archive. Georg Kreisel visited Paul Bernays several times and he seemingly read letters describing “the death of Gerhard Gentzen in a Prague prison.” The copies of those letters are, after the publication of my article about Gerhard Gentzen (PFMA 38(5), 1993), also in my possession. The complete work of Gentzen also belongs to Bernays’ estate. (M. E. Szabo has taken advantage of this fact while preparing the complete translation of Gentzen’s work into English.) All the materials are preserved in the historical collections of ETH Zürich.

Originally published in Czech as “Zpráva o posledních měsících a dnech Gerharda Gentzenaprožitých v Praze,” Pokroky matematiky, fyziky a astronomie Vol. 38, No. 5 (1993), pp. 291–296, ©1993 JČMF, Praha. Translated with permission by JiříVelebil.