Wartime Oxford : the planned capital of a racially pure Nazi Britain ---- and of chemically pure penicillin

Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.

The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.

After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.

The story is that Hitler saw Oxford as having successfully taught the Anglo-Saxon cum Aryan elite racial truths for almost a millennium (it may in fact be the world's oldest surviving university) and so it seemed to him to be the one place in Britain that most held aloft his biological political values.

Britain's elite vigorously resented Hitler's high opinion of Oxford University in his vision of the world back then - and continue to do ever since.

(Rarely do they ask why working class Britons also view Oxford as the very essence of pure Anglo Saxon privilege.)

Florey and purity - racial and chemical

Howard Florey won't have taken even a top job at NYC's Columbia University - no matter how big the salary and how big the size of his lab.

He hated Manhattan with a passion - he saw its concrete jungle as dirty, noisy, crowded and filled with Jews, catholic Italians and blacks.

By contrast, he clearly viewed becoming a full Oxford Professor of a named chair and director of an Oxford institute as meaning he had reached the near top of the Anglo Saxon intellectual ladder.

This is indicated by the fact that as soon as his position was secure, he felt he could finally return with his head held high to the Australia he had fled 15 years earlier - after his father had disgraced the family name.

So, on an ancient site where students had been taught for almost a millennium , his dreams of a chemical penicillin tomorrow first soared.

And it was here - amidst Oxford University's fabled green splendor - that his visions of the man-made, the artificial and of the synthetic pure flourished the most extravagantly.

Oxford Refined - clearly for Florey - and for Hitler - more than just an accent ...