Following the Nazi takeover in 1933, aid organizations for academic refugees from Germany appeared in many countries. In Britain, the Academic Assistance Council, later reorganized as the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), was set up to cater for all branches of science and the humanities, and to assist refugees regardless of the reasons for their persecution, whether political or racial. Academic excellence was the main criterion for support from the SPSL. Other organizations, some of them British, were more limited in scope, but may have been less insistent on academic merit. The SPSL meticulously recorded all of its activities, and its archives are today accessible at the Bodleian library in Oxford. Of the 2,541 individuals on file with the SPSL during 1933-1945, 96 were mathematicians, of which 63 were from Germany and the rest from other European countries. The support rendered by the SPSL ranged from essentially nothing up to direct financial contribution to relocation and re-establishment in a British university, and letters of support for naturalization as a British citizen. Contact with other aid organizations was frequently mediated, in particular with the US Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which helped resettle many European mathematicians in America. Today, the SPSL has evolved into the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA, http://www.academic-refugees.org/), which continues to assist academics unable to pursue their research in their countries of origin because of conflict or persecution.