the election he witnessed proved to be a key turning point that fatally weakened the moderate and democratic forces in Germany and paved the way for the rise of Nazism a few years later. A visitor to Princeton met with Cherniss many years later and reported that: … we somehow got around to taking about Wilamowitz … [Cherniss] said that Wilamowitz would pepper his lectures with remarks about the political situation in Germany and that his students would applaud by loudly stamping their feet on the floor. The remarks were of such a nature that they caused Cherniss to develop an intense dislike for the man. I don't recall how he characterized the remarks, but Solmsen's description of the antidemocratic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Prussian lens through which Wilamowitz viewed Weimar Germany would explain Cherniss's antipathy. Pre-War teaching and Arthur O. Lovejoy Cherniss received his doctorate from Berkeley in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit in 1930. He then taught Greek at Cornell University from 1930 to 1933, followed by ten years teaching at Johns Hopkins University and a return to the University of California before the war. A colleague at Berkeley remarked "He is a Platonist both as scholar and as thinker ..." He married Ruth Meyer, who had been a fellow student at Berkeley. Cherniss was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1941–1942. While Cherniss was writing his three monographs at Johns Hopkins, the prominent philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy was promoting an influential "history of ideas" approach to studying philosophical ideas that emphasized tracing their descent through successive historical periods. Lovejoy founded a "History of Ideas Club" at Johns Hopkins that included Cherniss, his friends Ludwig Edelstein and George Boas, and others: Like the Cambridge Apostles and the Metaphysical Society of the last century, the History of Ideas Club has set itself the threefold aim of intellectual stock-taking, the pursuit of new truth, and the "cross-fertilization" of the various academic departments and disciplines. Specifically, it originated in the need of American thinkers after the First World War to become more conscious of the cultural heritage of which they then began to feel themselves the custodians. Cherniss delivered papers at its meetings and the preface of Lovejoy's most well-known work, The Great Chain of Being (1936), thanks Cherniss for his contributions. Service with British military intelligence in Europe Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. In September 1941, groups of Nazi commandos tasked with eliminating