 During the Nazi period from 1933 onwards, Jaspers was excluded from any co-operation in the administration of the university until he was dismissed from his chair as a professor in 1937 and was subject to a publication ban (Publikationsverbot). During the war, he and his wife were in no physical danger. Yet he felt himself a marked man until the end of World War II. Jaspers once heard indirectly that there was a plan to deport him and his wife to a concentration camp in the middle of April 1945. Fortunately, the American troops arrived in Heidelberg two weeks earlier, on April 1st 1945. However, after 1945, his fortunes changed dramatically, and he figured prominently on the White List of the US-American occupying forces: that is, on the list of politicians and intellectuals who were deemed untarnished by any association with the NSDAP, and who were allowed to play a public role in the process of German political re-foundation. From this time on Jaspers defined himself primarily as a popular philosopher and educator. In the first role, he contributed extensive edifying commentaries on questions of political orientation and civic morality—first, in the interim state of 1945–1949, and then, after 1949, in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the second role, as one of the professors responsible for reopening the University of Heidelberg, to which he was appointed by the American Army of Occupation as a contemporary rector, he wrote at length on the necessity of university reforms, he emphasized the role of liberal humanistic education as a means of disseminating democratic ideas throughout Germany, and he took a firm line against the rehabilitation of professors with a history of Nazi affiliation. In 1946, The Idea of the University was published in an essentially different form from the book with the same title from 1923. The later work presents the university as a free community of scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth. As such, the university and the scholars that populate it can and should play a decisive role in rehabilitation of Europe based on the noblest ideas of the enlightenment. At that time and still, Jaspers is one of few who can justly speak for value and the need for such a stance against the threats upon freedom and humanity. The acknowledgment of Jaspers’s noble humanism in the first years after the war is apparent in the numerous honors granted to him, including the Goethe Prize in 1947, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1958, the Erasmus Prize in 1959, and the Prize of the Foundation of Oldenburg for Honorary Citizens.