On Oaths and Jobs

Email circulated to all personnel in my University last week, from the Head of Recruitment Services:
The University recognises that the recent EU referendum decision has caused uncertainty for our EEA nationals, and therefore we are pleased to offer a series of presentations which will provide legal and practical information around residency and citizenship options. [...]

I'm sure the email has best intentions and aims to help distressed EU employees.

But will it come to this: apply for citizenship (swear an Oath to the Crown), or lose my job?!

Fascism gained power in Italy at the 1922 elections. Racial laws against Jews were enacted much later, in 1938 (they “only” limited civil rights and access to jobs, although many citizens and opposition members were by then imprisoned or exiled) and led to an exodus of scientists and academics. Most famously, Enrico Fermi travelled to Stockholm to collect his Physics Nobel Prize in December 1939 and did not return to Italy.

What is perhaps less well known is that in 1931 the Fascist regime forced all academics to swear a new Oath of alliance, to the Motherland & the Fascist party:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuramento_di_fedelt%C3%A0_al_fascismo (in Italian here)

Those who refused lost their University Faculty jobs. This was before racial laws, and only about 15 of 1200 professors refused, amongst these the world famous mathematician Vito Volterra. Einstein, then still in Germany (Hitler came to power in 1933) was already a famous scientist (his Nobel prize was 1922), was called to intervene and wrote to the government (getting a response but not affecting things), and then noted somewhat prophetically in his personal diary “good times ahead in Europe”.