With the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Niels Bohr extended an offer to lecture in Copenhagen, and Paul Scherrer invited her to attend a congress in Switzerland, with all expenses paid. Carl Bosch still said that she could remain at the KWI for Chemistry, but by May she was aware that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case. On 9 May she decided to accept Bohr's invitation to go to Copenhagen, where Frisch worked, but when she went to the Danish consulate to get a travel visa, she was told that Denmark no longer recognised her Austrian passport as valid.
Escape from Germany
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
Because she lost her Austrian citizenship. Due to the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany She learned that academics would no longer be granted permission to travel abroad.
who was lise meitner?
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She was an Austrian-Swedish physicist.
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in which country did she live in her early days?
user
In the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna
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any particular educational institution that she attended as a student?
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University of Vienna
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why did she have to flee from germany?
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She could not leave for Denmark, Switzerland or any other country. Bohr came to Berlin in June, and was gravely concerned. When he returned to Copenhagen, he began looking for a position for Meitner in Scandinavia. He also asked Hans Kramers to see if anything was available in the Netherlands. Kramers contacted Costner, who in turn notified Adriaan Fokker. Coster and Fokker attempted to secure a position for Meitner at the University of Groningen. They found that the Rockefeller Foundation would not support refugee scientists, and that the International Federation of University Women had been flooded with applications for support from Austria.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
On 27 June, Meitner received an offer of a one-year position at Manne Siegbahn's new in Stockholm, then under construction, which would be devoted to nuclear physics, and she decided to accept it. But on 4 July she learned that academics would no longer be granted permission to travel abroad. Through Bohr in Copenhagen, Peter Debye communicated with Coster and Fokker, and they approached the Netherlands Ministry of Education with an appeal to allow Meitner to come to the Netherlands. As foreigners were not allowed to work for pay, an appointment as a non-salaried "privaat-docente" was required. Wander Johannes de Haas and Anton Eduard van Arkel arranged for one at Leiden University.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
With the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria on 12 March 1938, Meitner lost her Austrian citizenship. Niels Bohr extended an offer to lecture in Copenhagen, and Paul Scherrer invited her to attend a congress in Switzerland, with all expenses paid. Carl Bosch still said that she could remain at the KWI for Chemistry, but by May she was aware that the Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture was looking into her case. On 9 May she decided to accept Bohr's invitation to go to Copenhagen, where Frisch worked, but when she went to the Danish consulate to get a travel visa, she was told that Denmark no longer recognised her Austrian passport as valid.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
Coster also spoke to the head of the border guards, who assured him that Meitner would be admitted. A friend of Coster, E. H. Ebels, was a local politician from the border area, and he spoke directly to the guards on the border.
Lise Meitner | Escape from Germany
Kohn was dismissed from her position in 1933 due to Nazi regulations which barred Jews from government service (the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service). She survived by fulfilling contracts for applied research in the illumination industry until 1938, when she found herself without work or financial resources. Offered temporary positions at three women's colleges in the United States through the aid of Rudolf Ladenburg, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and many others, Kohn left Germany. She had been given a visa to the United Kingdom in 1939, but it was cancelled because of World War II; she eventually secured a visa to travel to Sweden and immediately went there in July 1940.
Hedwig Kohn | Escape from Germany
In May 1933, Essinger was informed that her oldest pupils would not be allowed to take the tests for the abitur, the school-leaving certificate needed to pursue a university education, and most non-Jewish parents withdrew their children from the school. Essinger realized that Germany was no longer a hospitable place for her school and sought to relocate it in a more secure environment abroad. She first sought a new location in Switzerland, then in the Netherlands and finally, in England, where she found an old manor house dating from 1547 in Otterden, near Faversham in Kent. The house is called Bunce Court, after the family that owned the property in the 17th century.
Bunce Court School | Escape from Nazi Germany
Hilda Weiss was Jewish, so with the rise of Nazism it was extremely dangerous for her to stay in Germany. She decided to leave for Switzerland in April 1933. Just before she boarded a train, a dining car waiter recognised her and attracted her attention. It turned out that he had also worked at Zeiss. He helped her to escape, concocting cover stories whenever she was approached by German police (which by then were controlled by the Nazis). She arrived safely in Basel. After a brief time in Geneva, she moved onto Paris. Then, in 1939 at the start of World War II, she escaped to the United States.
Hilda Weiss | Escaping Nazi Germany
Meitner found that Siegbahn did not want her. At the time the offer to come to Sweden had been extended, he had said that he had no money, and could only offer Meitner a place to work. Eva von Bahr had then written to Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who had provided money from the Nobel Foundation. This left her with laboratory space, but now she had to perform herself work that for the previous twenty years she had been able to delegate to her laboratory technicians. Ruth Lewin Sime wrote that: On 14 January 1939, Meitner learned that her brother-in-law Jutz had been released from Dachau and he and her sister Gusti were permitted to emigrate to Sweden.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Physics researcher Lise Meitner, who directed the Department of Physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, was able to remain in her post until 1938, but this was only due to her Austrian nationality, which ended with the Anschluss); she then left for the Netherlands, and then Sweden. In the scientific field, there were almost no nominations of women; in 1942, a woman was not permitted to direct a scientific institute, despite the fact that no male candidate had applied. The exile of women from political life was total: they could not sit in either the Reichstag, the regional parliaments or municipal councils.
Women in Nazi Germany | Withdrawal from higher education
In 1933, after the Nazis , Leitner, a Jew and a revolutionary, emigrated from Germany and went into exile. Her works were banned from publication in Nazi Germany. She earned her living by writing in the anti-Nazi magazine "Das Wort" published in Moscow. In 1940, she was in France, and as with a number of exiles from Germany, she was interned at Gurs internment camp. She managed to escape but could not leave France. The conditions of her death are unclear. In July 1940, she wrote to Hubertus, Prince of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, founder of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom..
Maria Leitner | Career
and earnings from small jobs as a répétiteur and ballet school pianist. After she was denounced in 1937, she managed to flee back to Germany by train without a valid passport to try to obtain an emigration permit. With the help of her dressmaker, an acquaintance of Hermann Göring, she managed to obtain the necessary visa. The dressmaker, a Christian, and her Jewish boyfriend, were less fortunate.
Katja Andy | Emigration to France
After Hitler's rise to power in 1933 it was necessary for Lotte and Siege to flee Germany, and initially they settled in Paris, but soon moved to London. Lotte's ambition to study at LSE was frustrated by the fact that her German qualifications were not recognised. In 1936 the British government refused to renew her visa; she departed to the Soviet Union to join her friend Brian Goold-Verschoyle, and "to see what it was like". She soon became disillusioned with the Soviet system and succeeded in returning to Britain. The British authorities received 'information' from the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky that she could be a spy, and she was arrested and interrogated by MI5 in Holloway Prison.
Lotte Moos | Emigration and travels
Her boyfriend was arrested and shot by the Nazis and she was sent to a concentration camp from which she escaped. She claimed that the details of her escape are so fabulously incredible, that she refrained from telling that story. After the war, she traveled extensively in Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and London. By age 27, she was living in Israel, where she developed a successful career as an exotic dancer. She later opened and operated a hotel and restaurant in Cyprus, something unusual for a woman to do during that time and in that place. She did not return to Germany until the 1960s when she established a charm school in Berlin.
Affengeil | Plot
In 1933, Specht fled Germany with the "Walkenmühle" pupils, most of whom were children of socialist or Jewish parents and went to Denmark, where she established a school for the children of German émigrés. In November 1938, she emigrated to Wales and was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man from 1940 to 1941. Her public opposition to the Nazis provided evidence that led to her release after one year. After her release, she worked in London on political re-education for a Nazi-free Germany, developing a concept based on the needs of youth who had been raised with Nazism and shattered by war.
Minna Specht | Exile and return
She spoke no English, but necessity and her superb ear for language enabled her to learn it very quickly, so that her greater concern became that she would forget her German. She was nevertheless too frightened, under the conditions of those times, to speak any words of German in public.
Stella Rotenberg | Escape
On receiving a visa from the United States, she then moved there. The journey to her first position at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro took Kohn through Berlin, Stockholm, Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, Yokohama, San Francisco, and Chicago.
Hedwig Kohn | Escape from Germany
When she had applied for her British visa, she had also had the prescience to apply for a visa to work as a servant (""Hausgehilfinnen-Visum"") in the Netherlands. On 14 March 1939, she departed from the "Westbahnhof" on the train to Amsterdam. She would never see her parents again. Her brother had secured Swedish entry documents for them, but the German authorities were disinclined to let them leave the country without payment of prohibitively inflated fees to the government . Stella Siegmann took work as a domestic servant in Leiden, running the home of a single forty-year-old man whose aspirations for her were evidently inappropriate.
Stella Rotenberg | Escape
Of Furtwängler's eventual compromise with the Nazis, Geissmar says that it “represented a complete surrender of Furtwängler in the eyes of independent observers”. According to her, he was criticised for this surrender and his reputation never entirely recovered. Geissmar resolved to get her passport back and find a job abroad. A friend introduced her to Anthony van Hoboken who had created a Photographic Archive of Musical Scores at the Austrian National Library and wished to expand it. He proposed that she visit libraries in the U.S.A. to arrange exchanges of material. In December 1935, thanks to a new application containing evidence of the Hoboken offer and an indirect contact with Goering she obtained her passport and left Germany immediately.
Berta Geissmar | Escaping the Nazis
She returned to Vienna in 1937 but owing to her Jewish background, from March 1939 she was threatened by the Nazi occupation. Her brother in law, Egon Friedell, committed suicide by jumping out of the window when members of the SA visited his apartment. Before they could be arrested, Frydan and her son managed to escape a few days later, first to Switzerland where she spent a year in Zurich. During her stay, she composed her symphony "In the dark of the night". After her brother Ludwig died in nearby St. Gallen in April 1939, she decided to emigrate to the United States.
Camilla Frydan | Emigration
On 2 March 1943 Ramdohr was arrested, but was released for lack of evidence. Later that month, Heinrich Himmler ordered her arrested again and sentenced to death, but she managed to escape. Ramdohr married German-born, Brazilian-raised medical student Carl Gebhard Fürst (1920–2010) in February 1944 in Munich, and escaped to her hometown of Aschersleben, using the name Lieselotte Fürst.
Lilo Ramdohr | Escape from Munich
In autumn 1933, three different groups of children and staff set out on an educational trip for the Netherlands, leaving from the south, the north and the east of Germany. Anna Essinger boarded a train with one group; her sister Paula took a group through Switzerland, where they picked up two pupils who had been on vacation with their mother. All three groups arrived on the ferry in Dover and were picked up in red buses and brought to Kent, where classes began the next day. In addition, there were three children from a Berlin family fleeing Germany that had pre-arranged for their children to meet the ferry and continue on to the school.
Bunce Court School | Escape from Nazi Germany
She spoke about this to the Refugee Committee in den Haag who switched her to an alternative (but unpaid) job, in return for her board and lodging, at an orphanage in den Haag. Her experiences in the Netherlands were in some respects disappointing. As international tensions increased the governments in western Europe took a less welcoming approach to Germany's many refugees, and during her time working at the orphanage she was required to report to a police station every day. In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak (for England and Germany, if not yet for the Netherlands) of the Second World War, the long-awaited visa for Britain arrived, and Siegmann immediately traveled by boat across the North Sea to London.
Stella Rotenberg | Escape
Born in Berlin, Germany, his Jewish family was forced to flee their home to escape further Nazi persecution after his father's arrest in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and as a condition for his release from Buchenwald concentration camp where he was a prisoner. They were among the 937 Jewish German refugees aboard the MS "St. Louis" who were denied entry into Cuba, the United States, Canada, and all the other western hemisphere countries, and consequently obliged to return to Europe. There, the family was granted refuge in Belgium, but had to flee again when that country was invaded by the Nazis in 1940.
Clark M. Blatteis | Early life, education, and career
She was detained and sentenced in nearby St. Gallen and then, in May 1938, expelled from the country. Instead of returning home to Vienna she now crossed the frontier (illegally) into France, settling in Paris where, until the outbreak of war, she supported herself as a gymnastics teacher.
Tilly Spiegel | Arrest and emigration
Hilde traveled across the country, from New York to Hollywood, gathering support and money to fund her husband's defense. However, in May 1949, temporarily at liberty pending his final appeal, Gerhart Eisler managed to escape by pretending to be blind and smuggling himself on board a Polish liner, which then dropped him off unceremoniously in London from where, after several further unpleasantnesses, he was freed and permitted to move on to Germany. Following discovery of her husband's disappearance, Hilde Eisler was immediately arrested. She was invited to inform on her husband, in return for which her US interrogators offered to give her a permanent visa.
Hilde Eisler | Expulsion from America
In July 1938 Erwin Siegmann managed to escape to Stockholm. His sister set her sights on emigration to England. She knew that there was a serious shortage there of domestic servants, which meant that for young women it would be relatively easy to obtain an entry visa and obtain work as a housemaid. She contacted the British "Home Office" ("interior ministry") in London and received an assurance that as a medical student she would be able to work as a trainee carer (""Pfleger-Lehrling"") in a British hospital. But no visa came. In Vienna, antisemitic persecution persisted, while the German take-over in Czechoslovakia brought the prospect of a wider European war into a clearer focus, which could only lead to increased difficulties in Vienna.
Stella Rotenberg | Escape
Meitner's earliest research began at age eight, when she kept a notebook of her records underneath her pillow. She was particularly drawn to mathematics and science, and first studied colours of an oil slick, thin films, and reflected light. Women were not allowed to attend public institutions of higher education in Vienna until 1897, and she completed her final year of school in 1892. Her education included bookkeeping, arithmetic, history, geography, science, French and gymnastics. The only career available to women was teaching, so she trained as a French teacher. Her sister Gisela passed the "Matura", and entered medical school in 1900.
Lise Meitner | Education
Leaving the country was illegal and, since the erection of the Berlin Wall two years earlier, had become very difficult. It later transpired that for Runge's friends the difficulties had been compounded because she had reported their escape plans to the Stasi. She had received 250 Marks for the information and her friends had received prison sentences.
Irene Runge | University
In 1939, when persecution of Jewish citizens became worse in Nazi Germany, Margarete Berent decided to flee. But her application for a visa to the U.S. was not granted. After receiving an interim visa for Chile, she left Germany via Switzerland and Italy. After her arrival in Chile, she had to wait for four months until she was admitted to travel to New York in 1940. Her start in New York City was quite hard for the now 53-year-old. She was not permitted to work as a lawyer, and had to earn a living in low-paying jobs, such as housekeeping.
Margarete Berent | Flight from Germany and new beginnings in the US
After the annexation of Austria with Germany in 1938 Alma and her father Arnold, also a famous violin virtuoso, managed to escape to London. She went on her own to the Netherlands where she believed she could resume her musical career. When the Germans occupied the Netherlands, she was trapped. A fictitious marriage to a Dutch engineer named August van Leeuwen Boomkamp did not protect her; nor did her nominal status as a Christian convert. She fled to France, but in late 1942 when she tried to escape to neutral Switzerland, she was arrested by the Gestapo. After several months in the internment camp of Drancy, she was deported in July 1943 to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Alma Rosé | Escape from the Nazis and final arrest
After the war Meitner acknowledged her own moral failing in staying in Germany from 1933 to 1938. She wrote: "It was not only stupid but very wrong that I did not leave at once." She not only regretted her inaction during this period, she was also bitterly critical of Hahn, Max von Laue, Werner Heisenberg, and other German scientists. In a June 1945 letter addressed to Hahn, but that he never received, she wrote: In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner found that she had become a celebrity. She had a radio interview with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a few days later another one with a radio station in New York, during which heard her sister Frida's voice for the first time in years.
Lise Meitner | Later life
At the age of 4, Bronner’s family escaped from Hungary to seek a better life in a different country. They left the country and managed to stay in Austria for 6 months before moving to the United States. Both of her parents were holocaust survivors and have had a strong influence on Bronner’s personality.
Marianne Bronner | Early years
"I am of Jewish descent", she told Frida, "I am not Jewish by belief, know nothing of the history of Judaism, and do not feel closer to Jews than to other people." On 25 January 1946, Meitner arrived in New York, where she was greeted by her sisters Lola and Frida, and by Frisch, who had made the two-day train trip from Los Alamos. Lola's husband Rudolf Allers arranged a visiting professorship for Meitner at the Catholic University of America. Meitner lectured at Princeton University, Harvard University and Columbia University, and discussed physics with Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Tsung-Dao Lee, Yang Chen-Ning and Isidor Isaac Rabi.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Fred escaped from Austria by boarding a train to Sweden. In April 1940, as the Nazis were invading Norway, he was able to board a ship for New York City. He entered the United States on a program designed to allow legal scholars "to escape persecution in Europe on the premise that they were participating in post-graduate programs at American law schools." He was assigned to study at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he studied U.S. law from 1940 to 1942. His brother, Robert Herzog, had left for France and became a French national. But in 1943, French collaborators delivered him to the Gestapo, who transported him to his death in Auschwitz.
Fred F. Herzog | Escape to the United States
in 1935, at which point she fled to London. Although Gertrude's parents did not escape the Nazis her sister Liselotte did.
Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber | Education
Shoshana attended the Northwood College and in 1940 the Chelsea Polytechnic School, where she had painting and drawing lessons and learned about fashion design. Due to the Blitz, the Schueller family had to take refuge in air-raid shelters almost every night. The experience was very stressful for Soshana. She expressed her stress and emotions through drawings.
Soshana Afroyim | Fleeing Vienna
On release, realizing the danger she was now in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany following the established escape route over the Erzgebirge Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and on to Prague and then by train to Geneva. In Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit herself to "the Jewish cause". She obtained work with a friend of her mother's at the League of Nations' Jewish Agency for Palestine (Eretz Yisrael), distributing visas and writing speeches. From Geneva the Arendts traveled to Paris in the autumn, where she was reunited with Stern, joining a stream of refugees. While Arendt had left Germany without papers, her mother had travel documents and returned to Königsberg and her husband.
Hannah Arendt | Paris (1933–1940)
As political refugees under imminent threat they both obtained immigration visa for admission to the United States. Joseph Lang, (who was Jewish) made his way to Lisbon, but Halbe was unable to obtain an exit visa from the French authorities, who were also holding on to her identity papers. In the end she was able to catch up with Lang after a brief delay, but she achieved this only after crossing the Pyrenees on foot, carrying a forged birth certificate. On 14 December 1940 Halbe and Lang arrived together in New York City on a ship from Lisbon.
Erna Lang | Nazi Germany and exile
There, they would say that they had come from the northern part of Poland, where their family, like others in the region, had lost its farm to a German family. With their digging tools in sacks across their shoulders, they would ask for work in harvesting potatoes.
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz | Escape
Heidi Urbahn de Jauregui comes from an entrepreneurial family in Remscheid. After the basic studies (Philosophy, History, German) in Cologne, she moved to West Berlin. A medical condition ended her studies. Following her recuperation, she could "fulfill her desire to leave Adenauer Germany, something she had wished to do for some time." She continued her studies in French Literature and German studies in Paris and obtained her Licence (French academic grade) at the Faculté de Lettres of the University of Montpellier. It was not possible for her to take the necessary Agrégation ( a required competitive exam in France) for a University teaching commission because the French authorities refused to naturalize her in spite of her fulfillment of the formal admission criteria.
Heidi Urbahn de Jauregui | Life
Gerhart Eisler worked as a journalist in New York. Available sources are silent on Hilde Eisler's activities there. War ended in May 1945 and Gerhart Eisler was keen to return to Europe. Hilde would have preferred to stay in New York. Towards the end of 1945 she found out that her parents and sister had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. Many relatives had met the same fate. But if she had let her husband return home without her she would, as she later told an interviewer, have "found no sympathy with ... American friends" if she "would have, so to speak, deserted [their marriage]".
Hilde Eisler | Expulsion from America
She avoided Nazi persecution when she escaped the Holocaust of World War II to the safety of a house set aside for Swiss citizens, when her father, a Hungarian Jew who managed the grain department of a bank, was able to obtain a Swiss "schutzpass", a document that gave the bearer safe passage. This pass is on view at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The flat where Leiber survived the war housed 26 people.
Judith Leiber | Life and career
By 1936, Hermann left Germany for Denmark and later France and England. In London, in order to avoid standing out on account of her German provenance, she married a man called Edward Henry early in 1938. Her prescience was justified by events: two years later the British government invoked its hitherto obscure Regulation 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, identifying several thousand refugees who had fled Germany for reasons of politics or race as enemy aliens and placing them in internment camps. After the war ended in 1945 she was able to combine her interests in physics and mathematics with political philosophy.
Grete Hermann | Emigration and later years
On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel). Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950.
Hannah Arendt | Introduction
The family fled Austria in the late 1930s following the rise of the Nazis and the Anschluss in 1938. Alice, who had obtained a job as a maid in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England, was the first to flee the country. The rest of the family later joined her in the United Kingdom. She met her husband, Mikulás Teich, who became a leading Slovak science historian, at a refugee club in the UK in 1940. Teichova became the first female professor at the University of East Anglia. In 1985, Teichova received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden.
Alice Teichova | Introduction
While her husband remained in Linz, Else Peerenboom-Missong now returned to South America, in many respects resuming the work she had been obliged to break off in 1939. She founded the "Social Women's Schools" (""Soziale Frauenschule"") in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1947, and headed it up herself for two years. In 1949, suffering from Diabetes, she returned to West Germany (as the three "western occupation zones" - which included the Rhineland - became in May of that year). In 1951 she took a consultancy-administrative post with the State Emigration Office in Bremen, with special responsibility for destinations in South America and Australia.
Else Peerenboom-Missong | Return to South America
By the time the Nazis took power early in 1933 Mathilde Jacob had for most purposes retired into obscurity, but her personal history of communist activism and her Jewishness nevertheless made her vulnerable. It is thought that she attempted to escape from Germany in 1936 but without success. In 1939 she did succeed in transferring some of the letters written to and by Rosa Luxemburg to the United States. She died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, having been arrested and deported at the end of July 1942. Following Jacob's death, the authorities attending to her confiscated assets recorded a claim from her landlord that she was liable to pay for some repairs on her apartment, also noting that rent on the property had not been received for three months.
Mathilde Jacob | Introduction
In 1994, he left the country due to detention threat and studied in Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey and received a Master's degree in Politics and Sociology, later he went to Europe and sought asylum there. In 2006 he became a citizen of Germany.
Dolkun Isa | Early life and fleeing from China
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in January 1933, and with antisemitism on the rise, the school became increasingly Jewish, as some parents bowed to pressure to boycott Jewish institutions and Jewish parents found it increasingly difficult to find placement for their children. In April 1933, when all public buildings were ordered to fly the Nazi flag and swastika, Essinger planned a day-long outing for her school, leaving the flag to fly over an empty building, a symbolic gesture, according to a nephew. Afterwards, Essinger and the school were denounced and the school came under Nazi scrutiny with a recommendation to install a school inspector at the school.
Bunce Court School | Escape from Nazi Germany
Following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and the German invasion of France in May/June 1940 most of the German political exiles in France were suddenly identified as enemy aliens and arrested. As the holder of a Polish passport, Brunhilde Rothstein was not arrested. She supported herself with a series of casual jobs, at one stage wrapping sweets (candies) for a living. By this time it appears that Brunhilde Rothstein and Gerhart Eisler had become "more than just friends". Gerhart Eisler was interned by the French in 1939, but in 1941 he became a beneficiary of an offer of political asylum for Spanish Civil War veterans by the Mexican government.
Hilde Eisler | Escape from Europe
After a year Renate Meyer switched to Freiburg University, about as far from Berlin as it was possible to relocate to without emigrating, "in order to free myself from the strong arm of my father". Later in 1948 she went to England at the invitation of the London-based , an organisation with close links to the ruling Labour Party. The GER had been founded by German emigrants during the war. She was impressed by the full shops and by the friendliness of the people she met in England. It was at the London School of Economics that in 1951 she met Rainer Lepsius whom she would later marry.
Renate Lepsius | Education
German armies invaded France from the north-east on 10 May 1940, capturing Paris (formally) on 14 June. For Frank and Edith it was time to quit the country: on 13 June they had joined the hundreds of thousands of Parisians fleeing south. There were four of them. They were accompanied by 's mistress and muse, the photographer Lilly Joseph (1911 – 2006), who had been with them since at least as far back as their time in Berlin. The fourth member of the party was Ida Cohn, Lilly's mother. They were still hoping to be able to emigrate to America.
Edith Barakovich | Escape from France
On November 7, 1942, the American Consulate in Lyon told Hall that an allied invasion of North Africa was imminent. In response to the invasion, on November 8, the Germans moved to occupy Vichy France. Hall anticipated correctly that the suppression of the Gestapo and Abwehr would become even more severe and she fled Lyon without telling anyone, including her closest contacts. She escaped by train from Lyon to Perpignan, then, with a guide, walked over a 7,500 foot pass in the Pyrenees to Spain, covering up to 50 miles over two days in considerable discomfort. Hall had named her artificial foot "Cuthbert", and she signaled to SOE before her escape that she hoped that "Cuthbert" would not trouble her on the way.
Virginia Hall | Escape
Popper was born in Vienna and educated at the Academy of Commerce in Prague. As a little girl she had been to Montessori nursery school in Vienna. When the Germans came in on March the thirteen's 1938 she visited the gymnasium, and suddenly most of the children yelled 'Get out of here, you Jew.' In 1938, after Germany's annexation of Austria, when she was twelve years old, her family having Czech citizenship fled to the region formerly known as Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. Unfortunately this move provided only temporary safety. In spring 1939 her father left for Belgium and England.
Erna Furman | Biography
Liffman was able to return to London near the end of 1946. He was eager to travel to Germany to find whether any of his parents (Hermann and Mathilde), three brothers (Alfred, Willy, Max) and a sister (Selma) had survived. He was initially refused entry into Germany, but was able to tour the occupied British zone by joining a Navy entertainment show called the "Tokio Express". Unfortunately, his parents had died in Auschwitz, but he was able to locate his sister, who had survived Dachau and was living in Brussels, Belgium. His brother Max had also moved to Brussels and survived the war by living "underground", i.e., in hiding with his wife.
Erich Liffmann | Return to Germany
A fellow internee was Anna Seghers. The country was still formally not participating in the war, but the government had nevertheless recently issued a blanket ban on German or Austrian nationals seeking to travel to Latin America via the USA. Several months later, following a successful lobbying campaign by stateside friends, Eisler and Rothstein were permitted to enter the United States on a short term permit. Over the next few years their short term permits were repeatedly renewed. On 24 August 1942 Rothstein married Eisler (as his third wife) and they made their home in the Queens district of New York.
Hilde Eisler | Escape from Europe
Through her contacts with the Mexican consul and with Noel Field she made a further application for an exit visa, but with no more success than before. In the end she took refuge in the Marseilles home of a man called Paul Burkhardt and his French wife, who hid her on the instructions of another high-profile German communist exile whose exit visa for Mexico had been blocked, Paul Merker. Merker himself went "underground" at about the same time. While she was in hiding Weiterer was able to keep in contact with Noel Field. She was not able to communicate with her partner, Siegfried Rädel, however.
Maria Weiterer | Slow release
Jutz's boss, Gottfried Bermann had escaped to Sweden, and offered Jutz his old job back at the publishing firm if he was able to come. Niels Bohr interceded with a Swedish official, Justitieråd Alexandersson, who said that Jutz would receive a labour permit on arrival in Sweden. He worked there until he was pensioned off in 1948, and then moved to Cambridge to join Otto Robert Frisch. Her sister Gisela and brother-in-law Karl Lion moved to England, Meitner also considered moving to Britain. She visited Cambridge in July 1939, and accepted an offer from William Lawrence Bragg and John Cockcroft of a position at the Cavendish Laboratory on a three-year contract with Girton College, Cambridge, but the Second World War broke out in September 1939 before she could make the move.
Lise Meitner | Later life
Uta Felgner's chances of operating in West Germany unbeknown to the security services there would have been zero. None of this diminished her resolve to move to the west. During the late 1940s and early 1950s millions had already done this, compounding the labour shortage created by the slaughter of war and causing the government to impose increasingly effective measures to stem the flow. Since 1979 (or earlier) escape from East Germany to West Germany (without official permission) had been illegal, difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, Felgner planned to escape. The plan unravelled when Hans Schulze, the West German businessman who was, at this time, her lover, had his car searched by frontier officers when he was on his way home from the Leipzig Trade Fair.
Uta Felgner | Escape attempt and aftermath
Eva Dittrich decided to resettle in the USA together with Paul Leo and left Germany on August 30, 1939 (one day before the war started) with two suitcases and a round trip ticket to Amsterdam, for a “weekend trip” so as not to arouse suspicion. They discovered that they would not be allowed to marry in Holland because of its status as a neutral country and the fact that their marriage would be illegal in Germany. As a refugee, Leo qualified for visas for himself and his daughter. Since Eva Dittrich was a non-Jewish German citizen, she was not in danger and not eligible for a visa.
Eva Leo | Voluntary Emigration
In early 1939, Guttmann and his family left Germany because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. An opportunity for escape arose when the Nazis provided him with a visa and ordered him to travel to Portugal to treat a friend of the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Guttmann was scheduled to return to Germany via London, where the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) arranged for him to remain in the UK. He arrived with his wife Else Samuel Guttmann and two children, a son, Dennis and daughter, Eva aged 6 in Oxford, England, on 14 March 1939.
Ludwig Guttmann | Escape to Britain
In the last months of World War II, she hid in a Catholic convent with her baby daughter, Atara, surviving on potatoes and water. She was later hidden by Germaine Goblot, daughter of French philosopher Edmond Goblot. Her sister, Rose Warfman, who was deported to Auschwitz, survived. Her brother, a 29-year young physician, Dr. Salomon Gluck, was deported from France on the convoy 73, led to Kaunas in Lithuania and Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia, never to return.
Antoinette Feuerwerker | Escape from the Nazis
In 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany in an event called the Anchluss, indicating that the Nazis were moving towards Hungary as well. Dormandi and her family were of Jewish descent, and so that year she moved out of Hungary with her husband, daughter, sister, brother-in-law Michael, and their son John. The family stayed together in Paris until the German occupation of France. The Balints moved to England, while the Dormandis remained in France under much secrecy.
Olga Dormandi | Emigration to Paris
The government rejected the demand, but at the same time "requested" her to leave the country as quickly as possible. Travelling via Vienna and Zürich she made her way to Paris which by this time - along with Moscow - had become home to several thousand German political exiles and the de facto headquarters of several exiled left wing German political parties. Although during the 1930s France was more welcoming than other western European countries to refugees from Nazi Germany, by 1940 the welcome was wearing thin, and for a couple of years the refugees had been required to report and confirm their details at the town halls each week.
Erna Lang | Nazi Germany and exile
He was now permitted to emigrate from France to Mexico, with Rothstein who was registered on relevant documentation as his fiancée. Their destination changed when the ship on which they were travelling was torpedoed, with the result that they ended up not in Mexico but in Trinidad where the British promptly interned them. After some weeks they were permitted to resume their journey, now required to board a ship to New York City. Despite being in possession of a transit permit, they were then interned for three months on Ellis Island, since 1892 New York's (and the United States') principal immigration station.
Hilde Eisler | Escape from Europe
Due to the rise of anti-Semitism in Vienna she emigrated to Egypt in 1936. According to an article penned by author Judith Belfkih for the "Wiener Zeitung", the Jewish Museum Vienna determined that Zaloscer was one of at least 13 women who undertook "fictitious marriages" to escape Nazi persecution through emigration during World War II: What almost unites them all: the women were silent for a long time about their fictitious marriages and the resulting double lives - to protect the children or the later partners. The motivation of the women was clear: they fought for survival and deliberately accepted the many risks - from denunciation of extortion and sexual assault - to their safety...
Hilde Zaloscer | Biography
After passing her school-leaving examination at the famous Schwarzwald School, she studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, under Moritz Schlick among others. From 1933 to 1935 she worked at the Industrial Psychological Research Centre at the University of Vienna; in 1933 she joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (which was banned in 1934) and wrote her first two novels, Kati auf der Brücke and Verwirrung am Wolfgangsee. In 1936 she married the German writer Peter de Mendelssohn, who, like her, had emigrated to London that same year as a result of the rise of Nazism in their respective countries.
Hilde Spiel | Studies and emigration
When Germans started deporting Jews, Marianne's family was able to gain exemption from this, because they were respected in the Jewish community and were asked to inform other families of deportation. While this was occurring, the Strauss family was attempting to immigrate to Sweden, America or a South American country. Unfortunately, all their attempts to do this failed. German authorities wouldn't allow them to leave even with modified papers, and the countries to which they wanted to flee also did not cooperate.
Marianne Strauss | Life in upheaval
Her husband, from whom she had already been separated for several years, emigrated to the United States in November 1937, probably with their daughter, Hanna: Hilde remained in Paris, working for International Red Aid till 1939. War was declared by the French government in September 1939 and the Germany army overran northern France in May/June 1940. Between these two events Hilde Kirchheimer found herself identified as an enemy alien and interned for approximately a month in the at Rieucros, close to the border with Spain. Later that year she was able to emigrate to the United States with Rudolf Neumann.
Hilde Neumann | Nazi Germany and exile
As she was still in touch with her Jewish colleagues, Harvey was placed under close observation by the Gestapo. Nevertheless she pushed the career of her protégé, director Paul Martin, performing in his screwball comedy "Lucky Kids" (1936) and further successful movies for the UFA until 1939, such as "Seven Slaps", the biographical film "Fanny Elssler" (1937) together with Willy Birgel and "Capriccio"; as well as "Frau am Steuer" in 1939. In June 1937 Harvey had helped the choreographer Jens Keith, prosecuted under the homosexual acts Paragraph 175, by posting a bail for him. Released from custody, Keith escaped to Paris; this led to a stern interrogation by the Nazi authorities.
Lilian Harvey | Emigration from Germany
She was born as Herta Taussig in Vienna, Austria. She earned a master's degree from the University of Vienna in 1934 and took a teaching position at the university. However, her father (the editor of "Die Neue Freie Presse") had publicly opposed the Nazis, so in 1938 she and her parents emigrated to England, taking a job as a maid because the English immigration laws prevented her from entering the country as a teacher. In 1944 she, her brother (the conductor Walter Taussig) and her mother moved to the United States (her father having died a year earlier), and began teaching mathematics again at the Greer School in upstate New York.
Herta Freitag | Life
Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, as his National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) was now the largest party in the "Reichstag (Weimar Republic)". The 7 April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed Jewish people from the civil service, which included academia. Meitner never tried to conceal her Jewish descent, but initially was exempt from its impact on multiple grounds: she had been employed before 1914, had served in the military during the World War, was an Austrian rather than a German citizen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was a government-industry partnership.
Lise Meitner | National socialism
Ten years later, in 1948, Tausig was reunited with her son in Vienna. In 1987, she published her memoirs with the title "Shanghai Passage: Flucht und Exil einer Wienerin" (escape and exile of a Viennese). In this book she describes her desperate escape from Austria.
Franziska Tausig | Introduction
It was while in Vienna that she re-established contact with her future husband Hans Zeisel, later a legal scholar, statistician, and professor at The University of Chicago. A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and Striker took the last train out. She and Hans met up in England where they married and sailed for the US with $67 between them.
Eva Zeisel | Early career, imprisonment, and emigration
To avoid the Nazi reprisal of Sippenhaft (kin liability), Freda's parents divorced and the family moved back to Liberec. Freda continued her education there, and then in Vienna and Dresden. During this time many of Freda's relatives and friends perished during the war, and Freda's own experiences witnessing the bombing of Dresden galvanized her ambition to pursue progressive and activist causes. Freda returned to Vienna in 1947 and obtained a leaving certificate before going on to communication studies and journalism, working during her studies for the American occupation in Vienna. She travelled to England that same year to visit her father, before completing nursing school and then finally moving to Frankfurt, Germany to study medicine at the Goethe University Frankfurt.
Freda Meissner-Blau | Early life
It was not until 6 May 1940 that she managed to enter the country. There was a Nazi raid a few days later and almost all Jews living in Holland were captured and deported, the rest were murdered. Rosa was arrested, but managed to get herself released by bribing the guards and spent the rest of the war living in the cellar of a farm belonging to a family, whom she had not known before, coming out only at night. According to her granddaughter Vera, she later joked that she had taken the precaution of packing her knitting to have something to do in the basement during the day.
Rosa Buchthal | Escape to the Netherlands
Daniel was born in Essen. She graduated from the University of Munich and worked at the Museum Folkwang, Essen. She arrived in the United States as a refugee.
Greta Daniel | Early life and education
He subsequently returned to Berlin and UfA. In spring 1939, Harvey left Germany and her real-estate fortune, which was confiscated; she was to be deprived of her German citizenship in 1943 because she had performed for French troops. Harvey went to live at her residence in Juan-les-Pins in Vichy France. In France she made two movies in 1940 – "Serenade" and "Miquette" (her last), both directed by Jean Boyer. After the occupation of southern France by German forces in November 1942, Harvey emigrated to the USA spending most of the time in Los Angeles working as a volunteer nurse, but also went on tour performing in Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit".
Lilian Harvey | Emigration from Germany
Massary was of Jewish familial extraction, and had converted to the Protestant religion in 1903. In late 1932 she departed Germany due to the rising persecution of the Jewish population by the Nazis, shortly before they seized dictatorial power in a paramilitary revolution and declared the Third Reich. Traveling through Austria and Switzerland she went to London, where she was befriended by Noël Coward and starred in his theatrical musical "Operette" in 1938. In February 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II engulfed Europe, she moved to Beverly Hills, California, United States.
Fritzi Massary | Emigration to England and America
After being detained by the Nazis in March 1933, she decided to leave Germany rather than risk re-arrest. She fled first to Prague, then Paris, finally arriving in London on 8 September 1933. She had an invitation from John Paton, a leading figure in the Independent Labour Party. She had sufficient funds to be allowed to stay for a month with the proviso she did not work.
Dora Fabian | Exile
Katrin Askan (born 21 February 1966) is a German author. She was born in East Germany, but in 1986, three years before the changes that finally adumbrated an end to the one-party dictatorship, she managed to escape to the west. A (slightly) fictionalised version of the long build-up to the event and of the escape itself, with a powerful resonance of authenticity, constitutes the core of her 2000 novel "Aus dem Schneider".
Katrin Askan | Introduction
She nevertheless continued its activities, working from her apartment, and helped by like minded comrades such as .
Maria Weiterer | Emigration and anti-Nazi resistance
Wary of growing antisemitism in Germany, Leichtentritt sent his resume to Harvard, Columbia, Juilliard, Curtis, and Chicago College of Music. Only Columbia and Harvard responded, and only Harvard offered him a position as a lecturer, using departmental funds to pay his salary (Autobiography p. 397). He left Germany in 1933 before the main wave of emigration, and took with him more than twenty chests of books, a Steinway grand piano, and his savings, about $250 — roughly equivalent to $4,800 in modern USD (Autobiography p.398). He then traveled to New York on the S.S. Veendam (Autobiography p. 399).
Hugo Leichtentritt | Departure From Germany
Born Jewish in Vienna, Austria in 1918 as Gusti Schreyer, she fled the Nazis in the late 1930s and lived/worked as a refugee in London, England. While in Antwerp, Belgium on an extended visit, she married Jewish scarfmaker and Kishinev refugee Michel Graboi (whose father had been killed in the pogroms). Many European Jews who sought a safe haven from Nazi persecution, including the Grabois, had difficulty with the United States' restrictive immigration quotas and the complicated, demanding requirements for obtaining visas. In an attempt to immigrate to America after finally obtaining a visa, the Grabois fled to France and set sail on the "Wyoming" freighter.
Nina Graboi | Early life
Encouraged and backed by her father's financial support, Meitner went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University in the Dahlem district of Berlin, where the renowned physicist Max Planck taught. Planck invited her to his home, and allowed her to attend his lectures, which was an unusual gesture by Planck, who was on the record as being opposing women being admitted to universities in general, but was willing to admit that there was the occasional exception; apparently he recognised Meitner as one of the exceptions. She became friends with Planck's twin daughters Emma and Grete, who shared her love of music. Attending Planck's lectures did not take up all her time, and Meitner approached Heinrich Rubens, the head of the experimental physics institute, about doing some research.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
In 1940, Paris was occupied by the Germans. Her eldest brother, Jean de Baissac, joined the British Army. Lise and her other brother, Claude, travelled to the South of France in an attempt to reach England. She obtained help with travel arrangements to England from the American Consulate and crossed into Spain and went to Lisbon, where she waited for five months for permission to travel to Gibraltar and on to the UK. The ship docked in Scotland and she made her way to London where she made contact with Lady Kemsley, who helped her get a job at the "Daily Sketch".
Lise de Baissac | Escape to Britain
In January 1915, he crossed the United States to New York City. He was reluctant to approach the German consulate there, as he had entered the country under a false identity. Worse, he read in a newspaper that he was presumed to be in New York.
Gunther Plüschow | Escape from China
Upon her marriage, she had lost her Turkish citizenship, and had received her husband's German citizenship. She went into hiding to avoid persecution as a Jew. In 1942, her sister Rebekka fled to the United States via France and Portugal. Although Gusyk had an exit visa for her son and herself since the spring of 1940, she remained in Berlin, probably to care for her aging father. In January 1943, her father died in the nursing home of the Jewish community in Berlin. Gusyk, now blocked by Nazi law, was no longer able to leave Germany.
Jenny Gusyk | Berlin years
High-profile anti-Nazi journalists and political activists were deemed at great risk even if they were not Jewish, and were helped accordingly. Germans who had been deprived of citizenship – such as Heine himself – were technically stateless and for that reason at particular risk of arrest. It was in any event a matter for the US authorities to determine who should be helped. The French authorities would grudgingly issue exit visas only if applicants were already in possession of entry visas – visitor visas – for the United States, and the Spanish authorities would not permit transit to Portugal (from where refugees, provided their paperwork was in order, might escape by sea) unless they had valid paperwork from both the US and French authorities.
Fritz Heine | Refugee escape organiser in Marseilles
At the age of eleven, Shoshana witnessed the annexation of Austria. ""I watched Hitler's triumphant entry to Vienna. I remember well how I looked out of the window (...) and saw how he was welcomed by the cheering crowd as he drove in his open car (...). I turned cold and was horribly frightened."" The family decided to leave Austria. Fritz Schüller, who had been born in Brno, had a Czech passport and left the country first. Margarethe, Shoshana and Maximilian fled to Switzerland, then Paris, where Fritz had waited for them and finally in 1939 they reached London, where they would stay two years.
Soshana Afroyim | Fleeing Vienna
If she wanted to go to the toilet, she had to use one at the restaurant down the street. The following year, women were admitted to Prussian universities, and Fischer lifted the restrictions, and had women's toilets installed in the building. Not all the chemists were happy about this. The Institute of Physics was more accepting, and she became friends with the physicists there, including , James Franck, Gustav Hertz, Robert Pohl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Westphal.
Lise Meitner | Friedrich Wilhelm University
She returned to Berlin in 1934, where she too worked at the car rental agency. In 1936, Emil arranged with Quaker friends in the United States for Kristel to attend Swarthmore College there. She visited Fuchs in England "en route" to America, where she eventually married an American communist, Robert Heineman, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She became a permanent resident in the United States in May 1938. In 1936, Kittowski and Elisabeth were arrested again, and the rental cars were impounded. Gerhard and Karin fled to Czechoslovakia. Elisabeth was released and went to live with Emil, while Kittowski, sentenced to six years, later escaped from prison and also made his way to Czechoslovakia.
Klaus Fuchs | Refugee in Britain
In August 1933, Stein married Liselotte (Lilo) Salzburg, the daughter of an eminent Jewish physician. Guards at the Justice of the Peace greeted them with "Heil Hitler" salutes. Working as a law consultant in a factory – the only job available to him at this point – Stein received a clandestine warning one night from the son of the factory owner. The SS was asking questions about him, and one of the other workers in the factory had been arrested that day and put into prison. A close friend had written, urging them to come to Paris, and they left the next day under the pretext of a honeymoon trip.
Fred Stein | Escape from Germany
Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936. When Hesse was two years old in December 1938, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Hesse and her older sister, Helen Hesse Charash, to the Netherlands to escape Nazi Germany. They were aboard one of the last Kindertransport trains. After almost six months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and then, in 1939, emigrated to New York City, where they settled into Manhattan's Washington Heights. In 1944, Hesse's parents separated; her father remarried in 1945 and her mother committed suicide in 1946.
Eva Hesse | Life
There they flatly asked why they were still staying in Germany. But there were economic obstacles to the planned emigration: emigrating Germans had a pre-departure Reich Flight Tax to pay, which was a quarter of their assets. Now Schur's wife had inherited a mortgage on a house in Lithuania, which because of the Lithuanian foreign exchange determination could not be repaid. On the other hand, Schur was forbidden to default or leave the mortgage to the German Reich. Thus the Schurs lacked cash and cash equivalents. Finally, the missing sum of money was somehow supplied, and to this day it does not seem to be clear who were the donors.
Issai Schur | Emigration
Essinger raised funds in England, primarily from Quakers, initially to rent and later, to purchase Bunce Court. She informed the parents of her desire to move the school to England and received permission to take 65 children with her. The children all went home for summer vacation, not knowing they were leaving Landschulheim Herrlingen for the last time. In summer 1933, Essinger arrived in England with the 13 pupils prohibited from taking the abitur (schooling completion exam). She set them up at Bunce Court, where they had just a few weeks to prepare for a British matriculation exam; nine of them passed.
Bunce Court School | Escape from Nazi Germany
Heightened political tensions and anti-semitism began to roll through Austria prior to the country's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938. Singer, now in her forties, was initially removed from these anxieties because of her remote location and marriage to an Aryan man. However, her situation changed after her husband was killed in a mining accident, leaving her alone with her young son, Peter. Accounts of her son's age at this time differ from two months to two years. Regardless, Singer's physical conditions and her son's needs caused her to move back to Vienna to stay with her mother and sister.
Susi Singer | Immigration to the United States
In August 1942, she narrowly avoided capture and deportation, then the police carried out a raid on the little "Hotel Arche de Noe" (""Noah's Ark Hotel"") where she was staying. All the hotel's other Jewish guests were escorted into police trucks. She went "underground" and was dependent for survival on "good" French people. Under Italian officials, Frenkel's presence was granted a level of legal status. Friends organised a Swiss visa for her and just a few days before its expiry she succeeded in entering Switzerland at the third attempt.
Françoise Frenkel | France
In Madrid he found work and lived for years in a modest middle-class background. He avoided the contact with other Germans.
Heinrich Tillessen | Escape
Following the advice of party comrades she emigrated, leaving Vienna on 16 March 1938 with a train ticket that took her to Zürich, from where she went on via Paris (where she encountered "passport problems"), arriving in London on 24 March 1938. She arrived, one of the first of a wave of political exiles from Austria, with a British pound in her handbag and, as she later wrote, no idea that she was not to set foot in her native land for another seven years. An "invitation letter" from an English friend had persuaded the authorities to let her into the country, and supported a three-month visitor's permit, but she had no long term visa and no permission to obtain work.
Eva Schmidt-Kolmer | English exile