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
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context. Due to the "Anschluss", Germany's unification with Austria Annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938 and because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany Due to Anschluss, Germany's unification with Austria.
who was lise meitner?
user
She was an Austrian-Swedish physicist.
assistant
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?
user
University of Vienna
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why did she have to flee from germany?
user
Because she lost her Austrian citizenship.
assistant
why?
user
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
In Sweden, Meitner continued her research as best she could. She measured the neutron cross sections of thorium, lead and uranium using dysprosium as a neutron detector, an assay technique pioneered by George de Hevesy and Hilde Levi. She was able to arrange for Hedwig Kohn, who faced deportation Poland, to come Sweden, and eventually to emigrate to the United States, travelling via the Soviet Union. She was unsuccessful in bringing Stefen Meyer out, but he managed to survive the war. She declined an offer to join Frisch on the British mission to the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, declaring "I will have nothing to do with a bomb!" She later said that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had come as a surprise to her, and that she was "sorry that the bomb had to be invented".
Lise Meitner | Later life
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Though Jewish, her father was a confirmed freethinker, and she was brought up as such. As an adult, she converted to Christianity, following Lutheranism, and was baptised in 1908. Her sisters Gisela and Lola converted to Catholicism that same year.
Lise Meitner | Early years
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
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
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
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
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
Dr. Stern's secretary, Käthe Seitz, stayed in Germany and opposed the Nazis. She was killed by decapitation.
Anne-Lise Stern | Flight from Nazi Germany
She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen. In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the phenomenon of such splitting process. In their report in February issue of "Nature" in 1939, they gave the name "fission".
Lise Meitner | Introduction
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
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
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
Her brother, Claude, was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Lise de Baissac | Escape to Britain
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)
According to John Koehler, "Kippenberger was alarmed when word reached him that Sergeant Willig had survived the shooting. Not knowing whether the sergeant could talk and identify the attackers, Kippenberger was taking no chances. He directed a runner to summon Mielke and Ziemer to his apartment at 74 Bellermannstrasse, only a few minutes walk from where the two lived. When the assassins arrived, Kippenberger told them the news and ordered them to leave Berlin at once. The parliamentarian's wife Thea, an unemployed schoolteacher and as staunch a Communist Party member as her husband, shepherded the young murderers to the Belgian border.
Erich Mielke | Fugitive
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
Meitner was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". On her visit to the US in 1946, she received the honour "Woman of the Year" from the National Press Club and had dinner with the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, at the Women's National Press Club. She received the Leibniz Medal from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1924, the Lieben Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1925, the Ellen Richards Prize in 1928, the City of Vienna Prize for science in 1947, Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society jointly with Hahn in 1949, the inaugural Otto Hahn Prize of the German Chemical Society in 1954, the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1960, and in 1967, the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
In total she had already written at least twelve letters to the guild between 1938 and March 1941, seeking assistance: the letters have been kept by them in their "Archive of German Exiles". This last appeal for desperate help is Leitner's last known piece of writing. However, she was last seen in Marseille early in 1941 by Anna Seghers and Alexander Abusch. She may have died in exile: one source speculates that she died of hunger, isolated in Marseille. Another speculates that she was one of many Jewish political exiles from Germany who failed to obtain exit visas from the French authorities and were rounded up and deported to concentration camps in Germany where many were killed.
Maria Leitner | Career
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
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
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
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
Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Fein fled to the Netherlands and in 1941 found refuge for the duration of the war in Switzerland. Fein remained active on stage over the balance of her life in her adopted Switzerland and abroad until shortly before her death.
Maria Fein | Introduction
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
The President of Germany, Theodor Heuss, awarded her the highest German order for scientists, the peace class of the Pour le Mérite in 1957, the same year as Hahn. Meitner became a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1945, and a full member in 1951, permitting her to participate in the Nobel Prize process. Four years later she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. She was also elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. She received honorary doctorates from Adelphi College, the University of Rochester, Rutgers University and Smith College in the United States, and from the University of Stockholm in Sweden.
Lise Meitner | Awards and honours
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
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
She nevertheless continued its activities, working from her apartment, and helped by like minded comrades such as .
Maria Weiterer | Emigration and anti-Nazi resistance
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
Meidner was born in Berlin. In 1927 she married the painter Ludwig Meidner. The Meidners emigrated to England in August 1939. There Else Meidner worked as a domestic. After World War II the couple drifted apart, both emotionally and artistically. Ludwig returned to Germany and Else stayed in London. In 1951 the Meidner's son, David (born 1929), emigrated to Israel.
Else Meidner | Biography
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
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 May 1942 Wijsmuller was arrested and put in custody in the prison on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam. The Gestapo suspected she was helping Jewish refugees to flee the Netherlands to France and Switzerland. A group of Jews and their hiding people were arrested at their hiding place in Nispen. Wijsmuller had provided them with false identity papers and escape routes, which she smuggled from Brussels to the Netherlands. To accomplish this she cooperated with Benno M. Nijkerk, from the “Comité de Défense des Juifs". But as the refugees only knew her pseudonym, "Madame Odi", Wijsmuller was released after a few days due to a lack of evidence.
Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer | May 1942: Arrest
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
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
The Natzler family was of Jewish origin. Following Hitler seizing absolute power in Germany in March 1933 and the start of anti-Semitic legislation, Grete and Lizzi were offered increasingly fewer roles in films and stage performances in Germany. Grete had renounced her Jewish faith in 1930. She moved to the UK in 1934 and went to Hollywood on a one-year contract with Paramount in 1935. By 1937 she had achieved minor celebrity as a film star and singer, had taken the stage name Della Lind, and was better known to an American audience as 'MGM's exotic Viennese singing actress'. Lizzi left Berlin to return to Vienna in 1933, but Austria experienced a similar political radicalization as Germany.
Hertha Natzler | Leaving Austria for Hollywood and Cairo, 1937–1938
But Inge convinces him that leaving innocent people in danger would be an even greater violation. The baptism occurs, the Dourenvalds get their visas, and the next day, bid Mitzi farewell and tell her she can have whatever possessions of theirs that she wants, as they can't take them with them and board a train leaving Austria with Gustl and his friends on the trail. Inge says her last goodbye to Lise and gives her a golden Jewish star. Jean Simmons' voiceover ends the film by saying that she (Inge) knew then that they would never see each other again and that while she wrote to Lise often after leaving Austria but never received any responses, she (Inge) didn't know if it was because Lise's father destroyed Inge's letters when Lise got them or kept her from writing back.
A Friendship in Vienna | Plot
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
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
Zimetbaum wanted to escape so that she could inform the Allies of what was going on at Auschwitz and thus save lives. She is said by some sources to have been the head of a resistance group. The escape was planned for Saturday June 24, 1944, when guard would be lighter due to the weekend. The plan was as follows: Galiński would dress up as an SS guard and escort Zimetbaum through the perimeter gate, pretending he was escorting a prisoner to install a washbasin. Zimetbaum would be carrying a large porcelain washbasin in a way that hid her hair, so the guards they passed would not know it was a woman he was escorting.
Mala Zimetbaum | Failed escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau
She was born Elise Meitner on 7 November 1878 into a Jewish upper-middle-class family at the family home in 27 Kaiser Josefstrasse in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the third of eight children of Hedwig and Philipp Meitner. The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists her as being born on 17 November 1878, but all other documents list her date of birth as 7 November, which is what she used. She shortened her name from Elise to Lise. Her father was one of the first Jewish lawyers admitted to practice in Austria. She had two older siblings, Gisela and Auguste (Gusti), and five younger: Moriz (Fritz), Carola (Lola), Frida and Walter; all eight, including the five girls, ultimately pursued an advanced education.
Lise Meitner | Early years
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
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
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
Fackenheim's affirmation of his Jewish heritage, although embraced by many other Holocaust survivors, was by no means universal. Physicist Lise Meitner had been born and brought up Jewish. She rejected newspaper attempts to characterize her as a Jew following the bombing of Hiroshima when the press learned that she had been the first scientist to recognize nuclear fission. Decades before Hitler rose to power she had become a Lutheran. Although the Nazis stole her savings and ruined her career she refused to work on the bomb or let Hitler define her identity.
Emil Fackenheim | Conversion to other religions
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
escape from Vienna with her husband in 1939".
Elaine Feinstein | Literary career
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
Following the occupation of France by the Germans in World War II, Damerment's family became actively involved with the French resistance. Damerment worked as an assistant to Michael Trotobas (British SOE agent) on the Pat O'Leary escape line set up by Albert Guérisse, where she helped downed British airmen and others to escape France until 1942, when it is believed that one of her fellow resistance workers, Harold Cole, betrayed the group and she fled to England.
Madeleine Damerment | Escape line
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 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
Before he left he set in train a plan to smuggle Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, two senior and by now elderly party politicians, out of Marseilles by hiding them on a ship. However, Breitscheid and Hilferding, despite being in possession of US entry visas organised under the auspices of the "Emergency Rescue Committee", still did not have legitimate identity documents and, according to one version, refused to leave without them. They believed they would be able to leave by other means: both were arrested and later killed by the Nazis.
Fritz Heine | Refugee escape organiser in Marseilles
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
Although East German security had often shot and killed citizens attempting to escape, they decided against shooting because of the possibility of triggering an explosion of the natural gas now leaking. Also, they believed Freudenberg had been killed by the current (which was not the case). 23-year-old Sabine was able to get back home, where the Stasi were already waiting for her. The improvised balloon had too much buoyancy and, because it lacked a properly working valve, it rose quickly and much higher than planned. Freudenberg couldn't sink and spent more than five hours aloft. At first, his course was west-south-west.
Winfried Freudenberg | Escape attempt and death
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
Weiss then went to the United Kingdom where he opened a printing and stationery business and lived out the remainder of his life. After his escape, Weiss was subsequently deprived of his German citizenship. In 1951, shortly before becoming a German citizen again, he died of cancer in London. Weiss's widow, Lotte Weiss (née Buss), returned to live in Berlin immediately after her husband's death. She died in Berlin in 1952.
Bernhard Weiß (police executive) | Weiss's Escape to the United Kingdom
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
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
She also helped to house refugees escaping from Nazi persecution.
Henriette Marie Meyer | Life
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
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
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
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
Reigl eventually reached Paris by crossing through Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium where she lived from 1950 to 1963. In 1963 she moved to Marcoussis (Île-de-France).
Judit Reigl | Biography
However, Krüger was still a German in France, while France was at war with Germany. She was therefore was considered an enemy. Krüger was sent to an internment camp in 1940 where she stayed for six months. After being released, she fled with her fiancé, Ernst Krüger, on a ship destined for Mexico. With both Mexican as well as U.S. visas, Krüger, her fiancé, and her sister, Gisela, hoped to gain refuge in North America. Unfortunately, on the journey, the ship was seized by the Dutch army. The three were placed in a British internment camp outside in Trinidad. After released, Krüger emigrated to New York.
Lore Krüger | Career
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
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
In the streets it became progressively harder to avoid encountering Gestapo officers and their French collaborators. Anne-Lise Stern now lived under a false identity and, after the death of her friend Eva Freud, made her way at the start of 1944 to Paris. Here someone denounced her to the authorities as Jewish. She was arrested on 1 April 1944.
Anne-Lise Stern | France and war
Before returning her to Britain, MI5 had to consider Sweney's nationality as she could not be said to have collaborated with the enemy if she was a citizen of a neutral country broadcasting to neutral countries. In her statement, Sweney said that she thought that her father had been born in Ireland but she wasn't sure. She received a British passport in 1936 on the grounds that her husband was British but she lost it before her arrival in France. She was released from detention, unlike the other passengers from the "Tirranna", and travelled to Paris where she obtained a temporary Irish identity document and passport, but the Germans replaced that with a "Fremdenpass" (foreigner's or alien's passport) when she arrived in Berlin.
Susan Sweney | Nationality
Lise Meitner (; ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who contributed to the discoveries of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on radioactivity, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and nephew-physicist Otto Robert Frisch discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie". Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the first woman from the University of Vienna and second in the world to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany.
Lise Meitner | Introduction
Famous German stage actress Emmy Ritter (Alla Nazimova) is held in a Nazi concentration camp. She is scheduled to be executed soon, but the sympathetic camp doctor, Ditten (Philip Dorn), has been a fan since childhood and offers to deliver a letter from her to her children...afterwards. Emmy's son Mark Preysing (Robert Taylor), an American citizen, travels to Germany in search of his mother, but nobody, not even frightened old family friends, want anything to do with him. A German official tells Mark that she has been arrested and advises him to return to the United States. The postmark of a returned letter guides Mark to the region where she is being held.
Escape (1940 film) | Plot
Because of his Jewish background he decided to escape from Nazi Germany and flee to England in 1939 by obtaining a trainee permit. Unfortunately, he lacked a Work Permit and, despite a contract with Gaumont British, was prevented from working by the British Musicians Union. At the start of the Second World War he was classified as an "enemy alien". Nine months later, he was rounded up with 2,500, mainly Jewish, enemy aliens and deported to Canada. Due to submarine activity his ship, the HMT Dunera, was diverted to Australia. During this eight-week voyage, he and his refugee colleagues were herded into cramped, filthy conditions and were subjected to significant ill treatment from their guards.
Erich Liffmann | England
Nazi Germany soon invaded and occupied France in 1940. Both joined the French Resistance. In 1942, London was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was held prisoner for the remainder of the war. In 1944 she was held with Louise Aslanian, with whom she became friends.
Lise London | Introduction
After the Nazis came to power, Kirsch was denied permission to leave Germany, and so was forced to escape to Italy leaving all her possessions behind. She returned to the United States in 1937, and made her professional debut in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall that year.
Florence Kirsch Du Brul | Introduction
He continued to live in Vienna until the 1938 Anschluss, when Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany. Despite being aware that his Jewish ethnicity would now be a problem for him, according to Blanche Patch, who knew him, he and his wife did not at first react: Trebitsch fled to Paris, where he was awarded an honorary French citizenship in 1939 in recognition of his promotion of French culture in Germany. After the invasion of France in 1940, he moved to Zürich. While there he wrote to Shaw asking him for financial support. He also attempted to raise funds by unsuccessfully claiming royalties for "The Chocolate Soldier", a German operetta based on "Arms and the Man".
Siegfried Trebitsch | Escape from the Nazis