General Discussion

Who can judge another for the path they choose? Many of the biggest talkers are not such big fighters when the moment arrives. "Invincible in the parlor, invisible on the battlefield."

Should people not have fled Germany and other European countries in the 30s?

The Refugee Map

Supported by Designated Development Funding from Arts Council England, our Refugee Map represents part of The Wiener Holocaust Library's archives. This site includes a selection of our rich collections of Family Papers, including handwritten diaries, photo albums, identity and emigration papers, Red Cross letters and recorded interviews. These documents reveal and preserve the stories of the individuals and families that fled Nazi persecution and antisemitism in the years before, during and after the Second World War.

Founded by Dr Alfred Wiener in 1933, The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi-era. We are dedicated to support research, learning, teaching and advocacy about the Holocaust and genocide, their causes and consequences.

https://www.refugeemap.org/

Albert Einstein’s legacy as a refugee

Albert Einstein is known as a genius, physicist and Nobel Laureate. While his theory of relativity changed the world, it wasn’t his only legacy. He was also a refugee and humanitarian, having inspired the founding of the organization that became the International Rescue Committee.

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Einstein was already a famous physicist by the time Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933. As a German Jew, however, his civil liberties were suspended and he was barred from resuming his professorship at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Nazis also raided his property and burned his books....

In July 1933, upon Einstein’s request, a committee of 51 American artists, intellectuals and political leaders came together to form the International Relief Association. Among them were the philosopher John Dewey, the writer John Dos Passos, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Other prominent citizens, even including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, soon joined the effort.

https://www.rescue.org/article/albert-einsteins-legacy-refugee

The scientists who escaped the Nazis

"My parents were pretty sure this was a one-way journey."

When Gustav Born's family were advised in early 1933 that it was time to leave Nazi-controlled Germany, it was from a good authority. The advice was from Albert Einstein, who told his friend and fellow scientist Max Born to "leave immediately" with his family while they were still able to travel.

The economist William Beveridge had set up the Academic Assistance Council, with the aim of rescuing Jewish and politically vulnerable academics.It was an organisation that would help 1,500 academics escape Germany and continue their research work in safety in Britain. It was quickly backed by academics whose names now read like a row of text books - J B S Haldane, John Maynard Keynes, Ernest Rutherford, G M Trevelyan and the poet A E Housman.

Refugee Nobel Laureates

Nobel prize winners: Prof H A Bethe, Prof M Born, Sir Ernst Chain, Prof M Delbruck, Prof D Gabor, Dr G Herzberg, Prof J Heyrovsky, Sir Bernard Katz, Sir Hans Krebs, Dr F Lipmann, Prof O Loewi, Prof S Luria, Prof S Ochoa, Dr M Perutz, Prof J Polanyi, Prof E Segre

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23261289

Refugees Fleeing Nazi Germany Reshaped Hollywood.

The look, the sound, and the speech of Hollywood’s Golden Age did not originate in Hollywood. Much of it came from Europe, through the work of successive waves of immigrants during the first half of the 20th century. The last several of those waves brought a group of traumatized artists who were lucky enough to escape Hitler’s death trains and extermination camps. All were antifascists; a few were Communists; most were Jews. These were Hitler’s gift to America — prodigious individuals who enriched the film culture and the intellectual life of our nation, and whose influence continues to resonate. Plenty of writers have explored the ways these refugees, exiles and émigrés managed to escape from Europe. Fewer have told about the Americans who had the courage to take them in. Of those heroic citizens, at the top of the list for her uncompromising conviction and generosity, was a too-often-forgotten screenwriter in Santa Monica named Salka Viertel.

Salka Viertel was a recently naturalized American when Hitler’s war began, having arrived from Berlin on a visitor visa in Hollywood with her husband during one of the earlier waves of emigrating filmmakers, in 1928. She became a proud and grateful U.S. citizen in February of 1939, only months before the official outbreak of war in Europe on Sept. 1 of that year. It was her very Europeanness that had alerted her early on to the growing conflagration across the Atlantic, well before Hitler took power in 1933. She had been raised in a well-heeled Jewish family in a garrison town in Galicia called Sambor, on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where she’d been born in 1889. And she came of age as an actress on the stages of many European cities, most notably Weimar-era Berlin. Long before the advent of National Socialism made anti-Semitism official state policy in Germany, Salka Viertel was quite familiar with its lethal intentions. Thus after 1933 she was extra sympathetic to the attempts of the panicked human beings who began to launch themselves desperately, in any way they could, toward the possibility of safety in America.

https://time.com/5752128/salka-viertel-hollywood-refugees/