Curated category
Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
- Hans L. TrefousseHans Louis Trefousse was born on the 18th of December 1921 in Germany. His family fled the Nazi regime and arrived in the United States in 1935.
- Kurt WeillKurt Julian Weill was born on the 2nd of March 1900 in Dessau, the son of a synagogue cantor, and he died in New York City on the 3rd of April 1950, just…
- Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg was born on the 13th of September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, a district that had historically served as a Jewish…
- Elsa EinsteinElsa Einstein entered the world on the 18th of January 1876 in the town of Hechingen. Her father Rudolf worked as a textile manufacturer there.
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society.
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and…
- Paul TillichPaul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long…
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned.
- Alfred EinsteinAlfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of…
- Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum built one of the most unsettling programs in the history of computing, and it unsettled him most of all.
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades…
- Gerald HoltonGerald James Holton was born on the 23rd of May 1922, in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family where his father worked as an attorney specializing…
- Peter BergmannPeter Gabriel Bergmann was born in Berlin on the 24th of March 1915, into a family that would scatter across the globe under the weight of Nazi persecution.
- Emmy NoetherIn a joint faculty meeting at the University of Göttingen, one professor protested aloud: "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract.
- Otto SternOtto Stern, born on the 17th of February 1888 in Sohrau, in the German province of Silesia, became one of the most influential experimental physicists of the…
- Eric GutkindEric Gutkind entered the world on the 9th of February 1877 in Berlin. His parents were Hermann Gutkind and Elise Weinberg, who lived until 1942.