Those Who Left Germany

They are not the Germans we usually talk about when we remember the Nazi era. They are not primarily remembered through deportations, ghettos, or camps, although some who initially escaped would later be caught by the German advance across Europe. They were among those who left Germany while the future was still uncertain: Jews, political opponents, academics, writers, artists, professionals, and others who understood that something fundamental had changed before anyone could know how far that change would go.

They did not leave before persecution began. By 1933, Jews and political opponents were already being pushed from professions and public institutions, businesses were being boycotted, civil rights were being dismantled, and political opposition was being violently suppressed. What had not yet happened was the Holocaust. There was no future history available to tell someone standing in Germany in 1933 what 1938, 1941, or 1945 would bring. Leaving meant making an enormous decision while the evidence was frightening but the outcome remained unknown.

Leaving Before the Ending Was Known

That uncertainty matters because hindsight changes the way departure looks. From our position, leaving Nazi Germany seems like an obvious act of self-preservation. From theirs, it could mean abandoning a home, profession, language, community, property, and social position for a future that offered no guarantee of safety or stability. Many German Jews were deeply rooted in German cultural and civic life. Others who left because of their politics, scholarship, writing, or opposition to the regime were similarly abandoning lives they had expected to continue.

The practical barriers were enormous. Other countries controlled whether emigrants could enter, and restrictive immigration laws meant that recognizing danger did not necessarily produce an escape route. Those who managed to leave might discover that professional qualifications did not transfer, that language limited employment, or that the money and property accumulated over a lifetime could not simply be carried across a border. Nazi policy increasingly stripped Jewish emigrants of their wealth, while receiving countries imposed their own financial and immigration requirements.

Departure could preserve a life while dismantling much of the structure that had made that life secure.

Loving a Country That Was Changing

Leaving also did not require ceasing to love Germany. For many emigrants, that was part of what made exile so painful. Germany was not merely the government that had taken power. It was family and language, childhood landscapes and familiar streets, music and literature, professional communities and intellectual traditions. A person could recognize what the country was becoming while still grieving what it had been to them.

That creates a kind of loss more complicated than simple rejection. The emigrant carries the country away while simultaneously accepting that returning to it may no longer be safe. Home becomes divided between memory and reality. The familiar place continues to exist geographically, but the conditions that once made belonging possible are being dismantled. Leaving can therefore involve mourning something that has not disappeared completely, but has changed enough that trust in it can no longer be sustained.

When Knowing Was Not Enough

The outside world was not entirely ignorant of what was happening. Foreign journalists reported Nazi persecution from the beginning, protests occurred abroad, and governments received information about discriminatory laws and violence. Yet knowing that something was wrong was different from understanding where it would lead, and different again from being willing to respond. Countries struggling with depression, unemployment, xenophobia, antisemitism, and the memory of the First World War were often reluctant to accept refugees or confront Germany.

For emigrants, this could create a particularly painful position. They had already disrupted their lives in response to conditions that much of the world acknowledged as troubling but had not yet treated as catastrophic. The difficulty was not simply convincing everyone that something was happening. It was living with the gap between recognizing that the existing situation had become intolerable and knowing what, exactly, would come next.

The Price of Safety

Survival did not erase what departure cost. Some emigrants rebuilt remarkable careers, particularly those who possessed international networks, financial resources, portable professions, or institutional sponsorship. Universities and private organizations created opportunities for displaced scholars and intellectuals, and exile reshaped cultural and academic life far beyond Germany. But those opportunities were unevenly distributed. Other refugees struggled with language, employment restrictions, immigration quotas, depleted savings, and the loss of professional status.

The fear of downward mobility was therefore not imaginary. A doctor, lawyer, professor, business owner, or artist could cross a border and discover that the identity built through decades of work had little immediate value in the new country. Younger emigrants sometimes had greater opportunities to begin again, while older people faced the possibility that rebuilding would consume whatever remained of their working lives. Even successful exile could contain a permanent fracture between the life someone had built and the one circumstances forced them to construct afterward.

Resistance From Exile

Departure did not always mean disengagement. German exiles wrote, published, organized, assisted other refugees, maintained political networks, and tried to persuade foreign audiences to take the regime seriously. Former politicians, trade unionists, writers, journalists, academics, and others continued forms of opposition that had become impossible or extraordinarily dangerous inside Germany. Some helped relatives and strangers navigate the increasingly difficult process of emigration. Others documented what was happening or tried to preserve alternative visions of German political and cultural life.

Exile resistance was fragmented and often constrained by the same insecurity that shaped emigrants’ ordinary lives. People attempting to rebuild their own livelihoods were also trying to help those left behind. Communication could endanger relatives or associates in Germany, while political divisions among opponents of Nazism did not disappear simply because they shared an enemy. Resistance from abroad could not substitute for what was happening inside the country, but neither was departure necessarily surrender. Distance created limitations, and sometimes it created possibilities.

The Country That Could Not Be Returned To

After the war, some emigrants returned to Germany and participated in rebuilding its universities, institutions, political life, and culture. Many others did not. For Jewish survivors and emigrants especially, the question of return carried the knowledge that neighbors, colleagues, institutions, and the state itself had participated in exclusion, dispossession, deportation, and murder. A reconstructed country could not simply restore the world that had existed before 1933.

Others had spent years creating lives elsewhere. Children had grown up in new languages. Careers had been rebuilt, relationships formed, and citizenship acquired. Germany remained part of their identities without necessarily becoming home again. Exile, intended perhaps as an interruption, could become permanent.

Leaving Without Certainty

There is a temptation, looking backward, to turn those who left early into people who somehow knew what everyone else failed to see. That gives them a certainty they did not possess. They could recognize persecution, authoritarianism, exclusion, and danger. They could see that the boundaries of belonging were narrowing. But they could not know the full history that we know now.

That may be the more important thing to remember. Decisions made during periods of political deterioration are rarely made with the clarity history later provides. Leaving can carry enormous costs, while staying can remain understandable long after warning signs appear. People have families they cannot abandon, professions they cannot easily reproduce elsewhere, money trapped in property or businesses, aging parents, language barriers, immigration restrictions, and attachments to places that remain home even when those places are changing around them. Some people who recognized the danger could not leave at all.

Carrying the Hearth

The Germans who left early do not offer us a simple lesson about who was brave enough to see the future. Their histories tell us something more difficult about living without access to the ending. They had to decide what evidence was enough, what losses they were willing or able to accept, and how long they could trust a country whose institutions and definitions of belonging were changing around them. History makes their danger obvious. They had to encounter it while it was still unfolding.

Perhaps their stories also complicate what we mean by home. A home is made from place, certainly, but also from language, memory, work, relationships, ritual, and the ordinary structures through which a life becomes recognizable to us. Leaving can mean losing many of those things at once. Yet emigrants rebuilt households, communities, careers, intellectual circles, political movements, and families elsewhere. They carried pieces of Germany with them even when Germany itself could no longer be trusted as home.

The hearth has always belonged to a place, but the knowledge of how to tend one belongs to the people gathered around it. Sometimes protecting the hearth means remaining beside it through a difficult season. Sometimes circumstances make remaining impossible, and home has to be carried in fragments until there is somewhere safe enough to kindle it again. The tragedy of exile is that those choices are rarely made with certainty. The resilience within it is that leaving one hearth does not necessarily mean living forever without another.

Sources and further reading

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.

Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Feuchtwanger, Lion. Exile. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Viking Press, 1940.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.  

Jay, Martin. Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Krohn, Claus-Dieter. Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.  

Palmier, Jean-Michel. Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America. London: Verso, 2006.  

Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.