Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States

Martin Magner (March 5, 1900 – January 30, 2002) was a German-American theatre, radio, and television director.
Magner was born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland); his father was a Lutheran director of a shipping line and his mother a Jewish concert pianist. He acted in the Hamburg Chamber Theatre from the age of 18 and replaced the general director of the company when he left for fear of the Nazis, despite his protest that he was himself Jewish. Four years later, on March 21, 1933, after being ordered to fire the company's remaining Jews, he fled to Vienna.For the following three years he worked there, in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and in Prague, where he directed operas. During these years he won praise from George Bernard Shaw, who liked his production of his play Too True to Be Good enough to call Magner an exception to his rule that "Youth is wasted on the young", and Sigmund Freud, who offered to train him as a lay psychoanalyst on the strength of a play about a psychiatrist. He declined.In 1936 Magner emigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where a Prague friend, Kurt Adler, was doing theatre work. For a while he taught at Northwestern University and again directed opera. In the 1940s he moved to radio and then in 1943 to television, working as a producer and director for 25 years, first for NBC and then from 1950 to 1965 for CBS in New York. His work included pioneering shows like Studio One, The Goldbergs, Lamp Unto My Feet, and Robert Montgomery Presents, and he hired a young Studs Terkel.After having to retire when he reached the age of 65, he moved to California and returned to theatre; he became the artistic director of the Inglewood Playhouse and started the New Theatre Inc. with Hope Summers. He made a practice of celebrating his birthday by directing a challenging play: for his 98th, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Play Strindberg and for his 99th, the West Coast premiere of Thomas Hurlimann's The Envoy. He preferred classics; other examples were Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Jean Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, Somerset Maugham's The Sacred Flame, and Athol Fugard's Blood Knot. He often used multi-racial casts.The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle gave him a special award in 1975 and a lifetime achievement award in 1989.Magner enjoyed mountain climbing. He was married for the third time to the photographer Marion Palfi; she died of breast cancer in 1979. He died of cancer in Los Angeles.

Alfred Theodor Brauer (April 9, 1894 – December 23, 1985) was a German-American mathematician who did work in number theory. He was born in Charlottenburg, and studied at the University of Berlin. As he served Germany in World War I, even being injured in the war, he was able to keep his position longer than many other Jewish academics who had been forced out after Hitler's rise to power. In 1935 he lost his position and in 1938 he tried to leave Germany, but was not able to until the following year. He initially worked in the Northeast, but in 1942 he settled into a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A good deal of his works, and the Alfred T. Brauer library, would be linked to this university. He occasionally taught at Wake Forest University after he retired from Chapel Hill at 70. He died in North Carolina, aged 91.
He was the brother of the mathematician Richard Brauer, who was the founder of modular representation theory.

Leopold Schwarzschild (8 December 1891, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 2 October 1950, in Santa Margherita Ligure, Italy) was a German author.

Fritz Reiche (July 4, 1883 – January 14, 1969) was a German physicist, a student of Max Planck and a colleague of Albert Einstein, who was active in, and made important contributions to the early development of quantum mechanics including co-authoring the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule.Fritz Reiche was born in 1883 in Berlin, Germany. In 1901 and 1902, he attended the University of Munich and he attended the University of Berlin from 1902 to 1907, where he received his PhD. From 1913 to 1920 as privatdozent he worked and taught under Planck in Berlin. Reiche published more than 55 scientific papers and books including The Quantum Theory.He became a professor in 1921 at the University of Breslau and then was dismissed as a Jew from his academic position in 1933. Eventually, with the help of Ladenburg, Einstein, and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, Reiche emigrated with his family to the United States in 1941 and went on to work with NASA and the United States Navy on projects related to supersonic flow.

Käte Stresemann (née Kleefeld; 15 July 1883 – 23 July 1970) was the wife of the German Chancellor, Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Gustav Stresemann. Widely admired for her elegance and intelligence, she was a prominent figure of society in the 1920s. As the wife of the foreign minister she made her salon at Tauentzienstraße 12a a meeting place of diplomats.
She was the daughter of a prominent Berlin industrialist, Adolf (also known as Arthur, born Aaron) Kleefeld. Both of her parents were born Jewish, but they raised their children as Lutherans. In 1903 she married Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), who later became Chancellor and Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, and bore him two sons, Wolfgang (1904–1998) and Hans-Joachim (1908–1999).
Her brother, Kurt von Kleefeld, was the last person in Germany to be ennobled, when he was raised to the hereditary nobility of the Principality of Lippe by Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe "in recognition of his loyal service" to his noble lord, Christian Kraft of Hohenlohe-Ohringen, Duke of Ujest, on request by the latter, on 12 November 1918, the same day as the Prince's abdication.Kleefeld is mentioned in one of the fictitious quotes the 8 November 1926 issue of Time satirically attributed to quite a number of prominent people under the headline: Had they been interviewed, some people who figured in last week's news might have related certain of their doings as follows: Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister of Germany: "A story went the rounds of Berlin last week that my ability to entertain lavishly on a salary of $6,400 a year is due to the kindly furtherance of my affairs by the multimillionaire Dr. von Kleefeld, my bachelor brother-in-law."In August 1929, when Käte Stresemann hosted the program for spouses at the 25th World Advertising Congress in Berlin, Time described her as "no hausfrau, but a young, elegant, cosmopolite, English speaking Jewess, a woman equipped with the conversation of the polite world, equal to parlor or nightclub."
In the autumn of 1939 she fled Nazi Germany with her son Wolfgang and his family and settled in the United States, where her son Hans-Joachim had already found refuge. She lived in New York City until her death on a visit to Germany.

Valeska Gert (11 January 1892 – c. 16 March 1978) was a German dancer, pantomime, cabaret artist, actress and pioneering performance artist.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

Gabriel Steiner (26 May 1883, Ulm – 10 August 1965, Detroit) was a German-American neurologist known for his research of multiple sclerosis. In his studies, he postulated a link between multiple sclerosis and certain forms of spirochetes.Of Jewish ancestry, he studied medicine at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Freiburg and Strasbourg, receiving his doctorate at the latter university in 1910. In 1913 he qualified as a lecturer in neurology and psychiatry, and from 1920, worked as an associate professor at the University of Heidelberg. Here, he was also head of the laboratory for pathological anatomy at the psychiatric-neurological clinic.In 1936 he emigrated to the United States, where from 1937 to 1954, he served as a professor of neurology and neuropathology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. In retirement, he was director of the Michigan Multiple Sclerosis Center.

Otto Lowenstein (7 May 1889 – 25 March 1965) was a German-American neuropsychiatrist who was a native of Osnabrück.
He grew up in Preußisch Oldendorf, the son of Julius Lowenstein, a merchant, and Henriette Grunewald, into a Jewish family, and, when he was 19, began to study mathematics and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, before switching to medicine in another university.In 1914 he received his medical degree from the University of Bonn, and following service as a military physician during World War I, he returned to Bonn as a neuropsychiatric assistant to Alexander Westphal. While at Bonn, he was involved in the fields of pediatric psychiatry and experimental psychology. He pursued funding from the Government of Westphalia, then developed and opened the first children's psychiatric hospital in the world. He became Chief of Staff at this new Neuropsychiatric Hospital of Bonn University (1920–1926). He became Chief Neuropsychiatrist and Director of the State Hospital for Nervous and Mental Diseases and founded the pioneering Neuropsychiatric Hospital for children, serving as its head from 1926 to 1933. This hospital continues to operate to this day and is believed to be the first specialized hospital of its kind in the world. He was the Director of the Institute for Heredity in Neurology and Psychiatry, (Institut Fuer Neurologisch–Psychiatrische Erbforschung) from 1926 to 1933. Together with his wife, Dr Marta (Grunewald) Lowenstein, he conducted hundreds of interviews to develop family histories of neurological illnesses. While in Germany he also began early research into pupillography as a means to detect and diagnose mental and neurological disorders including engineering the first machines and methodologies to assist in the study of the eye as a window to the brain.
In 1933, because of his Jewish ethnicity, he relocated to Switzerland in order to escape Nazi persecution (led by a former army colleague who was envious of his work), working as a neuropsychiatrist at the Clinique La Métairie in Nyon. He was a member of the faculty of the University of Geneva, Department of Ophthalmology, and Director of the Pupillographic Laboratory from 1935 to 1939. Under his leadership, the laboratory and the equipment pioneered there were invented and used in his researching the pupil. In 1939 he emigrated to New York City, where he was associated with New York University and later Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. In New York, he continued neuro-ophthalmological research with his research assistant Irene Loewenfeld. As he was preparing final edits to a major compendium of his life work specializing on the pupil, he was taken ill with pancreatic cancer. His work was entrusted to Dr Loewenfeld who had received her Ph.D. From the University of Bonn under Dr Lowenstein's mentorship. The work was ultimately published in the 1990s and contains his research in two volumes.He is remembered for his studies involving motion, size and functionality of the eye's pupil from a neuropsychiatric standpoint. In Germany and America, he created laboratories containing specialized equipment for research of the eye's pupil. He was particularly interested in the status of an individual's pupil during specific emotional and psychological states, as well as the condition of the pupil during periods of fatigue and alertness.
In 1957, he built an "electronic pupillograph" that incorporated infrared technology. This device was used to accurately measure and analyze the pupils' diameter, and was a forerunner to more sophisticated pupillographic instruments that were developed in later years. Lowenstein's pioneer experiments and numerous publications on pupillary topics were a major factor in bringing pupillography into American neuro-ophthalmological medicine.
Recently, a psychiatric clinic for children called Das Professor Otto Löwenstein Haus was founded at the University of Bonn in Lowenstein's honor.
He was survived by his wife Marta who died later in the same year and by his two daughters, Anne Elizabeth Löwenstein Perls of Pacific Palisades, California, and Mary Dorothy Theresa Löwenstein Rowe (aka Marieli Rowe) of Madison, Wisconsin.

Max Jakob (July 20, 1879 – January 4, 1955) was a German physicist known for his work in the field of thermal science.
Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Jakob studied engineering at Technical University Munich, from which he graduated in 1903. From 1903 to 1906, he was an assistant to O. Knoblauch at the Laboratory for Technical Physics. In 1910, Jakob embarked on a 25-year career at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Berlin. During this time he founded and directed applied thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow laboratories.Fleeing Nazi persecution, Jakob left Germany in 1936 and immigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) and a consultant in heat transfer for Armour Research Foundation. There he conducted research, covering areas such as steam and air at high pressure, devices for measuring thermal conductivity, the mechanisms of boiling and condensation, and flow in pipes and nozzles.His many years of teaching, consulting, and writing resulted in contributions to the literature of the profession; nearly 500 books, articles, reviews and discussions have been published based on his research. He has published a number of books in thermal sciences including Elements of Heat Transfer and Insulation (1942) and Heat Transfer (1956).
He is credited with devising the Jakob dimensionless number, aka Jakob number, which is used in phase change heat transfer calculations:

J
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{\displaystyle Ja={\frac {c_{p,f}(T_{w}-T_{sat})}{h_{fg}}}}

The Max Jakob Memorial Award, the highest honor in the field of heat transfer, was established in 1961 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Division in honor of Jakob.