How I Fled Nazi Germany
Hans A. Schmitt
In the Winter 1983 issue to which I had contributed, the Virginia Quarterly Review identified me as a person who had fled Nazi Germany. I thank them for dramatizing what has been an ordinary, and by the standards of grand biography, uneventful life, but they are mistaken, and I wonder who provided them with this apocryphal datum. The myth of my escape first surfaced one day in 1938 when Dr. William Gleason Bean, chairman of the history department at Washington and Lee University, summoned me to his office. After I arrived, he closed the door, bade me sit down, and asked in a conspiratorial whisper: "Tell me, Mr. Schmitt, how did you get out of Germany?" "I went to the Frankfurt main station, bought a ticket, and took a train," I answered truthfully. His face fell, and he dismissed me with curt thanks. Obviously, I had disappointed him, whether because I had cheated him of a good story, or because my apparent reserve indicated a lack of trust, I cannot say. He never raised the subject again.
