My husband and I represented that generation of Americans between the World Wars who became student émigrés, spending as many of the Depression years as they could studying in the universities and schools of Europe. Because ours had been a philosophic marriage—we had met in a graduate seminar at Harvard on the Philosophy of History—we had sailed on our honeymoon to Greece, the land of Aristotle and Plato. Greece, however, was crowded with refugees from the Turkish wars and while we were there even had its own revolution; so after some months we decided to settle instead in the land of Hegel and Kant. My husband, who had studied in Heidelberg as an exchange student in 1932—33, knew living conditions in Germany, and chose Freiburg, a quiet city at the foot of the Black Forest and a university town, as a place where we could study without fear of being disturbed by the New Germany which Adolf Hitler was bringing into being.

It was May 1935 when we arrived in the city of Freiburg, and it was Sunday. The railroad station was crowded with travelers of all sorts: families returning from a day's visit to grandparents, peasants in their traditional Black Forest costume, hikers with knapsacks on their backs who had spent the day walking in the mountains, middle-aged women (always numerous in postwar Europe) returning from Sunday coffee in some neighboring inn, cyclists who had put their bicycles on the train after biking all day and had ridden home at their ease. I was so busy looking in all directions at once that I almost walked into a middle-aged man in a brown uniform— a Nazi. He was wearing the small brown cap of the storm trooper, and he sported a Hitler mustache. A harmless looking