Susanne Engelmann

Dr. Susanne Englemann was terminated from her position as principal of a large German public high school for girls for “political unreliability”. She was a protestant but her mother was Jewish. Englemann had spent a year at Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate exchange student.  She went to Istanbul after the Nazis came to power, and as the war spread, she traveled through Russia, Siberia, China, and Japan, finally reaching the U.S. in 1941. She taught evening courses at Stanford University and was happy with her position there. However, restrictions on enemy aliens on the US west coast forced her to move east. She received a recommendation from Stanford’s Dr. Lewis Terman (creator of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test):

“If I were running the war, I would hire her as a traveling lecturer to go from one educational institution to another and tell them what Nazi political philosophy is doing to the human soul in German schools…She is a Nazi hater if there ever was one”.

Another reviewer said of Englemann, “What a relief to see Miss Susanne Engelmann after all the other refugees I have seen during the last months. She is not beaten, she is not a “Schlemihl”, but somebody who really knows something. She speaks excellent English, better than any of the refugees I know, and she looks nice.”

After a semester as a guest scholar at Wilson, Englemann received a recommendation from Wilson’s physics professor Dorothy Weeks, who described Englemann as, “Very active, not bitter, not broken by her experiences.” Englemann found a permanent position at Mary Washington College.