- George Washington
George Constant Louis Washington (May 1871 - March 29, 1946) was an American inventor and businessman of Anglo-Belgian origin. He is best remembered for his invention of an early instant coffee process and for the company he founded to mass-produce it, the "G. Washington Coffee Company".
- Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6 1856 - September 23 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind, especially involving the mechanism of repression; his redefinition of sexual desire as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, …
- John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 - 8 December 1980), was an Academy Award and Grammy Award-winning English songwriter, singer, musician, graphic artist, author and political activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founders of The Beatles. Lennon and Paul McCartney formed a critically acclaimed and commercially successful partnership writing songs for The Beatles and other artists. Lennon, with his cynical edge and knack for introspection, and McCartney, …
- John Bidwell
John Bidwell (August 5 1819- April 4, 1900) was known throughout California and across the nation as an important pioneer, farmer, soldier, statesman, politician and philanthropist. He is famous for leading one of the first emigrant parties along the California Trail, and for founding Chico, California.
- Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing CH (born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia on October 22, 1919) is a British writer.
- Johannes R. Becher
Johannes Robert Becher (b May 22 1891 in Munich; d October 11 1958 in Berlin) was a German politician and poet. Johannes R. Becher was the son of judge Heinrich Becher. In 1910 tried to commit suicide with a friend. Only Becher survived. He starting from 1911 he studied medicine and philosophy in Munich and Jena. He left his studies and became an expressionist writer, his first works appearing in 1913.
- J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and university professor, best known as the author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout Roman Catholic.
- Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka (March 1, 1886-February 22, 1980) was an Austrian artist and poet of Czech origin, best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. Kokoschka's early career was marked by intense portraits of Viennese celebrities. He served in the Austrian army in World War I and was wounded. At the hospital, the doctors decided that he was mentally unstable. Nevertheless, he continued to develop his career as an artist, …
- Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner (May 12, 1892 - July 22, 1970) was an Austrian-born stage and film actor. Kortner was born in Vienna as "Fritz Nathan Kohn". He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year he made his first appearance in a silent film. He became one of Germany's best known character actors.
- Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky (– December 13, 1944) was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. As a young man he enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics.
- Caleb Greenwood
"Old" Caleb Greenwood was a Western U.S. fur trapper and trail guide. In 1844 he, along with Isaac Hitchcock, guided the influential Stephens-Townsend-Murphy emigrant party across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Reputedly 80 years old at the time, on reaching Sutter's Fort he had completed the first overland wagon journey to California. Greenwood, returning east the following year with his two sons, pioneered a new route bypassing the Truckee River Canyon.
- Mascha Kaléko
Mascha Kaléko, born Golda Malka Aufen on June 7th 1907 in Krenau (today Chrzanow), Austria (today Poland); died January 21st 1975 in Zürich) was a German language poet. Her family moved from Galicia to Germany, from where she managed to emigrate to the USA during the Nazi era in 1938. While in the USA she lived several places until coming to rest on Minetta Street in New York City's Greenwich Village.
- Katie Melua
Ketevan "Katie" Melua is a British-Georgian singer and musician, who was born in Georgia, but moved to Northern Ireland at the age of eight and then relocated to England at the age of 14. Melua is signed to the small Dramatico record label, under the management of songwriter Mike Batt, and made her musical debut in 2003. She is, as of 2006, the United Kingdom's biggest-selling female artist and Europe's highest selling European female artist.
- Francis Asbury
Francis Asbury was one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Born at Hamstead Bridge, Staffordshire, England of Methodist parents, Asbury became a local preacher at 18 and was ordained at 22. In 1771 he volunteered to travel to America. When the American War of Independence broke out in 1776 he was the only Methodist minister to remain in America.
- Ödön von Horváth
Ödön (Edmund Josef) von Horváth, born December 9 1901 in Susak, a suburb of Fiume, Austria-Hungary (today called Rijeka, Croatia), and killed by a falling tree branch June 1 1938 in Paris, was one of the most important German-language playwrights and authors of the twentieth century. Horváth was born as an illegitimate child of the Hungarian diplomat Dr. Edmund Horváth and Maria Hermine Prehnal. He was named after his father, but only ever called "Ödön".
- Pavel Tigrid
Pavel Tigrid (born October 27, 1917 in Prague, Czechoslovakia as Pavel Schoenfeld, died August 31, 2003 in Héricy near Paris, France. Publicist, publisher and author of Czech origin. He left Czechoslovakia as a young man to evade the Nazis. In Great Britain, he adopted the pseudonym Tigrid (after Tigris) for his work as a broadcaster of anti-fascist propaganda and kept it for the rest of his life. Returning after the end of World War II, he continued his publishing career, …
- Leo Perutz
Leopold Perutz was a German language novelist and mathematician. He was born in Prague and was thus a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived in Vienna until the Nazi "Anschluss" in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine. According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, …
- Jacques Necker
Jacques Necker (September 30, 1732 - April 9, 1804) was a French statesman of Swiss origin and finance minister of Louis XVI.
- Peter Doig
Peter Doig is a Scottish painter. He´s one of Europe's most expensive living painters.
- Hermann Scherchen
Hermann Scherchen was a German conductor. Born in Berlin, he conducted in Riga from 1914 to 1916 and in Konigsberg from 1928 to 1933, after which he left Germany in protest at the Nazi regime and worked in Switzerland. Making his debut with Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire", he was a champion of 20th century composers such as Richard Strauss, Webern, Berg and Varèse, …
- Moshe Katsav
Moshe Katsav (born Musā Qassāb on 5 December 1945) is a former President of Israel and member of the Knesset. The end of his term of President was marked by controversy, and from 25 January 2007 until his resignation on 1 July 2007, he was on a leave of absence amid impending charges of crimes stemming from his alleged rape of one female subordinate which was later dropped, as well as the sexual harassment of others.
- Hans Eysenck
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a psychologist most remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the living psychologist most frequently cited in science journals. Hans Eysenck was born in Germany, but moved to England as a young man in the 1930s because of his opposition to the Nazi party. Eysenck was the founding editor of the journal "Personality and Individual Differences", …
- Henry Bouquet
Henry Bouquet was a prominent British Army officer in the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War. Bouquet is best known for his victory over American Indians at the Battle of Bushy Run, lifting the siege of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s War.
- Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath (born December 10 1882 in Vienna, died December 22 1945 in Oxford) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was forced to flee his native country for Great Britain in the wake of the Nazi occupation, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
- Fritz Busch
Fritz Busch (13 March 1890 - 14 September 1951) was a German conductor. Busch was born in Siegen, North Rhine-Westphalia. He held posts conducting opera at Aachen, Stuttgart and Dresden. In 1933 he was dismissed from his post at Dresden because of his opposition to the new Nazi government of Germany. He went on to work in South America and Scandinavia before becoming the music director of the Glyndebourne summer festival in England.
- Fritz von Unruh
Fritz von Unruh (May 10, 1885 - November 28, 1970) was a German Expressionist dramatist, poet, and novelist. Unruh was born in Koblenz, Germany. A general's son, he was an officer in the German army until 1912, when he left to pursue his writing career.
- Brother Theodore
Brother Theodore was a monologuist and comedian known for rambling, stream of consciousness dialogues which he called "stand up tragedy." He was born Theodore Gottlieb into a wealthy family in Düsseldorf, Germany, where his father was a magazine publisher. Theodore attended the University of Cologne. Under Nazi rule, he was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until he signed over his family's fortune for one Reichsmark.
- Thomas Conway
Thomas Conway was a French soldier from Ireland who served as a major general in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Conway was born in Ireland, but was educated in France. With twenty years experience in the French Army, he rose to colonel, before he volunteered to the Congress for service in the American cause in 1777. Based on an introduction from Silas Deane, the Congress appointed him a Brigadier General on May 13, …
- Remedios Varo
Remedios Varo was a surrealist painter. She was born in Anglés Cataluña, Spain in 1908 and died from a heart-attack in Mexico City in 1963. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was largely influenced by the surrealist movement. She was forced into exile from Paris during the Nazi occupation of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941.
- Erich Salomon
Erich Salomon (April 28, 1886 - July 7, 1944) was a German-born news photographer known for his pictures in the diplomatic and legal professions and the innovative methods he used to acquire them. Born in Berlin, Salomon studied law, engineering, and zoology up to World War I. After the war, he worked in the promotion department of the Ullstein publishing empire designing their billboard ads. He first picked up a camera in 1927, when he was 41, …
- Emil Artin
Emil Artin was an Austrian mathematician. His father, also Emil Artin, was an art-dealer, and his mother was the opera singer Emma Laura-Artin. He grew up in Reichenberg (today Liberec) in Bohemia, where German was the primary language. He left school in 1916, and one year later went to the University of Vienna. Artin spent his career in Germany (mainly in Hamburg) until the Nazi threat when he emigrated to the USA in 1937. He was at Indiana University from 1938 to 1946, …
- Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix (February 25, 1916-February 28, 1991) was an accomplished sociologist born in Berlin, Germany. As a teenager, he briefly belonged to "Neu beginnen" and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught there from 1943 to 1946.
- Brigitte Helm
Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm was a German actress, most famous for her role as Maria in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film, "Metropolis". After "Metropolis", which was her second film, Helm made over 30 other films, including talking pictures, before retiring in 1936. Her other appearances include "The Love of Jeanne Ney" (1927), "Alraune" (1928), "Gloria" (1931), "The Blue Danube" (1932) and "Gold" (1934).
- Hans Adolf Krebs
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs was a German, later British medical doctor and biochemist. Krebs is best known for his identification of two important metabolic cycles: the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic chemical reactions that produces energy in cells, is also known as the "Krebs cycle" and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1953.
- Sherry Lansing
Sherry Lansing (born July 31, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois as Sherry Lee Heimann) is the former CEO of Paramount Pictures and the first woman to head a major studio. In 2001 she was named one of the 30 most powerful women in America by Ladies Home Journal. Her mother fled from Nazi Germany at age 17, and spoke no English when she arrived in the United States. Lansing attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and graduated in 1962.
- Virginia Dighero-Zolezzi
Virginia Dighero-Zolezzi (December 24, 1891 - December 28, 2005), having lived for 114 years and four days, is the oldest person in the history of Italy. She was born in Lavagna, Liguria. She surpassed the Italian resident longevity record of Maria Teresa Fumarola Ligorio on June 6, 2005. On September 14, 2005, she became the longest-lived person of Italian descent ever, having surpassed Amalia Ruggieri Barone, who was an emigrant to the United States.
- André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist. Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, near Senlis in Picardy, but was brought up in Belgium. He studied art in Brussels and Paris. He fought for France in World War I and was seriously injured. Masson's early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink.
- Joe Slovo
Joe Slovo (May 23 1926 - January 6 1995) was a South African Communist politician and long time leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and leading member of the African National Congress. He was born in Obeliai, Lithuania to a Jewish family who emigrated to South Africa when he was eight. His full name was Yossel Mashel Slovo. His father worked as a truck driver in Johannesburg. Slovo left school in 1941 and found work as a dispatch clerk.
- Maria von Trapp
Maria Augusta von Trapp was the matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. Her story and that of her family's escape from the Nazis after the Anschluss was the inspiration for the musical "The Sound of Music". Maria Kutschera, born in Austria, had entered Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine (Roman Catholic) convent in Salzburg, intending to become a nun.
- Benjamin Mountfort
Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort (13 March 1825-15 March 1898) was an English emigrant to New Zealand, where he became one of that country's most prominent 19th century architects. He was instrumental in shaping the city of Christchurch. He was appointed the first official Provincial Architect of the developing province of Canterbury.