The film’s tag line, “They Fled Hitler, They Found America,” describes the journey of European intellectuals who escaped to the U.S. before World War II. Writers, musicians, and scholars including Josef Albers, Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, Bertolt Brecht, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, Fritz Lang, Jacques Lipchitz, Thomas Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Motherwell, Arnold Schoenberg, Rod Steiger, and Billy Wilder, to name a few, populate this film of testimony, interviews, and archival footage.