Hans Engel’s parents, a pair of Jewish-German doctors, are forced to leave Hamburg and start over again in the USA.
Hans Engel (1916–2013) was the son of the general practitioner Dr Heinrich Engel (1881–1956) and the paediatrician Dr Toni Engel (née Blumenfeld, 1878–1971), who was Hamburg’s first female doctor with a licence to treat insurance patients. The assimilated German-Jewish family lived in Hamburg’s Eppendorf district. After their licences were revoked in 1938, Hans Engel’s parents emigrated to the USA and initially lived in New York, where Toni Engel worked as a private nurse. Forced to redo all his medical exams in exile at the age of 60, Heinrich Engel finally found work at a private clinic in Dover, Ohio, where he and his wife remained for the rest of their lives.