Escape From Germany (2024) on Netflix
In August 1939, Norman Seibold is a missionary in Stuttgart as Hitler's army closes Germany's borders. He is ordered to find the other missionaries and get them out.
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- Netflix2.8/5
- IMDb5.5/101,440 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Norman Seibold arrives in Stuttgart in August 1939 as a missionary for his church, where a parade of German citizens salute Hitler and a Gestapo officer strikes him for failing to salute. At the train station he meets Elder Anderson, and at a book burning rally a Gestapo officer takes Anderson's Articles of Faith and throws it into the fire. Word spreads that Nazi Germany plans to invade Poland. Elder Richard Barnes, of the missionaries office in Frankfurt, appeals to the American ambassador without success, and President M. Douglas Wood directs that all the missionaries be brought out of Germany. Seibold and Anderson are ordered to leave for Holland and to urge other missionaries to flee.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Escape From Germany (2024)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Evelyn Wood, the mission president's wife in the story, later became famous for her speed reading course, "Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics". Her husband, President M. Douglas Wood, became a seminary teacher and a principal.
- Sister Erma Rosenhan was the only missionary from the story still alive when research for the film began, and she was available to be interviewed. She died at 105 before filming started.
- Most of the extras in Escape from Germany were actual descendants of the real-life missionaries who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, according to the closing credits and LDS Living magazine.
- The real missionary Elder McOmber fooled the Gestapo agent at the border station and managed to smuggle the film out of Germany.
- Norm Seibold, the missionary the film follows, is credited with helping 21 missionaries flee Germany. Forty-five years after the events he said that in large crowds he still looks for lost missionaries.
- Nine hours after Seibold left Germany, on 1 September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. The evacuation of the German mission had taken eight days.
- Elder Richard Barnes fought in the Invasion of Normandy, where he commanded 7,000 troops, and helped set up refugee centers and LDS Church meetinghouses in East Germany.
