Archives West Finding Aid

J. Hans Lehmann (1911-1996) was born in Barsinghausen, Germany to middle class Jewish parents. Due to the fact that they lived in Northern Germany, a region where Jewish people held allegience to the Hannoverian monarchy, he and his family were mostly shielded from growing anti-Semitism following World War II. In 1930, Lehmann attended the University of Heidelberg. It was here where he began to experience open anti-Semitism in 1932 after Hitler had become Chancellor. His lecture hall had a sign saying that Jewish students must sit in the back, an experience that Lehmann would recall in his memoir A time out of joint. To escape this enviornment, he transferred to the Universita de Stanieri in Perugia, Italy, where he obtained a medical degree, at a time of which the anti-Semitism of Germany had not spread. Knowing that the situation in Europe was becoming unsafe, he began working to flee with his family to America, obtaining a visa and the money necessary. He had to bribe officials in order to board a transatlantic steamship at Hamburg. Lehmann arrived at Ellis Island on March 30, 1936. He experienced difficulty in obtaining a job, as he did not have an American medical license and had limited English skills. However, his ablility to speak Italian enabled him to get a job at a small ethnic hospital. This would take him to Philadephia and later to Seattle. Lehmann soon felt convicted to serve in the Army Medical Corps. In March of 1945, he visited his hometown of Barsinghausen to learn that most of the people that he knew had perished in the Holocaust. After the war, he returned to America an adopted two sons with his wife, Thelma Gertsman. He opened a medical practiced in Ballard, going on to become faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine. In addition to his successful medical career, Lehmann was active in the arts in Seattle. Such ventures include earning a seat on the Seattle Symphony Board of Trustees, as well as 14 years of serving the Seattle Arts Commission and 9 years on the Seattle Center Commission. Him and his wife would later organize arts programming for the Seattle World's Fair in 1962. Despite such community involvment, he found time to serve on the University of Washington's Board of Regents (1977-1983).

-HistoryLink.org Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, "Lehmann, J. Hans (1911-1996)" (by Walt Crowley), www.historylink.org (accessed August 31, 2020).