Billy Wilder left Germany in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime. The Jewish Austrian-born writer and filmmaker had been working successfully in Berlin, but Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the spread of antisemitic persecution made remaining there dangerous.
Wilder moved first to Paris, where he continued writing and co-directed the 1934 film Mauvaise Graine. He then emigrated to the United States, arriving in Hollywood in 1934. His mother, stepfather, and grandmother later became victims of the Holocaust, a personal loss that shaped Wilder’s lifelong opposition to Nazism and Holocaust denial.
The wording can cause confusion because Wilder was born in Sucha, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and is often described as Austrian and American. That birthplace is not the country he fled in 1933. Hungary, Poland, and Austria were connected to parts of his family history or the former Austro-Hungarian world, but Germany was the country where he was living and building his early screenwriting career when the Nazis came to power.