[Emigration of German psychiatrists to England. 1: England as a refuge for psychiatrists]

During Nazi time some 100 German psychiatrists emigrated to the U.K. and worked there for the rest of their lives or a number of years. An approximately equal number of them came into close contact with (a) the developing modern British psychiatry and (b) with psychoanalysis, which had already been established for a long time. With the exception of the Maudsley Hospital and the British Psychoanalytic Society, no groups have been established, so that there are many individual life histories of the former German psychiatrists in the U.K. in a series of papers we intend to review the movement and its consequences. Long before the emigration movement began there were already convergent evolutions in the British and German psychiatry. The current paper studies the historical conditions encountered by the psychiatric clinicians and classical-psychiatric immigrants on their arrival in Britain.