Emergency Exit: seeking refuge in the shadow of fascism

Coming October 1st - This podcast explores the extraordinary stories of European refugees who escaped Nazi persecution, only to confront new forms of exclusion through Australia’s legal and bureaucratic systems.

In the aftermath of World War II, a charismatic Estonian man named Ilmar Tammelo arrived in Australia as one of more than 170,000 in the Displaced Persons Scheme. Trained as a lawyer and shaped by the upheavals of Soviet and Nazi occupation, Tammelo was assigned to manual labour in regional Australia, a condition of his participation in the DP scheme. A chance encounter brought him into the company of the leading legal theorist, Julius Stone, and Tammelo entered a small but influential circle o

The Nazi rise to power looms over Europe in the 1930s, causing an exodus of emigrants seeking refuge from persecution. But fleeing fascism involves contending with the arcane - and often arbitrary - immigration systems of other countries who turn a blind eye to the unfolding crisis. Some escape; most do not. In Australia, a woman named Camilla Wedgwood works tirelessly, trying to help refugees navigate the requirements for would-be immigrants. Through her letters, archival records and personal

Leonhard Adam’s life was twice transformed by bureaucratic categories. Declared a “non-Aryan” by Nazi rules, he was forced out of his career and from his home in Germany. He fled to England in search of safety, only to be classified as an “enemy alien”, a category formed in panicked haste as Europe descended into war. Adam was swept up in a wave of mass internment that made little distinction between refugees and real threats. From there, his world shrank to barbed wire and bureaucracy. Arreste

In this bonus episode, employment and human rights lawyer Josh Bornstein talks with Katherine Biber about the family history that shaped his career. Bornstein's grandparents left Poland in 1933 hoping to escape, finally securing passage to Melbourne in 1938, only for his grandmother to be hospitalised under a Nazi doctor and his grandfather interrogated by German police during a stopover before they could continue the journey. Growing up in a politically engaged household — his mother a union of

In this bonus episode, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak speaks with Rob Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk, about the international network's work protecting the human rights of threatened scholars and defending academic freedom. Founded in 1999 at the University of Chicago by a group of academics moved by a radio interview with an exiled scholar, Scholars at Risk now spans more than 650 member institutions in over 40 countries. Quinn traces how the organisation's work has grown from offering indi