Henry Ehrmann; Scholar Noted for Daring Escapes From Nazis

Henry Ehrmann, 86, former head of the government department at Dartmouth College, and a refugee whose daring escapes from Nazi Germany were told in word and on film. Ehrmann’s background includes studies, degrees and professorships at several European, American and Canadian universities after his flights to freedom in the 1930s. His escape from France to Spain through the Pyrenees was featured in the recent public television program “The Exiles.” Ehrmann taught at Dartmouth between 1961 and 1966. Until 1990, he had taught at UC San Diego. Ehrmann had been a judge in Berlin when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. With the help of friends and bribery he escaped to the Czech border, where he skied over the Sudeten Mountains to freedom. Ehrmann worked as a journalist and scholar in France until it fell to the Germans in 1940, and he and his wife helped others escape the Nazis over the Pyrenees into Spain and then to the United States. In North America, he also taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Colorado, McGill University in Montreal and UC Berkeley. In La Jolla on Sunday of heart failure.