Before he became America's most controversial secretary of state, Henry Kissinger was a refugee boy named Heinz from Fürth, Germany. He had the pouty look of a teenager, with a hint of impish curiosity. His birth certificate bore the swastika emblem of the Nazi German state, but his visa application said that he was "of the Hebrew race," a very good reason to leave Germany at the time.
Six months after Kissinger's parents filed that application with the U.S. Consulate in Stuttgart, and two months after the family arrived in New York, the Nazi government invalidated all German Jews' passports. Kissinger had just escaped a genocide.
