and in 1939 he received a teaching appointment at the University of Maryland, where he rose through the ranks and long chaired the Department of German. Plaut remained in New York City, where he officially changed his name to Plant and worked for the emigre Klaus Mann. Koplowitz would officially change his name to Seidlin in 1943, when he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen. With Plant, he coauthored S.O.S. Geneva, a young readers' book with a cosmopolitan and pacifistic theme that was published in English in October 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. Under the title Der goldene Apfel, an abridged and annotated version of Seidlin's Pedronis muss geholfen werden! was published in 1942 for use in German language instruction. Between 1942 and 1946, he was granted an extended wartime leave from his teaching position at Smith to serve with the "Ritchie Boys" (Military Intelligence Service). A second lieutenant, he served under Hans Habe in Germany, and he coauthored the screenplay of Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen), a documentary film about Nazi concentration camps that was directed by Billy Wilder. While his father died in 1938 and his sister Ruth was imprisoned at hard labor from 1935 to 1940 for political activities before emigrating first to the Shanghai Ghetto and then to Australia, his mother was killed in Auschwitz, probably in 1943. In 1946, Seidlin recorded his religion as Lutheran on a personnel information form. Ohio State University Following World War II, Seidlin made the acquaintance of Bernhard Blume while teaching at the German Summer School of Middlebury College in Vermont. Also an emigre who had left Nazi Germany in 1936, Blume chaired the Department of German at Ohio State University beginning in 1945, and he offered Seidlin an assistant professorship there. Seidlin moved to Columbus in the autumn of 1946, and he solidified his credentials with an essay on Goethe's Faust that appeared in the Publications of the Modern Language Association (1947). This signaled a growing shift in Seidlin's scholarly focus from the politically and socially informed studies of his Frankfurt and Basel years to the canonical works of Weimar Classicism and German Romanticism favored in Germanistics during the Cold War period. He collaborated on An Outline‑History of German Literature (1948) with the prominent Swiss-American comparatist Werner Paul Friederich (1905–1993), professor at the University of North Carolina, and Philip Allison Shelley (1907–1974), head of the German