On 10 April 1933 Hennig arrived by the night train in Aachen and that same morning married Kläre in the registry office before catching the train back to Leipzig to sit his state exams . Apart from increasing his difficulties and in particular excluding his obtaining university posts in a Nazi-dominated society , the marriage also definitively put paid to an ecclesiastical career in the Lutheran Church . By late July 1933 he had acquired his PhD and turned to face married life and look for a job , which was offered by his reluctant father-in-law , Felix Meyer . An inventor who by the late 1930s had some 250 industrial patents to his name , Meyer had founded a firm for their exploitation in 1909 . He came from a Jewish family with Westphalian roots going back to the sixteenth century that was not of strict religious observance . Meyer was also a German patriot and one of the Jews who refused to believe that the rise to power of the Nazi party constituted a danger , to the point that he even returned to Germany in 1938 after a journey to the United States with his wife . However , it was in the course of that same year that events caught up with him , especially after the so-called Kristallnacht of 9 – 10 November , during which he spent some hours under arrest , and by the end of that year he had been forced out of the firm and its management taken over reluctantly by his son-in-law Hennig . On 2 February 1939 , Meyer was allowed to emigrate legally to Belgium , being married since 1906 to a Belgian woman , Marguerite Darmstaedter . However , the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium on 10 May 1840 meant that the couple were stranded as German Jews in German-occupied Brussels , a potentially fatal development
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
John Hennig