When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Sigmund Freud was an elderly, cancer-ridden Jewish intellectual trapped in Vienna — exactly the kind of person the Third Reich was determined to destroy. His escape was engineered through an improbable chain of interventions that included a Nazi official who defied the regime’s logic to help the founder of psychoanalysis flee to London.

This episode traces the terrifying final months of Freud’s life in Vienna after the Anschluss, the diplomatic maneuvering and personal risks that secured his passage, and the strange moral complexity of a rescue that depended on the cooperation of someone inside the Nazi machine.

• The Nazi annexation of Austria and the immediate danger Freud faced as a prominent Jewish figure
• The international campaign to extract Freud from Vienna before it was too late
• The Nazi official whose intervention made Freud’s escape possible and the motives behind it
• Freud’s final year in London and his death just weeks after World War II began