Before he left Europe for the United States on 1 April, 1941, Hans Sahl worked for several months in Marseille for Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. Visas and affidavits needed to be procured and money and the ship passages had to be organised. Sahl primarily worked to help actors and people working in film and to encourage the volunteers in New York to contact the European Film Fund, which was founded in Hollywood to support destitute emigrants. In order to expedite the process, he himself wrote on 15 March 1941 to the fund’s founding member Ernst Lubitsch. Sahl asked the director in a “memorandum” for support for a long list of refugees. Neither Sahl nor Lubitsch could help most of them however. The director Hans Behrendt died on his way to Auschwitz. The conductor Selmar Meyrowitz died of exhaustion in Toulouse. Some, such as the actors Ernst Busch and Harry Kahn, their colleague Maria Fein and the director Jaap Speyer – Sahl was wrong, Speyer was still in France at this time – later managed to escape via other channels. The fate of the majority of the artists listed is uncertain. In the case of the film author Curt Alexander and the cameraman Curt Courant, Sahl’s efforts came to fruition however. Both reached the United States successfully.