After Hitler came to power in 1933, she moved to Switzerland, and married the poet W. H. Auden, purely to obtain a British passport and so avoid becoming stateless when the Germans cancelled her citizenship.

She continued to attack Nazism, most notably with her 1938 book School for Barbarians, a critique of the Nazi education system.

[4]Nevertheless, he later candidly confessed in the notes of his diary, that he "preferred, of the six, the two oldest [Erika and Klaus] and little Elisabeth with a strange decisiveness".

While still a student at the Munich Luisengymnasium, Max Reinhardt engaged her to appear on the stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin for the first time.

In 1936, her brother Klaus wrote the book Mephisto, whose main character was loosely based on Gründgens, posed as a man who sold his soul to the devil, (the Nazis).

The book, which drew a lawsuit from Gründgens' nephew in the 1960s, was made into a film of the same name in 1981, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer.

[10] In 1927, Erika and Klaus undertook a trip around the world,[1] which they documented in their book Rundherum; Das Abenteuer einer Weltreise.

She was involved as an actor in the 1931 film about lesbianism, Mädchen in Uniform, directed by Leontine Sagan, but left the production before its completion.

There Erika Mann lived with Therese Giehse, her brother Klaus and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, amid a large group of artists in exile that included Kurt Weill, Ernst Toller and Sonia Sekula.

In 1938, Mann and Klaus reported on the Spanish Civil War, and her book School for Barbarians, a critique of Nazi Germany's educational system, was published.

During World War II, Mann worked as a journalist in London, making radio broadcasts, in German, for the BBC throughout the Blitz and the Battle of Britain.

When she arrived in Berlin on 3 July 1945, Mann was shocked at the level of destruction, describing the city as "a sea of devastation, shoreless and infinite".

Mann attended the Nuremberg trial each day from the opening session, on 20 November 1945, until the court adjourned a month later for Christmas.

[11] She interviewed the defense lawyers and ridiculed their arguments in her reports and made clear that she thought the court was indulging the behaviour of the defendants, in particular Hermann Göring.

[10] When the court adjourned for Christmas, Mann went to Zürich to spend time with her brother, Betty Knox and Therese Giehse.

After a spell recovering at a spa in Arosa, Mann returned to Nuremberg in March 1946 to continue covering the war crimes trial.

She considered it a scandal that Göring had managed to commit suicide and was furious at the slow pace of the denazification process.

In particular, Mann objected to what she considered the lenient treatment of cultural figures, such as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi period.

[10] In 1952, due to the anti-communist red scare and the numerous accusations from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Mann family left the US and she moved back to Switzerland with her parents.