In the fall of 1938, the Iltis family was granted visas to enter the United States thanks to the intercession of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, along with affidavits of endorsement from Albert Einstein and Franz Boas.

In January 1939, when Hitler's military was preparing the invasion of Czechoslovakia, fifteen-year-old Wilfred escaped with his mother and his younger brother Hugh on a harrowing train ride that traversed Nazi Germany to France.

During a midnight stop at the Stuttgart station, Gestapo officers combed the train, removing ten passengers; the Iltises survived because the boys pretended to be asleep while their mother bluffed that she was the wife of a French diplomat.

Fred Iltis began his undergraduate studies in 1941 at George Washington University but after one semester transferred to Western Kentucky State Teachers College, pursuing a major in agriculture.

Many photos of his vast archive document the civil rights movement of the 1960s, student protests against the Vietnam War, the struggle of the Chicano agricultural workers led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, as well as the strikes and boycott of American fruit companies.