[2] Wilhelm Unger was born in Hohensalza (today called Inowrocław), at that time a small industrial town in the Prussian Province of Posen which since 1945 has been in the centre of Poland.
[1] After this he worked for the Kölnische Zeitung (newspaper) and for the West German Radio service which had relaunched and relocated to Cologne from Münster in 1926.
However, on 15 March 1939, as news services reported the German military invasion of Czechoslovakia, Wilhelm Unger fled to England, where his brother had been living since 1937.
The British authorities now responded by suddenly identifying thousands of refugees from political and/or race based persecution in Nazi Germany as enemy aliens whom they arrested and locked up.
However, by the end of that summer reports of the atrocities had reached the British parliament[5][6] and the authorities slowly began to rethink their policy of locking up the political and racially selected refugees from Nazi Germany.
[1] As a commentator and theatre critic he used his influence to encourage young director-impresarios such as his friends Peter Zadek and Jürgen Flimm.
[8] Unger was a co-founder of the Cologne Association for Christian-Jewish Collaboration (1958) and of the Germania Judaica library (1959), together with Heinrich Böll and Paul Schallück.