Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, before closing its borders to Jewish refugees, the United States granted asylum to approximately ninety thousand German Jews fleeing the horrors of the Third Reich. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the political circumstances of the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable--whether initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader public in West Germany. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German-Jewish refugees helped shape the course of West German democratization.