![]() “Will you send me any kind of help you can afford - food, clothing, hats, shoes, money?” he begged. Taking to the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, he implored Americans to relieve the sufferings of their former enemy. In 1920, returning to Germany for the first time since the Great War, he was heartsick at the destitution in a once prosperous land. On March 15, 1915, he expanded the operation to a 230-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley and christened the grounds Universal City - already declaring his aspirations for the universal medium.Īs Laemmle built his American dream factory, he maintained warm personal ties and close commercial links with his native land, frequently vacationing there and mixing business and pleasure. ![]() Boosted by an infusion of cash from a white-slavery exposé entitled Traffic in Souls (1913), he transferred his operation to the city soon to become synonymous with the budding industry, opening the first Universal Pictures in an old brewery on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Opening his own nickelodeon, Laemmle got in on the ground floor of a business that would never again be small change. In 1906, he moved to Chicago with plans to invest his savings in a five-and-dime store - until he noticed a long line of customers, nickels in hand, waiting to enter a storefront to gawk at the entertainment revolution launched with the new century. ![]() In 1889, wasting no time, he became a proud American citizen. He climbed the ladder a rung at a time, working hard, living modestly and keeping an eye out for the main chance, rising from $4-a-week messenger, to clerk, to store manager, to store owner. ![]() He is the closest thing to an Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg that Hollywood has.īorn in 1867 in the municipality of Laupheim, in the blue Danube district of Württemberg, Germany, the son of precariously bourgeois Jewish merchants, Laemmle immigrated to American at age 17 to live out a scenario scripted by Benjamin Franklin. Years before the official onset of genocide and decades before the word “Holocaust” become a signifier for the extermination of European Jewry, Laemmle worked tirelessly to rescue Hitler’s chosen victims, putting his money where his heart was, not just for family and friends but for any desperate supplicant. Less well known is Laemmle’s role as a savior of Jewish refugees from the charnel house of Nazi Germany. ![]()
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