Before he became America’s most controversial secretary of state, Henry Kissinger was a refugee boy named Heinz from F\u00fcrth, Germany. He had the pouty look of a teenager, with a hint of impish curiosity. His birth certificate bore the swastika emblem of the Nazi German state, but his visa application said that he was “of the Hebrew race,” a very good reason to leave Germany at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Six months after Kissinger’s parents filed that application with the U.S. Consulate in Stuttgart, and two months after the family arrived in New York, the Nazi government invalidated all German Jews’ passports. Kissinger had just escaped a genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reason<\/span><\/i> has obtained an exclusive copy of Kissinger’s immigration file under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It includes both his original entry documents from the 1930s and his naturalization forms from the 1940s. The papers provide intimate snapshots of Kissinger’s early life, when he was first starting to realize the power and danger of politics, but before he took that power for himself.<\/span><\/p>\n