United States 5th Army · Public domain

Thomas Mann's son made his own name with Mephisto (1936), a novel about an actor who trades his conscience for a career under the Nazis — so pointed a portrait that West Germany banned it for decades. Mann fled Nazi Germany, trained as a Ritchie Boy in U.S. Army counterintelligence, and became one of the first journalists to report from liberated concentration camps. With his sister Erika he wrote Escape to Life, a document of the German intellectual exile it describes. He died in Cannes in 1949, aged 42.