Two days after Adolf Hitler’s Germany swallowed up neighboring Austria, the brownshirts came for Sigmund Freud. The gang of Nazi thugs barged up the marble stairs of Berggasse 19 in Vienna on March 15, 1938, bent on terrorizing the world-famous founder of psychoanalysis and trashing the home where he had treated patients for 47 years. They were met not by the 81-year-old Freud but by his wife Martha, who greeted the intruders graciously and pointed them toward an umbrella stand for their rifles. “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” she said as daughter Anna, a prominent psychotherapist in her own right,...