Rehfisch also published works under the pseudonyms H.G. Tennyson Holmes, René Kestner, Sydney Phillips, Georg Turner-Krebs, José Rehfisch and Georg Turner. He was a freelance writer until March 1933, when he was arrested by the Nazis in Dresden after the premiere of a play called ''Hauptmann Grisel's Betrayal'', a warning of the dangers of National Socialism. He was released on the condition that he left the country never to return, so he escaped first to Vienna and then to London, where he worked first as a metal worker, then for the
BBC and the US
Office of Strategic Services. While interred at
Sefton Internment Camp on the Isle of Man in 1940, Rehfisch directed a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (see citation 6 above). Once released and in London, together with the philosopher
Hermann Friedmann, the journalist Heinz Jaeger (1899-1975) and the former artistic director of the
Staatsschauspiel Dresden Karl Wollf (1876-1952), Rehfisch founded The Club 1943, a cultural association of German-speaking emigrants. (This was after he left the FGCL or Free German League of Culture). In 1944 he edited a symposium
On Tyrants: 4 Centuries of Struggle against Tyranny in Germany, published by The Club 1943. Some of his plays written in English were produced in London, for instance
G.I. Brides at Sea, which was played at the Granville Theatre of Varieties in Walham Green in July 1946. One of his short stories, titled
Guilty Melody, was made into a British film in 1936. In 1938
The Iron Road was written in English by Rehfisch in collaboration with the English screenwriter Rupert Downing, for a production at the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre which opened on 8 October that year. It was commissioned to mark the centenary of the London to Birmingham railway line, and dramatised the trials of
George Stephenson who had to build over a swamp, and the effect of the railways on trade and the common man. Directed by
Herbert M. Prentice it was considered an artistic success but did not transfer to London. ==Return to Germany==