Difference between Movie and Novel SPOILERS!!!

I watched the movie with James Stewart countless times and finally decided to read the novel by Phyllis Bottome who lived in Germany way back in the early 30's according to Wikipedia.
So her approach is more realistic than Ethel Vance's.

And compared with a very similar, but rather lousy written novel ("Escape" by Ethel Vance who's writing style is pathetic), I gave Bottome's novel 2 stars in amazon dot com.
Bottome spreads lots of German words into her text which might be difficult to understand for American readers.
And the story is so much longer than the story in the film.

In the film Hans Breitner is called Martin Breitner (Jimmy Stewart). When he flees on skis together with Freya to Austria, she gets killed and he carries her on skis into Austria.

In the book however, he leaves Freya behind and tries to flee from Nazi Germany by skiing into Tyrol, Austria, which in 1937 when this novel was written, still did not belong to the Reich. From 1938 on it was part of the Third Reich.
But even though Hans reaches Austrian ground, he gets killed by Nazi border patrols.

So halfway into the book, Freya has lost the love of her life and expects a baby which she leaves with Hans/Martin's mother who owns a small farm way up in the mountains (Wetterstein).
The baby is never mentioned in the film which proves that novelists had more freedom than screenwriters way back then.