Herbert Strauss Addenda

Herbert Arthur Strauss, historian, academician, and teacher, was born on June 1, 1918, in Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was the son of a Jewish machine-tool salesman, Benno Strauss, and Magdalena (Hinterneder) Strauss, who was Roman Catholic. The family, including an older brother, Walther, and a younger sister, Edith, followed Jewish practices.

After leaving the Neues Gymnasium in Würzburg in 1935, Strauss moved to Berlin in 1936, where he was responsible for the administration of a Socialist Zionist youth group and enrolled in a program of Jewish graduate study. He studied German history and theology at Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums starting in 1938. Between 1940 and 1942, he served as an auxiliary rabbi for the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin.

When the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums was closed down by German authorities in 1942, Strauss and his future wife, Lotte (Schloss), went into hiding, where they remained until June 1943 when they escaped to neighboring Switzerland. Upon reaching Switzerland, Herbert and Lotte were briefly interned in refugee camps. In late 1943, Herbert Strauss began his studies at the University of Bern, where he concentrated on European History.

Herbert and Lotte were married in 1944. After Herbert received his doctoral degree in 1946, the Strausses immigrated to the United States, where Herbert Strauss initially served as an instructor at the City College of New York, eventually becoming a full professor.

In New York, Herbert became quite active in German-Jewish communal affairs. He was a member of several charitable and communal Jewish organizations, most notably the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe, of which he was the Executive Director. The AFJCE was an organization that helped German-Jewish immigrants acclimate to life in the United States and advocated on their behalf. He was also the founding director of the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, in 1971. In 1980, Herbert Strauss helped to found, and became the Director of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technische Universität, Berlin. The Center was dedicated to the study of anti-Semitism and to research on the migration of German-Jewish intellectuals during the Nazi period. His seminal work, published under the auspices of the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, Germany, was the two-volume International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres, 1933-1945 (1983).

Dr. Strauss was a prolific writer on a variety of topics such as acculturation and assimilation, ethnicity, German-Jewish relations and history, and immigration. Additionally, he was a regular contributor to a number of professional journals and magazines, where he published his articles and reviews. He was also an editor, translator, and a member of numerous academic panels.

Dr. Herbert Strauss died in New York City on March 11, 2005 at the age of 86, leaving behind his wife, Lotte, and their daughter, Jane.