Herbert A. Strauss, 86, Historian, Scholar of Refugee Intellectuals

Herbert A. Strauss, who died Friday at age 86, was a scholar who documented the emigration of Jewish intellectuals from Germany during the Nazi period.A refugee who narrowly escaped the Gestapo in Berlin in 1943, Strauss became a professor of history at City University while also serving as director of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin.Strauss was raised at Wurzburg, Bavaria, where his father was a machine-tool salesman. His mother had been born Roman Catholic, but the family followed his father’s Jewish observances. In a memoir of his youthful years, “In the Eye of the Storm” (1999), Strauss described the gathering storm of Nazism as resembling the gradual boiling of a tea kettle. He joined a socialist/Zionist youth group and moved to Berlin after graduating from a gymnasium in the late 1930s. He eventually enrolled in divinity school, one of the few forms of higher education open to a Jew under the Nazis – and one that included a rigorously classic German curriculum. For the rest of his career, Strauss would remember being witness to “the agony of a sophisticated academic civilization and the culture of which it had been a supreme expression.”In early 1942, Strauss’s father was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. That summer, he was murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp. Strauss’s education came to an abrupt halt later in 1942, when the Gestapo shuttered the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Strauss and his girlfriend, Lotte Schloss, escaped across the Swiss border in 1943 with help from her uncle, the Red Cross, and German farmers. They were married the following year. Lotte Strauss published her own memoir of the Nazi years, “Over the Green Hill,” in 1999; Fordham University Press published her memoir and Herbert’s. His research later established that her parents were shot to death by the Nazis.Strauss resumed his schooling at the University of Berne, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1946, and then immigrated to America, where he quickly found work as an instructor at City College.Already associated with various Jewish resettlement and emigre organizations, and believing that under the Nazis Germany had dispersed its finest intellectuals, Strauss specialized in tracking their movements. Eventually, this bore fruit as the “International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres 1933-1945” (1983), a massive work of agglomerative scholarship. The project eventually included the work of more than 60 scholars and ran to two volumes of more than 1,000 pages. Strauss’s widow, Lotte, said that the germ of the idea for the dictionary came from a newspaper editorial she read in 1971 pointing out that two recent Nobel Prize winners had been exiled thanks to racist Nazi policies.Strauss did not conceive of the Jewish dispersion as an entirely negative phenomenon; in a 1983 paper included in the edited volume “The Muses Flee Hitler,” he concluded that a new “Atlantic civilization” would be the upshot of the exodus of intellectuals to America.In 1980, Strauss became founding director of the Zentrum fur Antisemitismuforschung Berlin, a degree granting institution associated with the Technische Universitat Berlin.In New York, Strauss served as executive director of the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe and was the founding director of Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration.Strauss also held an appointment for several years in the general studies department at Juilliard. At City College, he became faculty sponsor for the Naacp when students decided to start a local chapter. His devotion to civil rights was evident in his choice of postage. Back in 2002, when the stamp honoring Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, was issued, Strauss purchased a large supply. He was still addressing letters with them when he was unexpectedly taken ill.Herbert Arthur StraussBorn June 1, 1918, at Wurzberg, Bavaria; died March 11 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center: St. Luke’s Division, of an acute infection; survived by his wife, Lotte; daughter, Jane H. Jones; two granddaughters, and one great-granddaughter.

Herbert A. Strauss, 86, Historian, Scholar of Refugee Intellectuals

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