Miles Lerman, who died Tuesday at 88, survived the Holocaust as a prisoner and partisan fighter, then emigrated to America where he had a successful business career and served as founding chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. A member of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust since being appointed by President Carter in 1980, Lerman helped with the raising of $200 million for the museum. Then, weeks before the museum opened in 1993, Lerman was appointed chairman of the museum’s governing council by President Clinton.

During his six years as chairman, 14 million visitors witnessed its collections, which include boxcars, barracks, canisters that held the nerve gas Zyklon B, and cobblestones from the Warsaw Ghetto.

“Miles often referred to those of us who worked closely with him as ‘comrades in arms,'” said the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield. Lerman also established the museum’s Committee on Conscience, which raises awareness on current genocides including Darfur. It extended invitations to parishioners of black churches in the South that were struck by arsonists in the 1990s.

Born into a prosperous family whose flour mills were seized by the Nazis, Lerman was sent to a labor camp where the work included breaking up Jewish tombstones to build a road for German troops invading Russia. He escaped in 1942 and described spending the rest of the war sabotaging the Germans with a band of partisans he helped organize. In one operation, he told the Washington Post, his men mixed sugar into the German’s diesel fuel. “The obligation of the partisan units was to drive the German soldiers crazy,” he said. “Our message was: Here are people who are willing to die on their feet, not on their knees.”

At the end of the war, he returned to his hometown of Tomaszow, by then a ghost town. His family had perished at the nearby death camp at Belzec. Lerman met an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, Rosalie Chris Laks, and the two married, then left Poland for America. Lerman worked in a Brooklyn warehouse before moving to Vineland, N.J., where he established a chicken farm and then built up a fuel oil distributorship. A stalwart Democrat who gave tens of thousand to party coffers, Lerman emerged as a candidate for chairman of the museum’s council shortly before it opened in 1993. The chairman serves at the pleasure of the president, and the previous chairman, Harvey Meyerhoff, had been appointed by President Reagan.

After the museum opened in 1993, Lerman negotiated with emerging Eastern European nations for the acquisition of Holocaust-related artifacts and archival materials. According to a former director of the museum’s research institute, Michael Berenbaum, Lerman’s “ability to hold his liquor was a unique asset in Eastern Europe.”

Mindful of his years as a partisan fighter, Lerman helped fund the Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance under the museum’s aegis.

Lerman became entangled in the controversy over an invitation to the museum for Yasser Arafat. The invitation was withdrawn on the advice of the museum’s director, Walter Reich. But Lerman – apparently under pressure by the State Department – reversed himself and Arafat accepted, only to cancel at the last minute. Dr. Reich resigned over the affair.

“All I wanted to do is to bring Arafat in and teach him the lessons of the Holocaust,” Lerman told the Washington Post in 2000. In the end, Arafat decided not to come.

In 1999, a panel of the Congressionally-chartered National Academy of Public Administration issued a report that criticized Lerman for “excessive involvement” in running the museum, where the volunteer leader had an office. “Miles Lerman and I disagreed on some matters related to Holocaust memorialization, but I strongly believe that he deserves enormous credit for his important contributions to the creation of the Holocaust Museum,” Dr. Reich, now Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at George Washington University, said in an interview.

After Lerman retired in 2000, he spearheaded the creation of a memorial at Belzec. In 2002, he led a delegation of Polish Americans to Vatican City, where they received Pope John Paul II’s blessing for the Belzec memorial, which was completed in 2004.

Lerman is survived by his wife, a son, David Lerman, a daughter, Jeanette Neubauer, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.