Historian Herbert A. Strauss has died

The historian Herbert A. Strauss, founding director of the Berlin Center for Anti-Semitism Research, has died at the age of 86. The Center was opened in 1982 at West Berlin's Technical University and is today one of the world's leading research institutes on anti-Semitism. Strauss was born in the German city of Würzburg in 1918 and until 1942 studied at Berlin's Academy for the Science of Jewry. He then had to go underground and later flee to Switzerland from Nazi persecution. Strauss later told about life as a Jew in Nazi Germany and about his survival in his memoirs. After the war, he made his PhD. in History in the Swiss capital Bern and went to become an expert in the history of European Jewry. He spent his retirement in New York, where he did on 11 March.