Holocaust survivor Irene Butter dies

Holocaust survivor Irene Butter died on Friday surrounded by her family and friends in the USA. Her agent Mary Bisbee-Beek confirmed this to NDR. For decades, the economist explained her experiences as a Jew under the Nazis.

Butter was born Irene Hasenberg in Berlin in 1930. In 1937, her family fled the Nazis to Amsterdam - to the same neighborhood where Anne Frank lived with her family.

Deportation to Bergen-Belsen

After the Germans invaded the Netherlands, the Hasenberg family was deported and came to a so-called transit camp in Westerbork in 1943. One day a package arrived there, Butter later recalled. Her father had previously ordered Ecuadorian passports with the plan of being foreign Jews exchanged by the Nazis for German citizens held captive abroad.

Nevertheless, they were initially sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anne Frank also met Irene Butter there again. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen.

Departure to the USA

After almost a year there was an exchange - but Butter's father, weakened by forced labor and the inhumane conditions in the concentration camp, died beforehand. Her mother and brother were hospitalized, so Irene had to leave alone: ​​first to Algeria, then to the USA.

There she eventually studied economics and became a professor at the University of Michigan.

Commitment and awards

For decades, Irene Butter didn't talk about her past - until she changed her mind during a discussion about Anne Frank. There she “recognized her responsibility and started talking,” Butter later explained.

She told her story primarily to students in the USA and Germany. The federal government honored this commitment with the Federal Cross of Merit in 2024.