He was one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, after the war he fought against war crimes and genocide as an internationally renowned international lawyer. Thomas Buergenthal has now died at the age of 89.
The German-born Auschwitz survivor Thomas Buergenthal is dead. The internationally recognized international law expert, who lives in the USA, died at the age of 89, as the city of Göttingen reported in an obituary. After the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War, Buergenthal found his mother again in the Lower Saxony city and lived with her for a few years. In 1951 they emigrated to the USA together.
Buergenthal came from a Jewish family who emigrated to what was then Czechoslovakia in the 1930s before the increasing disenfranchisement by the National Socialists. He was born there on May 11, 1934. After Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, the family fled to Poland, where they were again caught up in German occupation during World War II.
hardly had any children chances of survival
After a period in ghettos, the family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in 1944, where Buergenthal was separated from his relatives. He survived the camp and a death march to another concentration camp, where he was liberated at the end of the war. He was considered one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz. Children had little chance of surviving there and were usually murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival.
human rights and international law
Buergenthal later studied law in the USA and specialized in the field of human rights protection and international law. He was a professor at renowned universities and was later sent by the USA, among other things, as a judge to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the Netherlands, which is responsible for prosecuting war crimes and genocide.
According to the city, Göttingen remained closely connected to Buergenthal to the end. Mayor Petra Broistedt (SPD) paid tribute to his life’s work. “In Thomas Buergenthal, the world has lost an admirable man of reconciliation and a dedicated fighter for justice,” she said.