HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR AND WWII VETERAN DIES AT 99

Today the WWII Veterans History Project honors the life and service of Holocaust survivor and WWII veteran Harry Stern. Harry recently passed away at the age of 99. We had the privilege to interview him in 2019, preserving his wartime memories for generations to come.

Born in 1922 into a Jewish family in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Harry and his family were persecuted by the Nazis after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. He vividly remembered when he and his family lost their business and were not allowed to go to movies, shop in stores, or sit on public benches. But the terror was only beginning.

On November 9, 1938, during Kristallnacht, Harry and his father were arrested by the Gestapo, while their apartment was destroyed and looted by German brownshirts. He was held in jail for nearly a week before being released. Harry was lucky enough to escape Nazi Germany in early 1940 and left for America aboard the SS George Washington sailing from Italy. He began a new life in America, but when the US was thrust into WWII in 1941, he had to register for the draft.

In 1943, Harry answered his country's call and was inducted into the US Army, serving in a 105mm Howitzer unit attached to the 5th Corps. After training in the states, he landed on Omaha Beach on June 12, 1944, six days after the initial D-Day landings. Stern fought in five campaigns in the European Theater and was part of the liberating force of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where his step-father was once interned. During the later war months and into the Occupation period, he served as an official Army translator throughout Germany.

After the war, he learned that much of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, including his grandmother, who died at Auschwitz.

"Giving the Past a Future, One Story at a Time."

WWII Veterans History Project