Irene H. Butter

Irene Hasenberg Butter (born December 11, 1930), is a German-American public health scholar, and a Holocaust survivor. She is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Michigan.

A German Jew, she survived the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps in her youth. Thanks to a prisoner exchange arranged by her father, she left the Bergen-Belsen with her family at the end of 1945, and eventually settled in the United States.

Early life Irene Hasenberg and her brother Werner were born in Berlin, Germany to John and Gertrude Hasenberg. They were a family of bankers including her father and his grandfather before him. The small family practiced Reform Judaism and were fully assimilated into the local culture and considered themselves German.

However, when the German forces invaded the Netherlands in 1940, new hostilities against Dutch Jews followed and her father made arrangements to get foreign travel documents from a Swedish businessman, an effort that paid off in the weeks that followed. Because they had acquired safe new national identities, they were moved from Westerbork to a special section of Bergen-Belsen camp for foreigners and from there they were sent to Switzerland as part of an exchange for German citizens. when she was sent to an Algerian refugee camp of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, where she could eat and recover from her mental and physical hardship. With the help of American relatives, she was sent to the United States and on Christmas Eve of 1945, she arrived in Baltimore, Maryland. Six months later she was reunited with her mother Gertrude and brother Werner, who made the crossing from Europe to the United States by plane. Her courses "[highlighted] the influence of race, gender, and poverty on health status, and the central role of child and family health in achieving a healthy community many years before they became standard topics in public health teaching".

Holocaust education After her arrival in the U.S., Irene was told that it would be wise to keep silent about the Holocaust and her war experiences in Germany and the Netherlands, but when her high school daughter Pamela proposed a school project in 1976 about Irene's war experiences, Butter relented and told her stories to Pamela as well as the entire class. The positive feedback she received encouraged her to expand her talks to wider audiences, including a panel discussion about the diarist Anne Frank, who died in German captivity. She received the Dutch Government's Anne Frank Award in 2025 for her work in Holocaust education.

Legacy Co-founded the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures at the University of Michigan, which honors the Swedish diplomat who is known to have saved thousands of Jews. Participates in Zeituna, an Arab-Jewish dialogue group of women.

Selected publications

Articles Butter, Irene Hasenberg. Economics of graduate education: an exploratory study. University of Michigan, Department of Economics, 1966.

Memoir Butter, Irene and John D. Bedwell - Co-author: Kris Holloway, Shores beyond Shores, From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story, Uitgave Can of Worms, Londen/NY, Nov. 2019.

Chapters

Film Never a Bystander (2014) short documentary film about Butter by American filmmaker Evelyn Neuhaus.