Werner T Angress, born in Berlin in 1920, attended the Jewish emigration training center in Groß-Breesen from spring 1936 to fall 1937. After a brief stay in London, he emigrated to the Netherlands with his parents and two brothers in the winter of 1938. In the fall of 1939, he traveled to the United States by ship to live and work with other Breeseners at Hyde Farmlands, a farm in the state of Virginia. In the spring of 1941, he enlisted in the military and was trained at Camp Ritchie, among other places. As a US soldier, he landed in Normandy on D-Day and fought alongside the Allied forces to end Nazi rule. After the war, he returned to the United States, studied history, and earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis on the “Kampfzeit der KPD” (The Struggle of the Communist Party of Germany). He worked and taught at Stony Brook University, NY, for 25 years, increasingly devoting himself to topics related to German-Jewish history. His article on Groß-Breesen, published in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book in 1965, is still considered a seminal work. In 1988, Angress returned to his native city of Berlin, where he died in 2010.
Author: Wiebke Zeil