Irene Butter

Irene Hasenberg was born in Berlin on 11 December 1930 to John and Gertrude Hasenberg, a family of bankers who practised Reform Judaism and thought of themselves as fully German. She had a brother, Werner.

After her father's bank was taken from him because of its Jewish ownership, the family left Germany for Amsterdam in the late 1930s and lived in the same neighbourhood as the family of Anne Frank. Irene's friend Hanneli Goslar was a close friend of Anne.

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, anti-Jewish measures closed in on the family. In 1943 they were deported to the Westerbork transit camp. Ecuadorian passports obtained by her father arrived in the camp and saved them from the transports to the death camps; they were sent instead to the section of Bergen-Belsen used for so-called exchange Jews. Early in 1945 the family was released in an exchange for German citizens, but John Hasenberg died before the train left Germany, from the effects of his imprisonment. Irene, aged fourteen and weighing 79 pounds, was sent to a United Nations refugee camp in Algeria to recover, and arrived in Baltimore on Christmas Eve 1945. Her mother and brother joined her in the United States about six months later.

Helped by a scholarship, she attended Queens College in New York and then earned a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University in 1960, where she was the only woman in her doctoral programme.

She and her husband, Charlie Butter, joined the University of Michigan in the 1960s and moved their family to Ann Arbor. As a professor of public health she worked on health economics, health manpower and the migration of doctors, and later on midwifery, childbirth technology and women's health. Her courses were noted for addressing race, gender and poverty as influences on health long before these became standard subjects. She was granted emeritus status in 1996 and continued to publish.

Alongside her academic work she became a leading Holocaust educator. She co-founded the Raoul Wallenberg Medal at the University of Michigan in 1990 to accompany the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture series, and in 2002 co-founded Zeitouna, a dialogue group bringing Palestinian and Jewish women together. Her memoir, Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, co-written with Kris Holloway and John Bidwell and published in 2019, was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and was translated into German, Dutch, Portuguese and Czech.

Irene married Charlie Butter, whom she met during her studies, and they had two children, including a daughter, Pamela. After arriving in the United States she had been advised to keep quiet about her experiences, and she did so for decades. In 1976 Pamela proposed a school project about her mother's war, and Irene told her story to the class. The response encouraged her to speak more widely, and she later described that moment as recognising her responsibility to talk. Her life and message were the subject of the 2014 short documentary Never a Bystander by Evelyn Neuhaus.

Irene Butter died on Friday 2 October 2026 at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, surrounded by family and friends. She was 95. Her agent, Mary Bisbee-Beek, confirmed the death to Germany's NDR, and it was reported by Tagesschau, Michigan Public and the University of Michigan. The cause of death was not made public.

Germany's Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, said that with her death the world had lost an impressive voice of remembrance and a tireless fighter for peace. The Netherlands ambassador to the United States and the Anne Frank House also paid tribute. A funeral service was held on 6 October 2026 at Temple Beth Emeth in Ann Arbor, and the family asked that donations go to the Irene Butter Fund for Holocaust and Human Rights Education.

Irene Butter is remembered as a scholar who helped bring questions of gender, race and poverty into public health teaching, and as a witness who spent four decades telling young people what hatred and indifference had done to her family. Her honours included Germany's Order of Merit in 2024 and the Anne Frank Award for Human Dignity and Tolerance in 2025, presented with a Dutch royal honour. The Raoul Wallenberg Medal she helped create continues to honour humanitarians at the University of Michigan, and the Irene Butter Fund for Holocaust and Human Rights Education, founded at Temple Beth Emeth in 2023, carries on her teaching in Washtenaw County and beyond.