International Holocaust Remembrance Day with HAMEC speaker Fred Behrend

Holocaust survivor, Fred Behrend, will share his story of survival in Germany and the incredible role he played in the American Army to fight Nazism. When the Nazis came to power, Fred Behrend witnessed Kristallnacht and would escape persecution in Germany for Cuba and then to the United States. Fred Behrend would go on to experience brushes with history involving the defeated Germans. By the age of twenty, he had run a POW camp full of Nazis, been an instructor in a program aimed at denazifying specially selected prisoners, and been assigned by the U.S. Army to watch over Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V-2 rocket that terrorized Europe and later chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Americans to the moon. Upon returning from service in the U.S. Army, he rose out of poverty, built a successful business in Manhattan, and returned to visit Germany a dozen times, giving him a unique perspective into Germany’s attempts to surmount its Nazi past.