John Herz; scholar of international relations (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
January 25, 2006 Wednesday
Joe Holley, Washington Post Staff Writer
John H. Herz, 97, a scholar of international relations and
law and one of a number of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany
who found positions at historically black colleges and
universities, died Dec. 26 of congestive heart failure at
his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He taught at Howard University
in the 1940s.
Dr. Herz was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, and received a
doctorate from the University of Cologne in 1931. He also
studied at the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg and
Berlin and received a diploma from the Graduate Institute of
International Studies in Geneva in 1938.
Also in 1938, he published "The National Socialist Doctrine
of International Law," a book warning about Nazi aims and
intentions. He published it under a pseudonym, Eduard
Bristler, and managed to immigrate to the United States soon
afterward.
He found a position with the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton University through the assistance of Abraham
Flexner, a founder of the institute. He remained from 1939
to 1941.
Unable to land a faculty position at a large university, he
found a haven at Howard. In 1941, Ralph Bunche, then
chairman of the political science department, hired Dr. Herz
as a government instructor. "From his own experience of
discrimination, [Bunche] had special understanding for
refugees like my wife and myself," Dr. Herz wrote in a
self-published memoir titled "On Human Survival."
In a 1994 letter to the editor published in the New York
Times, Dr. Herz wrote: "The helping hand stretched out by
black colleges and black scholars should not be forgotten at
a time when, alas, Jewish-black relations have become
strained. I will forever remember in gratitude."
His experience was among those featured in the documentary
"From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black
Colleges."
From 1945 to 1948, he worked as a political analyst with the
State Department. At the request of former Office of
Strategic Services Director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Dr.
Herz was part of the U.S. legal delegation at the Nuremberg
trials and also helped draw up a plan for the
democratization of West Germany.
When Bunche became part of the United States' first
delegation to the newly established United Nations, Dr. Herz
succeeded him at Howard as chairman of the department of
political science and international politics.
While at Howard, he wrote "Political Realism and Political
Idealism," which won the 1951 Woodrow Wilson Prize awarded
by the American Political Science Association as the
outstanding book in political science for that year.
In 1952, he joined the City College of New York, where he
taught until his retirement in 1979. He said earlier than
most scholars that environmental destruction and
overpopulation were serious threats to life on the planet.
He focused his work on the relationship between contemporary
politics and global problems such as population pressures,
the exhaustion of natural resources and possible nuclear
annihilation. He was the author of "International Politics
in the Atomic Age."
The consequences of overpopulation demanded immediate
attention, Dr. Herz warned. "Even in countries like the
United States, Canada, Australia or even European ones that
still can (and should) absorb millions, with a world
population increasing by about 100 million each year and
doubling exponentially within ever shorter periods,
migration alone cannot solve the problem," he wrote in 1993.
He urged developed countries to jointly assist developing
countries with family planning, education and other forms of
aid.
"His work was his life," said a nephew, Roger Kingsley. Dr.
Herz continued his writing and research until shortly before
his death. "His goal was always to find solutions that would
bring about a more peaceful world for all to inhabit,"
Kingsley said.
Dr. Herz's wife, Anne Klein Herz, died in 2003.
Survivors include a son, Stephen O. Herz of Thun,
Switzerland; and a sister.