| David H. Kranzler | |
| Birth Date: | 19 May 1930 |
| Birth Place: | Frankfurt am Main, Germany |
| Death Place: | Poughkeepsie, New York |
| Citizenship: | American |
| Education: |
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| Occupation: | Professor of library science, Queensborough Community College |
| Known For: | Holocaust research |
| Notable Works: | The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz (2001) |
David H. Kranzler (May 19, 1930 – November 29, 2007) was an American professor of library science at Queensborough Community College, New York, who specialized in the study of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.[1]
Kranzler was born in Germany, one of seven children, to Yerachmiel and Chana Kranzler of Würzburg.[2] [3] His family emigrated to the United States in 1937 to avoid Nazi persecution, and he was raised in Brooklyn, New York.[4] He studied at the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and in 1953 he obtained his BA from Brooklyn College, followed by an MA in 1958, also from Brooklyn, and an MLS degree in 1957 from Columbia University.
In 1971 Kranzler was awarded a doctorate by Yeshiva University,[5] for a thesis entitled The History of the Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai: 1938–1945,[6] the result of a seven-year study of the 17,000 Jews who fled to Shanghai from Nazi Germany. His dissertation mentor was Dr. Abraham G. Duker.[7] Duker, who had prepared his own dissertation under Salo W. Baron at Columbia University, was University Professor of Jewish History and Social Institutions and Director of Libraries at Yeshiva from 1962 to 1972, and a long-time editor of Jewish Social Studies.[8] Kranzler's manuscript was published by Yeshiva University Press in 1976 as Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945.[1] [9] Reviewing the book for The American Historical Review, Leona S. Forman called it a "painstaking documentation of a vignette in Jewish history".[10]
After working as a school librarian, Kranzler joined the faculty of Queensborough Community College (QCC) of the City University of New York in 1969, and was a professor in the library department until his retirement in 1988. He was one of the founders and the first director of QCC's Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.[11]
He served as scholar-in-residence in numerous congregations, college campuses, and centers, including the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue (under Rabbi Marc D. Angel) in Manhattan; Kodima Synagogue in Springfield, Massachusetts (under his brother-in-law Rabbi Alex Weisfogel);[12] and the Ohio State University Holocaust Center (under Professor Saul S. Friedman). From October 2002 to January 2003, Kranzler was a Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Research Fellow for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust at Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research; the title of his research project was "A Comparative Study on the Worldwide Rescue Effort by Orthodox Jewry During the Holocaust Within the Context of Rescue in General".[11] [13]
Kranzler became the leading historian on the subject of Jews aiding and rescuing the Jews during the Holocaust, and was among the first to document the efforts of Orthodox Jewish organizations, such as the Vaad Ha-hatzala and Agudath Israel. Historian Alex Grobman referred to him as "the pioneer of research on Orthodox Jewry during the war."[14] Kranzler's books Solomon Schonfeld: His Page in History, co-authored with Gertrude Hirschler, and his later Thy Brother's Blood (1987) were the first to focus on this area. He wrote a paper, "Orthodox Ends, UnOrthodox Means", for American Jewry during the Holocaust (1983), a report organized by the American Jewish Commission, led by Arthur J. Goldberg.[15]
Kranzler lectured on the subject in America, Israel, Europe and the Far East. He interviewed and recorded over a thousand people, including some of the major Jewish rescuers, such as Hillel Kook (also known as Peter Bergson), George Mantello, Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Julius Kuhl, and close family and associates of rescuers no longer alive, including Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and Recha Sternbuch. He established a research archive of about a million pages and interviews (mostly audio on about 1,000 cassettes) which were at his Brooklyn home. By 1978 the archive held over 10,000 documents on Jewish residents of Shanghai.[16] After Dr. Kranzler's death the archive was transferred to Yad Vashem.[17]
In his book Thy Brother's Blood: The Orthodox Jewish Response During the Holocaust (1987), Kranzler argued that more lives could have been saved if American-Jewish leaders had lent more support to efforts in Europe to halt the deportations, including the attempts, in Slovakia and Hungary, to bribe and/or pay ransom to the SS. Criticizing the book's factual accuracy, Efraim Zuroff described it as "an extremely one-sided polemic" and "a popular invective of limited scholarly value".[18] In the view of historian Robert Moses Shapiro, the book's defects, particularly its bitter tone and poor editing, undermined its "important and gripping story".[19]
The mid-1944 grassroots protests in Switzerland, including street demonstrations, Sunday sermons and the Swiss press campaign of about 400 headlines about the atrocities were triggered by George Mantello making public a summary of the Auschwitz Report (Vrba–Wetzler report) is the subject of Kranzler's book The Man Who Stopped the Trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador and Switzerland's Finest Hour (2000), which has a foreword by Joe Lieberman. The Vrba–Wetzler report, written by two Auschwitz escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, and distributed mostly by the Bratislava Working Group, provided a detailed account of the mass murder taking place inside the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kranzler was convinced that Mantello's campaign to publicize the report led to the stopping of the mass transports of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in July 1944, and enabled the Raoul Wallenberg mission and other important initiatives in Hungary and elsewhere. The manuscript won the 1998 Egit Prize from the Histadrut for the best manuscript on the Holocaust.[20]
During his fellowship with Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research in 2002–2003, Kranzler engaged in a research project entitled "A Comparative Study on the Worldwide Rescue Effort by Orthodox Jewry During the Holocaust Within the Context of Rescue in General."[11]
Some of David Kranzler's talks about rescue are on YouTube: