3 - Edward A. Tenenbaum’s Family Roots, Adolescence, and Military Experience until 1946

Summary

Edward A. Tenenbaum’s Jewish parents from Galicia/Austria had been highly educated, his mother with a PhD in botany, his father in medicine, which qualified him to serve in the Austrian Army as medical company commander during all of WW I. They emigrated to New York City in 1920. Three sons were born there, Edward in 1921 as the oldest. After his graduation from Stuyvesant High School at the age of fifteen, he attended Ecolint at Geneva, perfected his French and wrote a prize-winning essay in English there. For his four years at Yale, I treat his study achievements and his extra-curricular activities, especially in Yale’s Political Union. At Yale he was best of his class of 1942. His B.A. thesis on the Nazi economic system was published by Yale UP in 1942. I cover his services for OSS and the US Army Air Forces in the USA and Europe as well as his friendship with OSS colleague and fellow economist Charles P. Kindleberger, who had headed the Enemy Objectives Unit in London. Tenenbaum was the first American officer to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp and wrote a famous report on its self-administration by inmates under SS supervision. For this he was awarded a Bronze Star.