The Faculty of Law mourns the loss of its honorary doctor Professor Thomas Buergenthal

It is with great sadness that the Faculty has received the news that our honorary doctor Thomas Buergenthal passed away in Miami on 29 May at the age of 89. Thomas Buergenthal survived the Holocaust as a child. After the war, he came to Göttingen, where he graduated from high school. He then emigrated to the United States and became, among other things, President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. As a professor at George Washington University in Washington D.C., he maintained close contacts with German academia. His intellectual brilliance and his personal destiny have not only made him a great figure in international and human rights protection; he has enriched Göttingen immeasurably - especially in view of what this city and this country have done to him and his family - as an honorary citizen and honorary doctor of our faculty, but above all for his human warm-heartedness. His account of his childhood and youth in the ghetto, in the Auschwitz concentration camp and on the death march, published in 2007 under the title "A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy", has moved many people.

(Translated from the original German obituary by Professor Hans Michael Heinig, Dean.)