Ernst Berl papers
Document | Accession Number: 2013.392.1
Correspondence, documents, printed articles, news clippings, documenting the experiences of chemical engineer Ernst Berl, following his removal from the faculty of the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, and his immigration to the United States in 1933. Included is correspondence with other emigre academics from Austria and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, correspondence concerning attempts to help others immigrate from Austria and Germany and obtain academic positions in the United States, as well as materials documenting Berl's efforts to help persecuted Jews in Darmstadt with scholarship funds he had collected there.
inclusive: 1915-1954
bulk: 1933-1946
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Herb Berl
Document Creator
Ernst Berl
Ernst Berl (1877-1946) was born in Freudenthal, in a part of Upper Silesia that then belonged to Austria (present-day Czech Republic). In 1894, he began studies at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, and graduated in 1898 as a chemical engineer. Following military service, he returned to academia, earning a doctorate at the University of Zurich in 1901. Initially he served as a lecturer in chemical technology at that same university, but then began working in industry, helping developing synthetic fabrics. At the outbreak of World War I, he returned to Austria and worked for the government, developing explosives and chemical weapons. Following the war, he took an appointment as a professor of chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany, where he remained on the faculty until 1933, when the Nazis gained power in Germany, and Jewish faculty members were forced out of their positions. Berl and his family moved to the United States that same year, when he was offered a position on the faculty of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where he remained until his retirement in 1945. During those decades, however, he was active as an inventor, patenting dozens of products for use in the chemical engineering, such as the Berl saddle, used in distillation devices.
The collection is arranged in four series: Biographical, Correspondence, Correspondence from Herbert Berl, and Financial, and files are arranged alphabetically by file folder within these series.
Chemists--United States.
Germany--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.
Hesse (Germany)--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.
Jews--Persecutions--Germany--Darmstadt.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Economic aspects.
Chemists--Germany.
Jewish refugees--United States--History--20th century .
Berl, Ernst, 1877-1946.
Berl, Herbert. Gift, 2013.
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