Irene H. Butter

Irene Hasenberg Butter (born December 11, 1930), is a German-American public health scholar, and a Holocaust survivor. She is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Michigan.

A German Jew, she survived the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps in her youth. Thanks to a prisoner exchange arranged by her father, she left the Bergen-Belsen with her family at the end of 1945, and eventually settled in the United States.^[1]

Irene Hasenberg and her brother Werner were born in Berlin, Germany to John and Gertrude Hasenberg. They were a family of bankers including her father and his grandfather before him. The small family practiced Reform Judaism and were fully assimilated into the local culture and considered themselves German.^[1][2]

In 1937, her father's bank was taken away from him "because of its Jewish ownership" and soon other assaults followed, which caused her father to move his family to Amsterdam, Holland in December 1937.^[3]

However, when the German forces invaded the Netherlands in 1940, new hostilities against Dutch Jews followed and her father made arrangements to get foreign travel documents from a Swedish businessman, an effort that paid off in the weeks that followed.^[1]

Before the new passports arrived, German occupiers deported the Hasenberg family from Amsterdam to nearby Westerbork transit camp in February 1944. In the camp, Irene Butter reconnected with some acquaintances from the Jewish neighborhood where she had lived in Amsterdam, including her friend Hanneli Goslar as well as Hanneli's close friend Anne Frank.^[3][2]

It was in Westerbork that Butter's father received a package forwarded from his Amsterdam address containing Ecuadorian travel documents for each member of the family.^[1][2] Because they had acquired safe new national identities, they were moved from Westerbork to a special section of Bergen-Belsen camp for foreigners and from there they were sent to Switzerland as part of an exchange for German citizens.^[2] However, Irene's father died before leaving Germany from injuries inflicted by his Bergen-Belsen captors.^[1]

Irene was fourteen and weighed only seventy-nine pounds^[4] when she was sent to an Algerian refugee camp of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, where she could eat and recover from her mental and physical hardship. With the help of American relatives, she was sent to the United States and on Christmas Eve of 1945, she arrived in Baltimore, Maryland. Six months later she was reunited with her mother Gertrude and brother Werner, who made the crossing from Europe to the United States by plane.^[1][3]

Armed with a college scholarship, Irene focused on her education and attended Queens College in New York. She then earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.^[1][2]

Butter was hired by the University of Michigan in 1966.^[5] Her courses "[highlighted] the influence of race, gender, and poverty on health status, and the central role of child and family health in achieving a healthy community many years before they became standard topics in public health teaching".^[5] From the 1960s into the 1990s, Butter published multiple articles on health care in the U.S., with a focus on midwifery and women's health.

In 1996, Butter was granted Emeritus status upon her retirement.^[5] She continues to publish academic papers.^[1][6]

After her arrival in the U.S., Irene was told that it would be wise to keep silent about the Holocaust and her war experiences in Germany and the Netherlands, but when her high school daughter Pamela proposed a school project in 1976 about Irene's war experiences, Butter relented and told her stories to Pamela as well as the entire class. The positive feedback she received encouraged her to expand her talks to wider audiences, including a panel discussion about the diarist Anne Frank, who died in German captivity.^[3][6]

In 2024, she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, Germany's highest civilian honor.^[7] She received the Dutch Government's Anne Frank Award in 2025 for her work in Holocaust education.^[8][9]

• Co-founded the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures at the University of Michigan, which honors the Swedish diplomat who is known to have saved thousands of Jews.^[1][3]
• Participates in Zeituna, an Arab-Jewish dialogue group of women.^[1][3][6]

• Butter, Irene Hasenberg. Economics of graduate education: an exploratory study. University of Michigan, Department of Economics, 1966.
• Butter, Irene (1967). "Health Manpower Research: A Survey". Inquiry. 4 (4): 5–41. ISSN 0046-9580.
• Butter, Irene (1971). "The migratory flow of doctors to and from the United States". Medical care: 17–31.
• Butter, Irene; Schaffner, Richard (1971). "Foreign medical graduates and equal access to medical care". Medical Care: 136–143.
• Butter, I H (April 1983). "Income differentials among primary care physicians: organizational structure or deliberate choice?". American Journal of Public Health. 73 (4): 362–363. doi:10.2105/AJPH.73.4.362. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 1650767. PMID 6829818.
• Butter, Irene; Lapre, Ruud (1986). "Obstetric care in the Netherlands: Manpower substitution and differential costs". The International Journal of Health Planning and Management. 1 (2): 89–110. doi:10.1002/hpm.4740010203. ISSN 1099-1751.
• Butter, Irene H.; Carpenter, Eugenia S.; Kay, Bonnie J.; Simmons, Ruth S. (1987-01-01). "Gender Hierarchies in the Health Labor Force". International Journal of Health Services. 17 (1): 133–149. doi:10.2190/0UQ0-WV6P-2R6V-2QDQ. ISSN 0020-7314.
• Kay, Bonnie J.; Butter, Irene H.; Chang, Deborah; Houlihan, Kathleen (1988-04-01). "Women's Health and Social Change: The Case of Lay Midwives". International Journal of Health Services. 18 (2): 223–236. doi:10.2190/MUVW-3R3K-2725-DGH4. ISSN 0020-7314.
• Butter, I H; Kay, B J (September 1988). "State laws and the practice of lay midwifery". American Journal of Public Health. 78 (9): 1161–1169. doi:10.2105/AJPH.78.9.1161. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 1349386. PMID 3407812.
• Butter, Irene H.; Kay, Bonnie J. (1990-01-01). "Self-certification in lay midwives' organizations: A vehicle for professional autonomy". Social Science & Medicine. 30 (12): 1329–1339. doi:10.1016/0277-9536(90)90313-H. hdl:2027.42/28948. ISSN 0277-9536.
• Butter, Irene H. (1993). "Premature adoption and routinization of medical technology: Illustrations from childbirth technology". Journal of Social Issues. 49 (2): 11–34.
• Torres, Roberto E.; Butter, Irene H. (1996-06-01). "The Impact of EEG Technology on Health Manpower". American Journal of Electroneurodiagnostic Technology. 36 (2): 114–132. doi:10.1080/1086508X.1996.11080544. ISSN 1086-508X.

• Butter, Irene and John D. Bedwell - Co-author: Kris Holloway, Shores beyond Shores, From Holocaust to Hope, My True Story, Uitgave Can of Worms, Londen/NY, Nov. 2019, ISBN 978-1-9161908-0-1.

• Butter, Irene H.; Carpenter, Eugenia S.; Kay, Bonnie J.; Simmons, Ruth S. (1994). "Gender Hierarchies in the Health Labor Force". In Fee, Elizabeth; Krieger, Nancy (eds.). Women's Health, Politics, and Power. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315231020-7/gender-hierarchies-health-labor-force-irene-butter-eugenia-carpenter-bonnie-kay-ruth-simmons.

• Never a Bystander (2014) short documentary film about Butter by American filmmaker Evelyn Neuhaus.^[4]

• Website Irene Butter
• Works by or about Irene H. Butter at the Internet Archive
• "Oral history interview with Irene Hasenberg Butter". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 1993.