W. Michael Blumenthal

Werner Michael Blumenthal (born January 3, 1926) is a German-American business leader, economist and political adviser who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979.

As a result of the Nazi party's Nuremberg Laws, which took effect in 1935, his family began to fear for their lives and realized they had to escape from Germany.

Blumenthal recalled Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews and their property which began throughout Germany on November 9, 1938, when he was 12 years old:

"I clearly remember ... when they came and smashed all the Jewish stores. I remember seeing the largest synagogue in Berlin burn, and I remember being beaten up by kids in uniform."

Nazi Gestapo men forced their way into his home early one morning in 1938 and arrested his father for no stated reason.

His father was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest forced labor camps in Germany, where an estimated 56,000 people, mostly Jews, were eventually killed.

His mother hastily sold all their household possessions and managed to win her husband's release.

They had no choice but to sell their long-established dress store to their managing saleswoman for "practically nothing," says his older sister Stefanie.

She recalls, "My mother wept—not so much out of the loss, but out of a sense of the unfairness of it, that someone we'd trained could turn on us, could get something we had worked so hard for, for nothing."

With their little remaining money, his mother bought tickets for them to go to Shanghai, China, an open port city which didn't require a visa.

At age thirteen, Blumenthal barely escaped Nazi Germany with his Jewish family in 1939.

They fled Germany on a passenger-carrying freighter shortly before war broke out in 1939.

They took only minimal possessions; they were not allowed to take any money.

He remembers the voyage: "From Naples via Port Said, Suez, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, and Hong Kong; each one of those ports of call was part of the British Empire, and none would admit Jewish refugees."

Upon arriving, they expected to remain only briefly, assuming they could then travel on to a safer country.

However, with the outbreak of World War II, Japan had occupied Shanghai, and the Blumenthals were confined to the Shanghai Ghetto along with 20,000 other Jewish refugees for the next eight years.

Blumenthal witnessed severe poverty and starvation throughout the ghetto, sometimes seeing corpses lying in the streets.

"It was a cesspool," he said.

He was able to find a cleaning job at a chemical factory and earned $1 a week, which was used to feed his family:

"I was confined to a faraway corner of Asia, so destitute that newspapers were stuffed into my shoes to cover up the holes ... I had no passport at all [and] for two and a half years I was a prisoner of the Japanese, and later not even the most junior American consular official would have given me the time of day."

His schooling was haphazard, and the stress of survival caused his parents to divorce.

Nevertheless, he was able to learn English during a brief period attending a British school, and learned to speak some Chinese, French and Portuguese during other periods there.

When the war in the Pacific ended in the summer of 1945, American troops entered Shanghai.

He found a job as a warehouse helper with the U.S. Air Force, which benefited from his linguistic skills.

He was forced to spend World War II living in the ghetto of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China, until 1947.

He then made his way to San Francisco and began doing odd jobs to work his way through school.

He enrolled in college, eventually graduating from University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University with degrees in international economics.

During his career, he became active in both business and public service.

Before being appointed to a cabinet position with newly elected President Jimmy Carter, Blumenthal had become a successful business leader and had already held administrative positions under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

As a member of the Carter administration, he helped guide economic policy and took part in re establishing ties with China.

After he resigned, he became chairman and CEO of Burroughs Corporation and Unisys, followed by seventeen years as director of the restored Jewish Museum in Berlin.

By 1947 he and his sister, after much effort and being refused visas to Canada, received visas to the U.S.

They made their way to San Francisco, where they knew no one, and with only $200 between them.

With limited education, and now a stateless refugee, he did his best to make something of himself:

"I came to this country feeling that I had capabilities and talents. I read a lot. I talked to people. I wanted to do things. I found out that I can cope reasonably well."

He is the author of The Invisible Wall (1998, Counterpoint Press) and From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century (2013, The Overlook Press).

Blumenthal is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member.

Blumenthal was born in Oranienburg, Weimar Republic (present-day Germany), the son of Rose Valerie (née Markt) and Ewald Blumenthal.

His family was of modest means as owners of a dress shop.

His forebears had lived in Oranienburg since the 16th century.