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St. Olaf to award honorary degrees to Holocaust survivor, Latin Americanist

By Kari VanDerVeen
October 7, 2009

St. Olaf College will award honorary degrees to Henry Oertelt, a Holocaust survivor and regular speaker on campus, and Roderic Camp, one of the most distinguished experts on Mexico in the United States, during a convocation ceremony Thursday, Oct. 15, at 11:10 a.m. in Boe Memorial Chapel. The event is free and open to the public and will be streamed live and archived online.

In addition to Thursday's event, Camp will lecture on "What It Means to Me to Be a Latin Americanist" Tuesday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Valhalla Room of Buntrock Commons, and on "Leadership in Mexico: Has Democracy Made a Difference?" Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 3:15 p.m. in Viking Theater, Buntrock Commons. Also on Wednesday, at 6:45 p.m. in Holland Hall 501, Oertelt's story will be shown in films prepared by the Shoah Foundation and through portions of a current film project that is based on his book, Unbroken Chain: My Journey through the Nazi Holocaust.

Henry Oertelt has spoken to audiences about the Holocaust for decades. Photo by David Brewster/
Star Tribune.

Henry Oertelt
Henry Oertelt has been speaking at St. Olaf on a semi-annual basis for more than 25 years, sharing his story of surviving the Holocaust and emphasizing the importance of tolerance, political involvement, and confronting hatred.

In 1943 Oertelt was taken from his home in Berlin and interred at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He spent time in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and Flossenbürg camps before being liberated by American forces during the Flossenbürg Death March in 1945. He arrived in St. Paul, Minn., in 1949 with his wife and daughter and became a U.S. citizen in 1954. Oertelt has shared his experience of loss and survival in Nazi Germany for 40 years.
Roderic Camp is perhaps the foremost expert on Mexico in the United States.

Roderic Camp
Roderic Camp has had an exceptional career as a scholar and teacher devoted to exploring and understanding aspects of Mexican politics and society. He has authored 29 books and more than 100 scholarly articles and essays. His book Politics In Mexico is the most widely used introductory work on the subject in the United States and Mexico, and he has worked with the U.S. Department of State to brief the last five ambassadors to Mexico.

The Philip M. McKenna Professor of the Pacific Rim and a member of the Department of Government at Claremont McKenna College, Camp is a recipient of four Fulbright Fellowships and four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as a visiting professor at Colegio de México and the Foreign Service Institute, and has carried out research as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.