Holocaust Survivor Irene Butter Passes Away: A Life of Resilience and Hope

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By : Lowell Hagan








Updated: October 5, 2026 • 09:52 AM

The Holocaust survivor and peace activist Irene Butter has died in the USA. The native Berliner was 95 years old. Two years ago, she received the Federal Cross of Merit for her work as a contemporary witness.

Holocaust survivor Irene Butter passed away on Friday surrounded by her family and friends in the USA, confirmed her agent Mary Bisbee-Beek to NDR. For decades, the economist educated people about her experiences as a Jew under the Nazis.

Butter was born Irene Hasenberg in Berlin in 1930. Her family fled the Nazis to Amsterdam in 1937, moving into the same neighborhood as Anne Frank and her family.

Deportation to Bergen-Belsen, Departure to the USA

After the German invasion of the Netherlands, the Hasenberg family was deported and arrived in Westerbork in 1943, a so-called transit camp. One day, a package arrived there, Butter later recalled. Her father had previously ordered Ecuadorian passports, planning to be exchanged as foreign Jews by the Nazis for German citizens held abroad.

The family first went to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Irene also met Anne Frank there again – they saw each other through a barbed wire fence, as the so-called exchange Jews were housed in a different part of the camp. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen.

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