Henry Kamm (born Hans Kamm; June 3, 1925 – July 9, 2023) was a German-born American correspondent for The New York Times. He reported for the Times from Southeast Asia (based in Bangkok), Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Early life and career
Hans Kamm was born in the German town of Breslau, Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland), on June 3, 1925 to a Jewish family. Kamm attended a progressive collective school that closed in 1933. Then he had to go to a Jewish school. After the Kristallnacht pogroms, Kamm's father was arrested in November 1938 and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After he was temporarily allowed to return home a few months later, he fled to Britain and later went to the United States. In January 1941, Hans Kamm and his mother also fled to the U.S., reached from Lisbon via a sealed train from Breslau.[1] Kamm grew up in Manhattan, where he graduated from George Washington High School. He became an American citizen in 1943, changing his name to Henry Kamm.[2] At the age of 18 he enlisted in the army in 1944 and fought in Belgium and France, where he learned French. After the end of the war he was employed in Dachau as an interpreter at trials against suspected Nazi war criminals. However, the work of defending the accused was difficult for him; after a week he ended his participation and left Germany.[1]
He started working as a journalist for the New York Times in 1949. He reported from France (1960, 1971–1977), Poland (1966–1967), Russia (1967–1971), Japan (1977), Thailand,[3] and Afghanistan, among others.[1]
Kamm won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1978 for his coverage of the plight of refugees from Indochina.[6] His early experience of disenfranchisement and forced emigration greatly impacted his 47-year career at the Times, his son Thomas Kamm, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, said in 2017: it "explains the interest he always showed throughout his journalistic career for refugees, dissidents, those without a voice and the downtrodden."[7]
In the 1960s he came to Germany more often, for example to interview Willy Brandt.[1] He reported from Eastern Europe on the resistance against the communist regimes and made friends with Václav Havel, Jiří Dienstbier, and Stefan Heym.[1]
Private life
In 1950, Kamm married Barbara Lifton. The couple had three children: Alison, Thomas and Nicholas as well as ten grandchildren. Kamm separated from his wife in the late 1970s and lived with a Vietnamese woman and had a step son from her former relationship.[7] In his retirement, Henry Kamm lived mostly in France. On November 18, 2018, he regained his German citizenship, and in 2021 voted in a German federal election for the first time.[1] Kamm died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Paris, on July 9, 2023, at the age of 98.[2]
