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Werner Michael Blumenthal (January 3, 1926) is an American business leader, economist and political adviser who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979. At age thirteen, Blumenthal barely escaped Nazi Germany with his Jewish family in 1939, and 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 U.C. 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 reestablishing 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. ==Early life== Blumenthal was born in Oranienburg, Germany, Weimar Republic, the son of Rose Valerie (née Markt) and Ewald Blumenthal, who owned a dress shop.〔()''Current Biography Yearbook''〕〔 His forebears had lived in Oranienburg since the 16th century.〔 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 emigrate. Blumenthal was a witness to Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews and their property which began throughout Germany on November 9, 1938. Nazi gestapo men forced their way into his home early one morning in 1939 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 bribe the guards to let her husband go. 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."〔Chesnoff, Richard Z. ''Pack of Thieves'', Anchor Books (1999) p. 20〕 With their little remaining money, his mother bought tickets for the family to travel to Shanghai, China, which didn't require a visa. They went there expecting 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 interned in the Shanghai Ghetto, 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 he used to help feed his family.〔 "I was confined to a faraway corner of Asia," he writes in his autobiography, "so destitute that newspapers were stuffed into my shoes to cover up the holes... I had no passport at all () 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."〔Blumenthal, Michael. ''From Exile to Washington'', The Overlook Press (2015) ISBN 146831100X〕 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, Japanese, French and Portuguese during other periods there.〔Katz, Bernard S., and Vencill, Daniel. ''Biographical Dictionary of the United States Secretaries of the Treasury'', Greenwood Publishing (1996)〕 When the war in the Pacific ended in the summer of 1945, American troops entered Shanghai. He was able to find a job as a warehouse helper with the U.S. Air Force, which benefited from his linguistic skills.〔 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 had only $60 between them.〔Kaufman, Diane, and Kaufman, Scott. ''Historical Dictionary of the Carter Era'', Scarecrow Press (2013) p. 42〕 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."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「W. Michael Blumenthal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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