Herman Osnos correspondence

Herman S. Osnos was born in September 1900 in New York City to Jewish Russian immigrants, Samuel and Bella Osnos. Herman grew up on his family’s farm in Middlesex, New Jersey before eventually making his way to Detroit, Michigan where he worked for the department store, Sam’s Cut Rate. Between the years of 1930 and 1950, Herman held many positions within the company, ranging from secretary, to manager, to executive. Overtime he became a very successful businessman and proprietor, owning properties in the Detroit area.

While working for Sam’s Cut Rate and during the period of increasing hostility and persecution against Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, Herman advocated for Jewish refugee’s entrance in to the United States. Herman employed many such refugees, among them, Albert Schmidt, a tailor who emigrated from Munich. Through Albert, Herman came to know the Stark family of Munich, who desperately sought sponsorship for United States visas. Over the course of two years, and after lengthy correspondence with the family’s eldest son, Walter, Herman secured visas for first the two Stark boys, Walter and Werner in 1938, and in 1939, the boys’ parents, Herman and Klara, and their sister. Several other German and Austrian Jews wrote to Herman seeking assistance and sponsorship of affidavits between 1935 and 1948. As an advocate for Jews, Herman served as a member of the Jewish Welfare Board and attempted to help as many refugees as he could seek asylum in the United States.

In the late 1920s Herman married a woman named Helen and together had one son, Gilbert, born in 1930. Herman died in Stamford, Connecticut in 1989 at the age of 88.