Paul Fairbrook collection

Paul Fairbrook and his twin brother Hellmut (d. 1987) were born in Berlin on August 21, 1923 to Alvin and Lotte (Cohn) Schoenbach. His father was from Holzminden, and his mother was from Hannover. They married in 1920 and moved to Berlin. Alvin Schoenbach was a banker and worked at the Berlin Stock Exchange. They had a daughter Erika, born in 1921, and another son George, born in 1928. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Alvin began the process of trying to get visas. Lotte and the children spent six months near Colmar as he tried to do so from Berlin. The family ended up moving to Palestine and settled in Ramat Gan. Hellmut changed his name to Uriel. Alvin’s business venture did not work out and after he had to file for bankruptcy decided to leave for the U.S. Alvin went to Amsterdam to try to get visas to the U.S. and Lotte and the children went to Selma, a small village near Skofja Loka in Yugoslavia. After a few months they left to meet him in Amsterdam. They still had German passports and Lotte booked their train travel through Germany. At the border they had a harrowing experience and were threatened with being sent to a concentration camp if they were not out of the country in twenty-four hours. The customs inspector did allow them to reboard and though they missed their connection in Cologne, where they originally had planned to visit with uncle Fritz, with the help of a kind stationmaster who held the connecting Dutch train, they were able to continue their journey. The family spent six months in Amsterdam. In the spring of 1938, they left on a freighter for New York. Paul and his siblings went to public school. During high school he had several summer jobs working in hotels. After graduating from Textile High School in 1940, he went to work in the restaurant of the Greenbrier Inn in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. In the summer of 1941 he took a summer course at the famed Cornell University hotel school. His dream was to manage a hotel. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Paul tried to enlist in the Marines, but was rejected because he wasn't a U. S. citizen. The Navy and Army similarly rejected him. But though an "enemy alien" he was drafted in January 1943, and was naturalized three months later. It was then that he anglicized his name to Fairbrook. His brother Uriel, who also served, remained Schoenbach. Most of Fairbrook’s three years of service in the U.S. Army were spent at Fort Hunt, known as Post Office Box 1142, home of the Military Intelligence Research Sections (MIRS). He was assigned along with seventeen other enlisted men and three officers to write the Red Book, the “Order of Battle Book of the German Army.” The information was from documents obtained from prisoners of the North African campaign and detailed the units of the German Army, their history, the hierarchy of officers, and details including the insignia of their uniforms and commendation buttons. He also researched studies including “Political Indoctrination and Morale Building in the German Army” in which he found that after the assassination attempt on Hitler in July, 1944, Nazi officers were assigned to major military units to keep tabs on the commanders to make sure of their loyalty. Fairbrook was awarded a commendation for this discovery. At the German surrender, Fairbrook was sent back to Camp Ritchie as part of a group from MIRS that was assigned to write a history of the war based on documents the Army seized from the Nazis. He was able to arrange for his brother Uri to join this group. After his discharge, Paul attended Brown University for his BA and Michigan State University for an MBA. He went on to a career in food services, became Dean of the Culinary Institute, and Director of Auxiliary Services for Northern Illinois University and the University of the Pacific. He wrote five books on the subject of food services.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Paul Fairbrook

Donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2021 by Paul Fairbrook.