Letters Home-80 Years Later (Dana Adams Schmidt 1915-1994)

Kristallnacht to Nuremberg

World War II through the articles and personal letters of an award-winning journalist

Dana Adams Schmidt was born in Bay Village, Ohio, in 1915 to a German/Austrian father and a mother from a prominent American family with roots to the early settlers. He was a graduate of Pomona College in Claremont, California and the Columbia School of Journalism.

His mother, Margaret Adams Schmidt, plays a key role in this book because he had promised to write a letter home each week while abroad, which resulted in 1200 letters throughout the war. His sister, Elizabeth Schmidt Crahan, has brilliantly intertwined the letters with his main articles giving an intimate first-person account of World War II.

His journalism career began in 1937 after winning a traveling scholarship from Columbia.While abroad, he joined the United Press and was sent to Berlin in 1938 because he spoke German. One of his first assignments as a reporter was to accompany the German army as it invaded the Sudetenland. In Berlin, he saw the devastation of the shops on the Kurfuerstendamm, Kristallnacht, and experienced the beginning of the persecution of the Jews. He was transferred to Sofia and then to Istanbul and Ankara. He was assigned to General Eisenhower's Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers. He covered the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, Corsica and Southern France. He joined NYT Paris staff in 1944, was sent to Frankfurt, covered the Nuremberg trials and continued his distinguished career as a foremost reporter in the Middle East. He authored four books.

Elizabeth Schmidt Crahan was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture in 1938. She raised a family of four and returned to USC in the 1960s to earn a Master's in Library Science. She worked at the LA County Medical Association Library, becoming the Director in 1978 until she retired in 1990.