הנרי היינר קסירר

Henry Heiner Cassirer (1911-2004), journalist and writer, the son of art dealer Kurt Hans Cassirer (1883-1975), and his wife Eva Solmitz and grandson of industrialist Max Cassirer (1857-1943), born in Berlin, Germany. He spent his childhood with his aunt Edith, who was married to the reform teacher Paul Geheeb. He attended the Odenwald School near Frankfurt funded by his grandfather Max Cassirer and run by his aunt.

Cassirer fled to London, England, in 1936, studied at the London School of Economics and after graduation worked at the BBC for its services in German. In 1939 it was he who broadcast to Germany that Britain had declared war to the Third Reich. In 1940 he emigrated to the U.S. and worked at CBS. After a program about the UN Charter of Human Rights, he was approached by the UN and in 1948 he became the director of the Department of Education and Broadcasting of the new cultural organization UNESCO in Paris. He became Honorary President of the French organization for the disabled GIHP as he himself was partially paralyzed after a visit to India in 1956.

He considered himself a citizen of the world, and always refused to consider himself a German, or a Jew. He wrote a number of books on communications, broadcasting and education.