Arthur was born in Berlin and was 12 years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. “I knew he had a thing about Jews and hated Jews. The feeling of antisemitism was widespread but I didn’t know it firsthand because I was very close to my fellow students,” recalls Arthur. Along with his parents and older siblings, Gertrud, Erwin and  Elisabeth, Arthur lived a comfortable and cultured middle class life in Berlin.

His mother, Gabriele, originally from Vienna, had met Arthur’s father, Emil, while visiting her married sister in Berlin. They married in 1910. Emil was employed by the enormously successful Ullstein Publishing House. He helped launch their book publishing division. But like other Jewish owned businesses, Ullstein was seized by the Nazis and its Jewish employees, including Emil, were let go in 1934. Arthur’s older brother, Erwin was already in his twenties and left for England.

It wasn’t until 1936, around the time of the infamous Olympic Games, that things began to be uncomfortable for Arthur. His parents took him out of gymnasium (high school) and enrolled him in the Jewish Goldschmidt Schule where he developed an interest in photography and chemistry. Arthur describes this time as “an adventure” but then his mother was put in a concentration camp in October of 1936.

Gabriele Herz had gone to Italy in the spring of 1936 to visit family members and to try to secure employment for her husband. As part of the policy forced emigration, Jews who had returned to Germany after more than three months abroad were either deported or sent to “instructional camp” (Schulungslager) which actually meant internment in a concentration camp – Dachau for men and Moringen for women. Jews were only released if they could prove that they would leave Germany within two weeks.

Emil and Gabriele Herz left for Italy, within two weeks of Gabriele’s release from Moringen in March of 1937. Gabriele wrote a memoir, "The Women’s Camp in Moringen", about her experiences. After the world learned about the extermination camps, Gabriele felt her experience was not that compelling. But Hildegard and the Herz's nephew, Howard Hartig, translated her memoirs to English and it was published in 2006. . It is one of the few first person accounts of the early concentration camps, in particular about the experiences of women inmates – very few of whom were Jewish.

Arthur’s parents sent for him in April of 1938. The Herz home was now occupied by an Aryan relative by marriage. Arthur returned to pick up a few things to bring to Italy. He recalls in particular, taking the family prayer books. In July of 1938, Mussolini sought to solidify his relationship with Hitler by passing the Manifesto of Race which took away the citizenship rights of Italian Jews. The Herz family saw no future in Italy so they moved to Lugano, Switzerland, hoping to get visas to France where they had friends and where Emil thought he could continue his career as a publisher. While they were in Switzerland, they learned of the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Though Arthur felt sorry to hear the news, he describes himself as being more concerned about his social life – he asked his dad for the keys to the car to go out for the evening. He is not proud of his reaction and he more than made up for that when he fought against Nazi Germany in the U.S. Army. But Arthur’s reaction underscores how people not personally affected by great crimes can go on with their lives. This was a lesson Hildegard would also learn from the other side – having experienced Kristallnacht.

The family never got visas to go to France, which was a blessing in disguise since they would have remained caught up in Hitler’s plans for European Jewry. In January of 1939, they went to say good-bye to Arthur’s brother in England before sailing to Havana, Cuba, where they would await visas to enter the United States.

Arthur says that was the last time his older brother beat him up. It was the conflict that many German Jews felt over their “homeland” that instigated the fight between the two brothers. As Arthur watched the British Army put anti-aircraft guns into Hyde Park, he said, “Hey! These pea shooters aren’t going to do anything against our airplanes!”

“Our airplanes? Our airplanes!” Shouted Erwin. And then Erwin pummeled Arthur.

Once the family was in Cuba, Arthur was sent to school to learn English. His parents thought he had a better chance of getting into the United States on a student visa since he would not need immigration papers. Arthur has always described himself as “not much of a student” but he loved reading books about photography. So, Arthur wrote to Kodak in Rochester, N.Y. (because “Eastman Kodak” was written on his camera) and they referred him to the Mechanics Institute (now the Rochester Institute of Technology or R.I.T) where there was a photography department.

Arthur was accepted and arrived in Rochester, N.Y. in August of 1939 – one month before World War II began. More than a little changed from the day he boasted about Germany’s airplanes, Arthur wanted to fight against the Nazis. The United States was not yet in the war but Canada declared war on Germany seven days after Britain and France did. Arthur wrote to the Canadian government offering his services, but they wrote back explaining they could not accept his offer as he was an “enemy alien” because he was from Germany.

This was something that many German Jews faced when they tried to enlist with the Allied Forces, showing once again, how little was understood about the status of Jews in Nazi Germany. On December 8th 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Arthur tried to enlist in the US Navy and was once again turned down as an “enemy alien”. Unable to enlist,  Arthur completed his schooling, graduating in 1942.

He began working for Kodak and ironically, one month later, he was actually drafted into the U.S. Army! In March of 1942, President Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9106 which “Excepted Certain Persons From the Classification of Alien Enemy for the Purpose of Permitting Them To Apply for Naturalization”. This permitted German Jewish refugees – anxious to both prove their loyalty to the United States and to fight against the regime that took their citizenship away to be drafted into the U.S. Army.

Arthur volunteered for the parachute troops but was placed in the 166th Signal Photo Company, instead, because of his photography background. Unfortunately, Arthur developed pneumonia just before his unit went overseas. After his recovery, he was added to a Signal Corps radio repair unit and shipped overseas to the recently liberated Luxembourg in 1944. A radio repair truck was driving near to where the 166th was stationed, so Arthur went along.

That morning, the German Army initiated the powerful Ardennes offensive, popularly referred to as "the Battle of the Bulge." The Nazis had by this time managed to infiltrate US troops with English speaking Germans dressed as American soldiers, whose mission was to spread confusion and havoc. When his truck came under heavy fire, the driver decided to return to his depot.

Arthur, still determined to join his Photo Company, hopped off the truck and asked the first MP Sergeant he encountered for help in locating his outfit! Upon hearing Arthur’s heavy German accent, the MP assumed that Arthur was a German infiltrator and he asked him who had won the World Series. When Arthur couldn’t tell him (he didn’t follow baseball) the MP immediately concluded he was a German national; Arthur was disarmed, roughed up, and faced imminent execution.

Hoping to save himself, Arthur told the MP that he might receive a promotion—even a medal—for vigilance in recognizing and then imprisoning a GI-clad soldier whose treachery could later be confirmed. The strategy worked: Arthur was transported to a prison in Liège with a number of actual German POW’s.

Once there, Arthur was not sure if his life would be ended by his fellow prisoners, if they found out he was Jewish – or by the heavy aerial bombardment. The commander checked out Arthur’s story and he was released to join his unit on Christmas Day, 1944.

Arthur more than proved himself upon rejoining the 166th Signal Photo Company. He received the Bronze Star for meritorious service in photographing the crossing of the Rhine River at Oberwesel. A week before V-E Day, he was wounded while photographing the crossing of the Issar River in Bavaria and received the Purple Heart. Some of his photographs were published in LIFE magazine in 1950. His photographs were also published in Patton’s GI Photographers, along with some of his reminiscences:

“…the major contribution I made during the European campaign was based upon my fluent knowledge of German. My background and this knowledge facilitated the rapid location of specific sites in a town we were trying to overrun, the evaluation of captured documents, and the interrogation of POWs…”

After recovering from his wounds, Arthur returned to Kodak as a lab technician and finished his BS at the University of Rochester. He was then awarded  a Kodak Scholarship for graduate studies and received his Ph.D. in 1953. He and Hildegard had been married for six years and had two of their four children. Arthur worked as a researcher on silver halide surfaces at Kodak until his retirement in 1989.