Joseph W. Eaton Collection 1597, 1704-1894, 1944-2008 Bulk dates: 1966-2008

Joseph Eaton (born Josef Wechsler) was an American sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh and a German-Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States as a child in 1934. The collection primarily comprises correspondence, writings, clippings, ephemera, and photocopied archival materials related to Eaton's genealogical research in the Bavarian localities of Schwabach, Nuremberg, Fürth, and Theilheim (Waigolshausen), including materials pertaining to the history of the Jewish communities in those localities, as well as specifically to Eaton's own immediate family and his ancestors of the Wechsler, Rosenbaum, and Goldschmidt families. Included are materials related to Eaton's travels to those localities in the context of programs hosting former Jewish residents and commemorating the Holocaust and the German-Jewish communities that were destroyed. A small portion of the collection pertains to Eaton's scholarly interest in the experiences of Jewish communists in East German society, including transcripts and/or audio files of two interviews he conducted with Hermann Axen, a Jewish concentration camp survivor who from the 1970s until 1989 was a member of the Politburo of the ruling Socialist Unity Party.digitizedJoseph W. Eaton was born in Nuremberg, Germany, 28 September 1919, as Josef Wechsler, the son of Jacob Wechsler and Flora Wechsler (née Goldschmidt). His parents had married in Frankfurt am Main in 1912. In Nuremberg Eaton's father owned a shaving brush factory. When the business failed following the stock market crash, the family moved to Berlin, in 1930. Eaton had three siblings, all brothers: Siegfried (Shlomoh; born 1913), Martin (Moshe; born 1915), and Herbert (Yitzchak; born 1921).After the ascent of the National Socialists to power in Germany in 1933, Eaton's family began to look for ways to emigrate, but they could not afford to do so as a family. Joseph's two older brothers left for Palestine, and Joseph and his younger brother, Herbert, emigrated to the United States with the help of the German-Jewish Children's Aid program. (Herbert eventually settled in Israel.) Eaton's parents later fled to the Netherlands; they were deported from there, and died in Sobibór in July 1943. Eaton's maternal grandmother, Cilli Hamburger, of Frankfurt am Main, died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943.Joseph Wechsler arrived in New York in November 1934. By 1938 he had changed his last name to Eaton. All of his brothers also took the new name of Eaton. (One brother, Herbert, later went back to using Wechsler.) According to Joseph Eaton, they changed their name in connection with their service in the armed forces on the side of the Allies during World War II (three of the four served either under the Americans or the British), out of concern for the safety of their parents, who were living at the time in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.Joseph Eaton graduated from Cornell University in 1940 with a major in sociology. In 1943, while pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University he was drafted, and, thanks to his language skills, was selected to work as a journalist in the psychological warfare unit of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in which position his duties included writing leaflets to be disseminated behind enemy lines. In 1945-1946, while stationed in Straubing, near Regensburg, he was the editor of a weekly newspaper, the Regensburger Post, published by the Army for the German civilian population of Bavaria.After the war Eaton returned to Columbia, and completed his Ph.D. in sociology in 1948. On 8 July 1947 he married the speech therapist Helen Fay Goodman. The couple had four children: David, Seth, Jonathan and Deborah.Eaton spent most of his professional career at the University of Pittsburgh. He was appointed professor of Social Work Research there in January 1959, and shortly later held a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Public Health. As of 1974 his appointment was moved to the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where he remained until his retirement in December 1989. Eaton’s scholarly interests were often related to social work, comparative social systems, and social economic planning and development; he sometimes worked in collaboration with Israeli scholars.In summer 1980 Eaton spent six weeks as an exchange scholar in East Berlin, in a program sponsored jointly by the American Academy of Sciences and the Akademie der Wissenschaften, of East Germany. his susequent reportsdealt with Communist social science methodology; Jews in East Germany; and sociology in East Germany. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eaton returned to Germany and pursued conversations with Jews who had participated in the Communist system, visiting Gregor Gysi and Hermann Axen, among others.Joseph Eaton died in Pittsburg on 15 October 2012, at the age of 93.ProcessedGysi, Gregor ; Heym, Stefan ; Jacobi, Clara Adelheid ; Kohn, Salomon ; Mainz family ; Rosenbaum, Mendel ; Singer, Maria Renata ; Weinzierl, Erika.Aachen ; Frankfurt am Main ; Hamburg ; Regensburg ; Schweinfurt ; Theilheim ; Wiesbaden; Wuerzburg ; Zell