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- President Joe Biden nominated Amy Gutmann to serve as US ambassador to Germany.
- The academic is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who escaped Nazi Germany in 1934.
- Gutmann has said that her family’s experience of Nazi persecution had a “profound influence” on her.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
President Joe Biden announced on Friday that he was nominating Amy Gutmann to serve as US ambassador to Germany.
Gutmann, who is the president of the University of Pennsylvania, is also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Gutmann’s father escaped Nazi Germany in 1934, according to a 2013 interview in The Daily Pennsylvanian.
In a Friday statement to her university, the 71-year-old academic said that she felt “grateful” to be nominated for the role “as the daughter of a German Jewish refugee.”
In the 2013 interview, Gutmann said her family’s Holocaust experience had a “profound influence” on her.
Gutmann’s father fled Nazi Germany with his siblings and parents and moved to India before settling in New York a decade later, according to the interview.
“It’s true that his whole family would have disappeared from the face of the earth had it not been for what he did,” she told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Her family history inspired her to help establish one of the world’s largest Holocaust education archives, Haaretz reported. She partnered with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive in 2013 to bring nearly 52,000 video testimonials to the University of Pennsylvania’s library system, the outlet said.
In a statement, Gutmann said she will continue working at the University of Pennsylvania until her Senate confirmation.
If confirmed, she would also become the first woman ever to hold the ambassadorship to Germany, Politico noted.
She is expected to replace Robin Quinville, who was appointed as an interim ambassador following Richard Grenell’s resignation from the post in 2020.
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