Tenenbaum was the son of
Polish Jews who emigrated to America. In the late 1930s, he was a student at the
International School of Geneva, Switzerland, where he befriended the portrait artist
Milein Cosman. He subsequently graduated
summa cum laude from
Yale University in 1942. for the Bachelor of the Arts candidate ranking highest in scholarship. Tenenbaum was a US First Lieutenant and intelligence officer with the
Publicity and Psychological Warfare unit of the
Twelfth Army Group headquarters under General
Omar N. Bradley. While in his early 20s, he and civilian
Egon W. Fleck were the first two non-captive Allied personnel to enter
Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945, at 5:30
p.m. After the war, Tenenbaum served as special assistant to
Lucius D. Clay, finance adviser of the
U.S. military-established government from 1945 to 1948 and as an economist with the
Economic Cooperation Administration from 1948 to 1950. He is credited with rescuing the German
Deutsche Mark while in this position with the
Currency Reform of 1948. Former German
chancellor Helmut Schmidt said about Tenenbaum, "He was the intellectual link between the American military government and the German experts." Tenenbaum was killed in a traffic accident in 1975. ==References==