The family of former DU Professor Edwin Sears has donated a collection of his archival papers to Penrose Library, including items relating to the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the Nuremburg trials and Albert Einstein. Photo: file
The family of former DU Professor Edwin Sears has donated a collection of his archival papers to Penrose Library.
The gift includes numerous items relating to a number of World War II-era events and people, including the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the Nuremburg trials and Albert Einstein.
Andrea Sears-Van Nest, Sears’ daughter, has already turned over most of the collection, which appraised for about $25,000, to Penrose’s special collections and archives. The entire collection will be turned over in time.
Growing up, Sears-Van Nest had a vague idea about her father’s role in world events. But after her mother, Vera Sears, died in 2008, she found boxes of photographs, newspaper clippings, journals and letters that shed light on her parents’ past.
“My husband and I were sitting here with mouths open; it was just so tremendous,” Sears-Van Nest says. “My father died when I was so young and my mother was mum about everything.”
The collection includes documents from the Reich Director describing the assassination plot of Hitler by Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg and others, as depicted in the recent Hollywood movie Valkyrie.
The collection also includes Sears’ correspondence with Albert Einstein. Sears had been a secretary for Einstein at the University of Berlin in the late 1920s. The letters show that while Einstein wanted to help the Sears family immigrate to the United States, he could not financially sponsor another family. However, Einstein put the Searses in touch with an attorney in New York who did sponsor the family’s move to the U.S.
Other documents in the collection include papers from the Nuremburg trials. Edwin Sears was also drafted into the U.S. Army to help prosecute war criminals.
“I encourage people my age to talk and discuss their parents’ history with them,” Sears-Van Nest says. “Be curious and take pride in it.”
He studied law at the University of Berlin, where he met Vera. The two married just before it became illegal for Vera, who was gentile, to marry Edwin, who was Jewish. The two lived in Berlin while Edwin Sears completed his law degree and then became a professor of law at the University of Berlin. In 1939, he was forced to leave because he refused to sign a pledge of loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.
Edwin Sears was a professor of law at the University of Denver from 1943 until 1951. He oversaw his own law firm until his death in 1964. Vera Sears was a professional dancer and studied with Martha Wilcox at DU. Wilcox asked Vera Sears to teach at the Lamont School of Music, where she became director of the Children’s Dance Theatre.
Nancy Allen, dean of Penrose Library says the collection will support research across campus, including DU’s Holocaust Awareness Institute, the Korbel School of International Studies and the Carson-Brierly Dance Library collection.
“Penrose Library is very grateful to have received this extraordinary collection, which fits very well with our strengths,” Allen says.