Fritz T. Epstein

Fritz T. Epstein (1898 – December 6, 1979) was a scholar and expert on the Soviet Union, born in Sarreguemines, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire, in 1898.

He served in a sound-direction-finding unit (Schallmesstrupp)on the Western Front, and took part in General Ludendorff's Kaiserschlacht or final offensive in 1918.

At war's end he renewed his studies, focusing on Eastern European history successively at Jena, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, where he received his PhD, with a dissertation on the court and administration of Russia from the 15th to the 17th century, in 1924.

[citation needed] With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, his Habilitation and any prospect of a career was blocked and he thus moved to London in 1933, to escape Nazi persecution, with the assistance of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC), and subsequently to the United States (1936).

From 1948 to 1951 he worked as Curator of the Central European and Slavic Collections at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.