Hans G. Furth

Shortly after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria into Germany, Furth fled the Nazis; first to Croatia, as a dependent of his mother who had married an elderly Croatian acquaintance to gain entry into that country.

In the same year, he became a professor of psychology at Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. Fürth wrote ten published books on child development since 1966.

After retiring from full-time teaching in 1990, Fürth focused on writing about his past and completed a manuscript entitled "Society Faces Extinction: The Psychology of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

His books utilized Piaget's largely abstract concepts, including the notion that children left unattended continually rethink their understanding of the world and, as such, do not wait for educators to fill them with structured knowledge.

Fürth and his wife, Madeleine Steen Furth (d. 2011), were active in the civil rights movement, offering their home in Washington, D.C., to protesters who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in August 1963.