Heinrich Dieter Holland (1927–2012)

Abstract

Heinrich Dieter “Dick” Holland, who died on 21 May 2012, was responsible for major advances across several fields of geochemistry. He was born on 27 May 1927 and died just short of his 85th birthday. How Dick became a geochemist is an interesting story in itself. I first met Dick when we shared an office as graduate students at Columbia University in New York. He had attended Princeton University in New Jersey and graduated in 1946 with a chemistry major. He had arrived in the United States with his family from Germany in 1940. The family was of Jewish origin, and although Dick and his relatives were not strict practitioners, their fate in Hitler's Germany, dictated by the family's ancestry, would have been undesirable. Dick and his brother first went to England in 1939 to escape the future horrors that were sure to await them if they had remained in Germany. After their parents escaped to the Dominican Republic, Dick and his brother joined them there. With the help of friends, the family came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1940 (it was not unusual for immigrants to first come to a landing spot in the western hemisphere prior to admission to the United States).