Oscar Neumann

Oscar Rudolph Neumann (3 September 1867 in Berlin – 17 May 1946 in Chicago) was a German ornithologist and naturalist who explored and collected specimens in Africa. He fled via Cuba and settled in the United States to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. Neumann's starling (Onychognathus neumanni) and several other species are named after him.

Neumann's travels in Ethiopia and Sudan

Portrait c. 1940

Neumann was born in wealthy Jewish family, the son of Maximilian and Anna née Meyer. A younger sister of his was Elsa Neumann (1872-1902) who became one of the first physics doctorates from Berlin University. Another sister Alice was a sculptor.[1] He travelled to German East Africa across Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya in 1892 and collected for the Berlin Museum publishing descriptions. In 1899 he accompanied Baron Carlo von Erlanger through Somaliland and southern Ethiopia,[2] collecting birds that went to Lord Walter Rothschild's bird collection in Tring. In 1915 he went to New Guinea and also made an expedition to Sulawesi in 1938 sponsored by the specimen collector and dealer J. J. Menden. In 1908 he lost much of his money and was hoping to work for Rothschild in Tring but this did not materialize as Rothschild himself ran into financial problems. Neumann then took to stock-broking in Berlin. In 1941, with the help of his friend Julius Riemer he fled Nazi Germany, traveling from Berlin to Cuba, then to Chicago, where he worked the final years of his life as a curator in the Field Museum of Natural History.[3][4] He was elected to the British Ornithologists' Union in 1897 but resigned in 1910 due to financial reasons. He never married.[3] Parts of his collections are now in the Julius Riemer Museum in Wittenberg.[5]