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Denver, CO - Among New Jersey's delegates here for the Democratic National Convention is one whose story moved from the shadows of Nazi death camps to the rare echelons of American power and prestige and who is now back in Germany helping the world understand why he fled.

"We need to look to the future and how we relate to young people in a world without borders," said W. Michael Blumenthal, 82, who lives in Princeton and Berlin. He served in the Democratic administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s and then Jimmy Carter in the 1980s.

Werner Michael Blumenthal was born near Berlin in 1926 and at 13 saw his family sell all its possessions to buy his father's freedom from a concentration camp, then flee to Shanghai.

Seven years later, as a brighter dawn followed World War II, the family arrived in the United States, where Blumenthal took degrees from Berkeley and Princeton, then moved on to be Kennedy's deputy assistant secretary of state for economic affairs and Johnson's deputy special representative for trade negotiations.

Moving slalom in and out of the corporate, government and university habitats, Blumenthal became Carter's treasury secretary, where he served from 1977 to 1979.

Blumenthal fairly presaged positions taken today by Obama, the presidential candidate to whom he's pledged as a delegate. Business cottoned to him because he championed capitalism. Labor liked him because he pushed progressive employment and social policies.

"More recently," said Blumenthal, who is attending his third national convention, "I have been the director of the Jewish Museum of Berlin."

Asked to pit that endeavor against Jews who vow to never set foot in Germany for the Holocaust genocide Nazis pursued against them or their ancestors, Blumenthal said: "Things have substantially changed. That was a not-uncommon attitude among Jews all over the world. I might have felt the same way 10 to 15 years ago."

"It means a lot," the former university educator, diplomat and chief executive said of the museum. "The German government is making a very special effort to make sure the past is not swept under the rug, and the lessons learned from it are learned by Germans. It is a highly visited museum."

He said he is not a latecomer to the Obama camp.

"I have been a supporter of Obama since the beginning," said Blumenthal.

Blumenthal, at 82, is not the oldest Jersey delegate here. That bouquet goes to New Jersey's senior U.S. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, who is 84. Former Gov. Brendan Byrne, 84, and Essex County Democratic chairman Philip Thigpen, 82, are also older.