Susanne Riveles received a Ph.D. in African Studies from Howard University in Washington DC and holds an MA in Sociology from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany. She also studied at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Columbia University in New York. From 1980-1993, she worked for Amnesty International (AIUSA), leading their Southern Africa Coordination Group. Her advocacy portfolio included many hundreds of prisoners of conscience, notably Nelson Mandela, Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Desmond Tutu, and Simon Farisani. In May 1985, she accompanied the Rev. Jesse Jackson on his two-weeks speaking tour to the European Parliament in Strasbourg and to Berlin to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Berlin and the end of WWII. For three years, Dr. Riveles directed a project for the Holocaust and war victims Tracing and Information Center of the American Red Cross at the US National Archives, searching through German documents captured by the US army during WWII and at the liberation of German concentration camps.
From 2005-2009 Dr. Riveles researched the National Archives in Berlin, researching the records collected by the Nazi secret police (Gestapo) about the activities of the Saefkow, Jacob, Baestlein (SJB) resistance group. Dr. Riveles and two historians, all daughters of executed members of the SJB resistance organization, designed, researched, fundraised, and implemented the exhibit presented at Berlin's Humboldt University in summer 2009. Dr. Riveles was also responsible for a project that placed 53 commemorative stones {Stolpersteine) in and around Berlin.
Dr. Riveles served on the Board of the International Alliance of Women, where she was the convener of the Commission for Women, Peace, and Security and served as a delegate to the UN Commission on the Status of Women CSW for the last seven years. She was born in Berlin Germany.
