Bernhard Baer

Bernhard Georg Baer was born in Berlin on September 15, 1917.

His father Leonhardt Baer had been born in Berlin on August 10, 1879. He was a merchant and co-owner of the fur and leather goods company Baer & Salomon, founded in 1903, which he ran with his older brother Jean (Isaak) Baer, until its forced dissolution in 1939. Bernhard Baer's mother Lina Charlotte Baer, née Wahrenberg, was born in Berlin on April 1, 1894. The couple married in Berlin in 1916 and initially lived at Rosenthaler Straße 5, then at Schleswiger Ufer 5 in the 1920s and finally from 1934 at Tile-Wardenberg-Straße 11.

The Baer family was persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany. Bernhard Baer studied at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1938 and passed one of the last rabbinical examinations there around 1941, before the institution was closed by the Nazis in 1942. In a declaration of assets, in which Baer had to disclose his property to the tax authorities due to anti-Semitic Nazi legislation, his last occupations were honorary preacher at the Jüdische Kultusvereinigung e.V. in Berlin and honorary lecturer at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. The declaration is dated December 18, 1941 and lists Bernhard Baer's current possessions as being, apart from a few items of clothing and two suitcases, exclusively his library: 350 books, ten encyclopedia volumes, six volumes of world history and an atlas. Baer had been elected rabbi by the Jewish community of Mainz in 1941, but was unable to assume this post as he was refused permission to relocate.

Bernhard Baer and his parents were deported from Berlin to the Riga Ghetto on January 19, 1942 and murdered there. Their exact dates of death are not known.

The marks of provenance and objects connected to Bernhard Baer are listed here in the co-operative provenance database Looted Cultural Assets.

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