Alfred Eisfelder

Signature of Alfred Eisfelder

Since 2013, three books from Alfred Eisfelder's library could be returned.

Alfred Bruno Eisfelder was born in Berlin on 20 October 1888, to Jacob Eisfelder and Emma née Wittkower. In 1912 he married Gertrude Sternberg in Berlin, who had been born there in 1887. After training as a technical merchant at AEG, he worked first in Lübeck and soon after in Emden, where the Eisfelders' two sons, Günter and Ferdinand, were born. After returning to Berlin, Alfred and Gertrude Eisfelder divorced in 1930.

Alfred Eisfelder had lost his job in the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s and was unable to find employment thereafter. In the Jewish Address Book of 1931 he is listed at Klopstockstr. 9.

Persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany, he was forced to do forced labor at the Ehrich & Graetz company in Berlin-Treptow. On 14 November 1941 he was deported from Berlin to the Minsk Ghetto, where he was murdered. The time and circumstances of his death are not known.

Gertrude Eisfelder married Fritz Heymann in the late 1930s and survived underground in Berlin for some time, but was eventually discovered, deported to Auschwitz and murdered in 1943.

Günter Eisfelder was able to emigrate to Brazil in 1936 and thus survived the Holocaust, as did his brother Ferdinand (later Fred Fields), who escaped to Shanghai in 1938.

The path of the books into the stock of the Berlin City Library is unknown. Shortly after the end of World War II in 1945, they were added to the collection as a "gift". The supplier "Kulturamt" (Cultural Office) indicated for one volume in the acquisition journal is presumably associated with the Berlin magistrate, but this supplier designation was also used for Nazi-loot that was already held in the library. For the other two books, only the library's own book depository is mentioned as the vendor.