Bernhard Fritz Friedlaender

Bernhard Fritz Friedlaender was born on June 12, 1890 in Poznan as the son of Sigvard Friedlaender and Julia Friedlaender, née Löwenstein. After graduating from the local grammar school, he studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau, Heidelberg and Berlin. He passed his state examination in 1913 and served as a military doctor during the First World War. He was married to Ruth Löwenthal, who was born on March 14, 1902 in Brandenburg an der Havel. The couple had one son, Heinz Egon Friedlaender, born on September 24, 1930 in Berlin. After working as a junior physician for several years, Fritz Friedlaender set up his own specialty practice for skin conditions in Berlin around 1928. He opened his first practice in Spandau at Breite Straße 57. The family later moved to Wedding, where they had their home and practice at Müllerstraße 35 from around 1934.

The Friedlaender family was persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany. In 1939, the Friedlaenders were forced to move out of their apartment in Müllerstraße and finally had to live in a forced housing unit at Helmstädter Straße 9 in Wilmersdorf. Efforts to escape to the United States or Great Britain failed. On October 24, 1941, Fritz, Ruth and Heinz Egon Friedlaender were deported from Berlin to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, where Fritz Friedlaender worked as a medical doctor. During the dissolution of the ghetto in 1944, the Friedlaender family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Ruth Friedlaender was separated from her family there and murdered; the exact date of her death is not known. Fritz and Heinz Egon Friedlaender were deported to various camps after the Sonderkommando uprising in October 1944, most recently to the satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp, Wöbbelin concentration camp near Schwerin, where they were liberated by the US Army on May 2, 1945. Fritz and Heinz Egon Friedlaender survived the Shoah.

It was only after the end of the war that Fritz and Heinz Egon Friedlaender learned with certainty that Ruth Friedlaender had been murdered. Fritz's mother Julia Friedlaender, née Löwenstein, was also murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp. Fritz settled in West Germany and opened a medical practice in Lüneburg in 1948. He married a second time, to fellow Shoah survivor Edith Knappe, and moved to Hamburg in 1953, where he died on October 9, 1954.

Heinz Egon Friedlaender emigrated to the United States in 1947 and changed his name to Henry Friedlander. He studied history, carried out research and taught at various American universities and devoted himself to Holocaust research from 1970 onwards. From 1975 until his retirement in 2001, he was Professor of Jewish Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. In 1995, he published The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, a standard work of Holocaust research. Friedlaender died on October 17, 2012 in Bangor, Maine. He was married to the Holocaust researcher Sybil Halpern Milton (1941-2000), with whom he had three children.

The book was accessioned as a gift in the Berlin City Library (“Berliner Stadtbibliothek”, BStB) in September 1945 and incorporated into the collection in 1948. The supplier “Kulturamt” (Cultural Office) listed in the acquisition journal is presumably connected with the Berlin Magistrate. However, this supplier designation was demonstrably also used for books which had been taken from the last homes of Berlin Jews, which the BStB had purchased in 1943 from the Berlin City Pawnshop.