Eduard Adler

Not much is known about Eduard Adler’s early life. He grew up in Speyer in the Rhineland as the son of Max Adler and Selma Mayer until the autumn of 1940. During this time, he presumably completed an apprenticeship as a confectioner. He later went by the name Edward. His father was deported to the Dachau concentration camp during the November pogroms of 1938.

On 22 October 1940, he and his family were deported to France along with 6,500 other Jews from Baden, the Palatinate and the Saarland. He was initially held at the Gurs internment camp in south-western France at the foot of the Pyrenees, then in August 1941 he was taken to the ‘Les Milles’ camp in Aix-en-Provence near Marseille. From there, he was taken to the Drancy transit camp north-east of Paris, from where the prisoners were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. His parents were deported on 14 August 1942 along with 1,000 other people and murdered in Auschwitz.

The French-Jewish children’s charity Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) managed to rescue Eduard Adler from Drancy. Equipped with false papers, he worked as a woodcutter until he was apprehended during a Wehrmacht check in November 1943 and transferred to a barracks in Paris. Together with 60 other Frenchmen, he is now sent to the SS training camp at Sennheim (Cernay in Alsace). In 1944, all the soldiers are transferred to Prague. Later, he is deployed to Küstrin (Kostrzyn nad Odrą, now in Poland) in the 65th Company of the French Foreign Legion at the Oder-Warthe estuary. On 2 January 1945, he was admitted to a military hospital in Aue (Saxony) due to injuries and, three months later, was taken prisoner by the Americans. Due to his Jewish heritage, he was released a few weeks later.

On 18 May 1945, Eduard Adler found accommodation with his aunt Klara Fiedler in Mittweida. He registered as a driver at the town hall there. On 7 September 1945, he and his aunt became founding members of the Jewish Community of Chemnitz.

He did not stay there long – a month later he moved to Speyer. The following year he married Irma Wetzel. In 1947 their daughter Brigitte was born.

In 1950, he left Bremen with his wife and daughter and travelled to the USA, settling first in Norwalk (Connecticut) and later in Baltimore (Maryland), where his father’s siblings had been living for several decades.

Eduard Adler died in Rockville (Maryland) in August 1987. On 15 March 2005, his widow died in Gaithersburg (Maryland).