Julius Spanier (18.4.1880 Munich – 27.1.1959 Munich)

Julius Spanier was born in Munich, the son of the stock market agent Joseph Spanier and Gretchen née Weinbach. He studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilan University and completed his specialist training as a pediatrician and general practitioner in Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1904 and setting up on his own in 1906. In 1907 he married Zipora Knoller, born 1886 in Krefeld.

In the First World War he served as a medical officer from 1915 to 1918. From 1926 to 1928 he was a member of the Munich Pediatric Society where he was active in infant care and which he co-founded in 1919. He worked part-time as a school doctor and provided the ‘school feeding’ at his own expense; he also provided medical care to the Jewish Children’s Home in Antonienstraße.

On July 25, 1938, the Fourth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act declared the licenses of all Jewish doctors to be “expired” as from 30 September that year. In 1939, after the emigration of Dr. Berthold Weiss, Dr. Spanier took over the management of the Israelitic Private Clinic at Hermann-Schmid-Straße 5-7, where he was supported by his wife in providing nursing care. As a Jewish ‘healer of the sick’ he was the trusted representative for the Jews in the ‘Home for Jews’ in Berg am Laim and the Lohhof Flax Processing Works labor camp.

The hospital was forcibly evacuated on June 4, 1942. Nurses, patients and the dying were loaded into moving vans; 62-year-old Julius Spanier and his wife were also in the first of three transports to Theresienstadt. Shortly before on May 30, 1942 – and in any case already systematically driven into economic ruin by the state – had been deprived of all his remaining assets by order of the State Ministry of the Interior.

Julius Spanier and his wife survived Theresienstadt; he had also pursued his medical activities there. For four years, he was the first President of the Jewish Community in Munich, after it was refounded on July 19, 1945. From 1947 until 1953 he was also elected Chairman of the State Committee, the highest organ of the Regional Association of the Israelite Religious Communities in Bavaria. In the first year after the war, he also led the Munich District Medical Association and from February to June 1946 he was an active member on the Bavarian State Advisory Committee. From 1946 to 1955 he was in charge of the Pediatric Clinic on Lachnerstraße. From 1947 to 1951 he was a member of the Bavarian Senate. From 1948 onwards he made an outstanding contribution to Christian-Jewish collaboration in the eponymous association and died highly honored and respected at the age of 78.