Ursula Kretschmer, his later wife, was among the women who courageously protested the imprisonment of their husbands and male relatives outside the jail on Rosenstraße. After ten days, Gerhard Braun was released. He was then made to perform forced labor for the Deutscher Glasermeister trade cooperative. Whenever he heard through acquaintances and contacts that a deportation was imminent, he went underground for a while, hiding in as wide a range of places as possible. In this way, he managed to survive to the end of the war, in 1945. He married Ursula Kretschmer the same year. Later, he studied at West Berlin’s Academy of Arts and was made Professor of Visual Communication in 1961.

In the memoirs that Gerhard Braun and his wife later wrote, he mentioned a couple who had lived with them, the Zeidlers. He recalled that they had also survived and visited the Brauns in Berlin after the war. The name Fred Zeidler appears in the city’s old directories, noted as resident at Ringstraße 7 in the district of Steglitz, until 1938.

Julius, Gertrud and Gerhard Braun were not evicted and survived the Nazi period at home. Julius Braun is listed as the resident owner in the Berlin directories up to the year 1941; from 1942 on, they noted “O[wner] unknown” at this address. But the house remained the property of the family and Gerhard Braun later reported in an interview:

Werner Braun was Julius and Gertrud Braun’s elder son. A member of the German Communist Party (KPD), he had been attacked by the SA several times even before the Nazis came to power. On November 9, 1938, he married Hildegard Kretschmer, who had been raised a Catholic but whose mother was Jewish. The young couple lived in the rear building in Werner’s parents’ garden. They planned to emigrate to the United States and had already applied for the necessary documents. But the birth of their daughter Ruth on February 16, 1940, meant they needed to re-apply and their emigration was delayed.

In 1941, Werner Braun was arrested on the street for being an “enemy of the Reich” and jailed in Moabit prison. In March 1942, Hildegard Braun was instructed by the Gestapo to report with her daughter to the assembly point in the old synagogue on Levetzowstraße in preparation for a transport on March 28, 1942. Here, she was reunited with Werner. They were deported together via Trawniki to the Piaski ghetto, where it seems they were separated on arrival.

Ursula Braun, Hildegard's sister, later said in an interview that she had worked for a construction firm that was active in the German-occupied territories and was therefore fully aware of the fate that awaited her sister:

The pianist Clara Feininger, born February 15, 1879, moved in as a subtenant in 1940 or 1941. She was the artist Lyonel Feininger’s first wife. In her “declaration of assets” she stated that she had been forcibly housed in the cellar, and paid a quarterly rent of RM 35. The Nazis classified and persecuted her as “racially Jewish” because she had two Jewish grandparents and had previously been a member of the Jewish Community. She had married Lyonel Feininger in 1901, and had two children with him – Eleonore (Lore) Helene and Marianne. They divorced in 1907. On January 10, 1944, Clara Feininger was deported to Theresienstadt and from there, on October 23, to Auschwitz, where she was probably murdered on arrival. Gerhard Braun later said in an interview:

Katharina Kretzschmar