From 1933 on, Dora Schloß, née Hoffmann, lived with her two adult children on the second floor of the street-facing building. Their apartment had two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with hot running water, a balcony, and a basement. Dora Schloß divorced in 1937. Her son Herbert was single and a company employee. In January 1942, he was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was assigned to a penal commando deployed in the brickworks. This was where newcomers and those at the bottom of the prisoner hierarchy, e.g., homosexuals, were sent to work. Herbert Schloß died in 1942 during a phase of intensified SS violence on the camp grounds. The reason for his being jailed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp does not emerge from the few surviving documents.

In 1941, Herbert Schloß’s younger sister Hildegard married Leo Schilibolski, who then also moved in at Grellstraße 17. Originally a salesman and visual merchandiser, he became a sales representative in a bid to find some work after 1934. Eventually, he registered as unemployed. In winter 1938/39, the employment office made him work shoveling snow. In May 1939, he was enlisted for railroad construction work. “If you did not go to work, the Gestapo would arrest you,” he later wrote in his compensation application. He broke his “right hand and left foot” performing this work. Despite being treated by the Reich railroad doctors, his left leg continued to plague him afterwards whenever he stood for any length of time.

On December 1, 1941, the Skurnik family moved into a “partly furnished” room of the apartment and the kitchen as subtenants. Rosa Skurnik was a qualified book-keeper who worked as a forced laborer for Siemens-Schuckert in the firm’s turning shop in Siemensstadt. Siemens-Schuckert was known for its severe disciplining of staff members, handing over 300 or 400 of them to the Gestapo each year. Rosa’s husband Carl Skurnik had originally been a tradesman. He was made to work for Pertrix, a company which made batteries for the German army. Their son Siegfried Skurnik worked as a forced laborer for Weber & Co., a metal punching plant in Treptow.

On February 5, 1943, Hildegard and Leo Schilibolski were arrested in their apartment and on February 19, 1943, deported along with the Skurnik family to Auschwitz. Dora Schloß had already been taken away to the Theresienstadt ghetto in spring 1942. Leo Schilibolski was the only one to survive. While in Auschwitz, he was subjected to medical experiments: Patches of skin on his upper arms and shins were removed to examine changes in tissue such as caused by cancer. In late January 1945, he left Auschwitz for Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was liberated by soldiers of the US army on May 5, 1945.

On October 26, 1941, a subtenant moved into the Isenthals’ apartment for a short time: Horst Heinemann, a former commercial employee who worked as a domestic servant, bicycle messenger, and from early 1941 on, “dirty worker” for Deutsche Lufthansa in Staaken. To escape the forced labor “in very bad conditions” for Lufthansa, he tried to flee with a non-Jewish acquaintance to Switzerland. But the escape attempt failed. On November 21, 1941, Horst Heinemann was detained in Lörrach. When he had served his sentence but was still held pending his deportation to Dachau concentration camp, he managed to escape while working outdoors.

With Reichsmark 50 lent to him by a fellow inmate, he set off back to Berlin. Here, his friends Fritz and Käthe Zins – a non-Jewish cap manufacturer and his Jewish wife and assistant – found him various places to hide: the homes of Jewish and non-Jewish friends and associates and an arbor in Hohenschönhausen – in the middle of winter. In 1942, Fritz Zins was jailed in Wuhlheide corrective labor camp for aiding Horst Heinemann’s escape and assigned to road construction work. As Fritz Zins was married to a Jew, in spring 1944, he was sent to Watten-Eperlegue prison camp in France and assigned forced labor with “Organisation Todt”. In the meantime, his business was closed down. Käthe Zins was interrogated by the Gestapo. The couple’s younger daughter was forced to leave high school in spring 1943 as she was categorized as “of mixed blood, first degree”, although she was baptized.

When Allied bombing was driving many Berliners out of the city in August 1943, Käthe Zins also left Berlin with her two daughters. Horst Heinemann joined them a short time later. Outside the capital, the family was known as Protestant, nominally non-Jewish: Käthe’s younger daughter was able to attend high school again; her elder daughter found an apprenticeship. For the next one-and-a-half years until the war ended, Horst Heinemann lived with them in a small apartment in Bad Flinsberg. In early 1945, they were joined by Ilse Mende, another Jewish friend living in hiding.

From the time of his escape from prison until his liberation, Horst Heinemann “lived like a hounded animal. For years, I did not have a minute without fear”, he stated in 1957 during his compensation proceedings.

The Moses family, who were repeatedly hit by Nazi terror, also lived in the building. In spring 1934, the Supreme Court sentenced Philipp Moses, a tradesman, to two years’ imprisonment for high treason and “communist machinations”. His non-Jewish wife Anna Susanna Urschel and his 18- and 20-year-old sons Herbert and Manfred were also sentenced to one year and several months’ imprisonment. Philipp Moses was sent to prison in Brandenburg an der Havel, then to Oranienburg concentration camp and finally to Moabit detention center.

The public holding housing association “Mieteraktienbauverein Gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft”, renamed “Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Eintracht Gemeinnützige AG” in 1929, and known as “WBG Eintracht” (“Unity HA”), constructed three buildings at Grellstraße 59-61 in 1927/28. By 1938, WBG Eintracht had twenty buildings here – numbers 46 to 73 – with 160 apartments. From around 1938, by the latest, WBG Eintracht combined the pursuit of clear-cut economic interests with the Nazi state’s antisemitic and racist ideology, taking drastic action against Jewish tenants and forcing them to move out at short notice. The association’s business report for 1938 declared that it had “made arrangements with all our remaining non-Aryan tenants for them to vacate their apartments,” and that “most non-Aryans have already given up their apartments. By the end of the year, all our residential property will be free of Jews.” The term “non-Aryan” implied various groups of racially stigmatized people besides Jewish people. A total of 19 Jewish people, or people read as Jewish, were forced to give up the apartments they rented from WBG Eintracht on Grellstraße by spring 1939, including the Isenthals and the Jakubowski family, who were ejected as early as January 1, 1939.