Ernst Abraham Adolf Grünspach

Ernst Abraham Adolf Grünspach was born on 11 October 1911 in Krotoschin (then in the Prussian province of Posen). Due to a lack of biographical sources, we were unable to find any information about his childhood and youth.

His father, Georg Grünspach, was an importer and merchant^.1 His mother's name was Gertrude (née Natan)^.2 His father, who probably identified with political Zionism, was one of thousands of shareholders in the "Jewish Colonialist Trust"^.3 This company was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1899 and was the financial basis of the Zionist movement.

Ernst Grünspach studied at the Faculty of Law at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin from October 1930 to April 1933. In a memorial sheet from the Yad Vashem memorial, his aunt, Erna Bloch, wrote that he had even worked as a trainee lawyer at the university^.4

After his studies, Ernst Grünspach emigrated to Amsterdam with his wife Eva (née Jaffe). They lived at Krammerstrasse 8 during the war and in October 1942 Louise Kautsky, the widow of the well-known Marxist philosopher and politician Karl Kautsky, also moved in with them. Lousie Kautsky was known as an author and socialist-feminist activist. The Kautsky couple were friends with Ernst Grünspach's father-in-law.

Published research into the life of Louise Kautsky shows that the Grünspach couple were arrested at the end of July 1943, together with around 7,000 other Jews, in a security police operation in Amsterdam^.5 They were taken to the Westerbork transit camp and deported from there on 6 September 1944 on transport XXIV/7 to Theresienstadt. Ernst Grünspach was then taken to Auschwitz on transport El on 29 September 1944, where he died on 2 November 1944^.6 His wife was also deported to Auschwitz on 1 October 1944. The sources regarding her fate are contradictory.