Walter Leopold (1898–1952)

Walter Leopold was born to a Jewish family in Ottweiler, Germany, the son of a cantor. He fought in the German Army in World War I and received the Iron Cross for bravery. After the war, he earned a doctorate at Heidelberg University, Job opportunities were limited, so he became director of the Reichenheim Orphanage in Berlin. There he met his future wife, Hilda Bluemlein, a pediatric nurse. In 1930, the couple moved to Leipzig, where Dr. Leopold worked for the Gemeinde (Jewish Community Office). With the rise of the Nazi regime to power in 1933, his mother and two brothers emigrated to the USA, but Dr. Leopold, his wife, and their daughter Anneliese stayed in Germany. Dr. Leopold was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938, but then released. Pressured by the Gestapo to leave the country, he refused. He and his family lived first in hiding and then under assumed identities until the end of World War II as he continued his resistance against Nazism. The remarkable diary that Dr. Leopold kept during these years was published by his nephew Les Leopold in 2020 as Defiant German, Defiant Jew: A Holocaust Memoir from inside the Third Reich.