Max Zellner was born on March 13, 1876 in the district town of Ostrowo (today Ostrów Wielkopolski), which is located on the Ołobok southeast of Posen (Poznań). He was the son of the music teacher Julius Zellner and his wife Otilie, née Laser.
No information has been preserved about Max Zellner's parents' home, childhood and youth. It is also not known whether he grew up with siblings. In all likelihood, his parents belonged to the Jewish community of the city of Ostrowo, which at the time of Max's birth numbered around 1,600 of the 8,000 residents.
After graduating from school, Max Zellner first began studying law in Berlin and later studied medicine in Berlin, Breslau (Wrocław) and Freiburg. In 1901 he received his doctorate from the University of Freiburg with a thesis on eating disorders entitled “On Disorders of the Food Instinct” and received his license to practice medicine in the same year.
At the turn of the century, Max Zellner settled in Berlin as a general practitioner and, on February 4, 1909, married Regina Luise Stern, who was nine years younger than him. She was the daughter of the merchant Herz Hermann Stern and his wife Helene, née Friedländer. At the time of the wedding, Max Zellner lived and practiced at Landsberger Straße 21 (today's Mollstraße) near Büschingplatz. In 1910 the couple moved into an apartment at Landsberger Straße 17, not far from the practice.
Their daughter Stefanie was born on June 21, 1919. The young family moved to Helmstedter Straße 31 in Wilmersdorf, where they lived until 1932/1933 before moving their apartment and practice to Bachstelzenweg 17 in Dahlem. Max’s father Julius died in 1931 and his mother Otilie died in 1932. Unfortunately, no other sources have survived that could provide an insight into the family's life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
With the gradual disenfranchisement and persecution of Jews since 1933 - or of all people who were considered Jews in the Nazi state according to the Nuremberg Laws - coercive measures against Max Zellner and his family also began. This included numerous measures of discrimination and social exclusion, the deprivation of civil rights and exclusion from professional and economic life. “Non-Aryan” doctors were excluded from the public health system with the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” of April 7, 1933. Between 1933 and 1937, their health insurance licenses were successively withdrawn with a total of seven ordinances, and with the ordinance of November 20, 1933, they were allowed to do so They no longer attend further medical training courses and have been excluded from the medical on-call service. On September 30, 1938, Max Zellner, like all Jewish doctors, had his license to practice medicine revoked with the “Fourth Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Act”.
At the end of the 1930s or beginning of the 1940s, the Zellners had to leave their apartment and moved to Hohenzollerndamm 184 as a sublet. At this point, life in Berlin had become a pure struggle for existence for the couple. To name just one of the many drastic measures, according to the police ordinance of September 1, 1941 “on the identification of Jews” they could only move around in public with the stigmatizing “Jewish star” and it is likely that at least Max Zellner was one of them A company based in Berlin had to perform forced labor.
The humiliation and disenfranchisement was followed by deportation: On October 1, 1941, the Gestapo informed the Berlin Jewish community that the “resettlement” of Berlin's Jews would begin. Max and Regina Zellner were arrested in 1943 as part of the “Factory Action” and deported to one of the Berlin collection camps. From there they were sent together on March 12, 1943 with the “36. Osttransport” was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered there.
The daughter Stephanie emigrated to Palestine before 1939, married Michael Bernie Bernstein and lived with him in the USA and Canada. In her twilight years they moved to Israel, where Stephanie died in 2012.