Stolperstein Bernhard Alexander © S. Davids-
Grabstein Lola Alexander und Gedenken © Familienbesitz
Bernhard Alexander was born on 12.06.1904 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, the eldest of the five children of Robert and Martha Alexander. He had two younger brothers: René and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1908, and twin sisters Hansi and Tana (Lola), born in 1907. Father Robert Alexander was a tradesman in the leather business, and the family moved homes often through Bernhard’s childhood, first through Wilmersdorf and eventually settling in Steglitz. In 1919, when Bernhard was 15, they moved to a larger first-floor apartment at Grunewaldstrasse 18, suggesting that the family’s financial situation had been going well.
After leaving school, Bernhard completed a commercial traineeship. Instead of following in his father’s footsteps, however, he began to work as a taxi driver. From 1928-1940 Bernhard was employed by a number of different taxi companies in Berlin. Few details are known about his life in his twenties and thirties, only that he moved frequently and remained unmarried.
In December 1938, all German Jews had their driver’s licenses revoked by special decree. How Bernhard made ends meet after he was banned from working as a taxi driver is unknown. By then he was living as a subtenant at Schlossstrasse 28, one of numerous boarders taken in by an extended Jewish family.
From June 1940 Bernhard was made to do forced labor at the Berger & Kulp coal yard at Berlin’s Westhafen industrial port. In May 1941, he was denounced while at work—his brother’s compensation claim from the 1960s points the finger at Berger & Kulp’s owner—and Bernhard was arrested at the coal yard and taken straight to the so-called “labor education camp” at Wuhlheide. In operation since 1940, this Gestapo-run prison camp held thousands of people who had been targeted for racial or political reasons as well as forced laborers deported from Nazi-occupied territories. The companies that profited from this prison labor included the Deutsche Reichsbahn.
As a prisoner there, Bernhard would have been forced to labor under extremely hard, concentration camp-like conditions. Whether through this work or deliberate mistreatment, in late 1941 he was taken from the prison camp to the Jewish Hospital in Wedding with an injured leg. The injury must have been severe, for Bernhard remained in the hospital—under close guard—for around a year.
On 24.09.1942, he was forced from his hospital bed and taken to the collection point for the 20th Osttransport. Before the train departed two days later, filled with more than 1000 Frankfurt and Berlin Jews, he was forced to fill out a declaration of his assets. He valued his possessions at zero.
When the train arrived at Raasiku, Estonia five days later, a number of passengers were selected for forced labor at the nearby Jägala concentration camp. The majority, the still-injured Bernhard almost certainly among them, were taken to the nearby pine forest at Kalevi-Liiva, where they were shot dead and buried in mass graves.
Bernhard’s brothers René and Klaus had non-Jewish wives, which gave them limited protection from deportation. They worked in forced labor, René from 1940-1945 and Klaus from 1943-1945. After the war, both returned to working as taxi drivers in West Berlin.
His sister Hansi was swept up in the “Fabrikaktion” mass arrests and deported to Auschwitz in March 1943. His other sister Lola was warned in advance by her factory supervisor and survived in hiding in Berlin with his help.