The Jewish banker Paul Spitzer had to give up his position on the executive board of a Berlin property management company in 1939 and perform heavy labor for the Reichsbahn railroad company from 1941.
He went underground on November 20, 1942, calling himself Paul Schumann. He stayed with a Jewish family until March 1943, then – arranged by an acquaintance, Elfriede Anklam – with the stove fitter Max Krahl in the Zehlendorf district. After Krahl’s sudden death in July 1943, Paul Spitzer suffered a heart attack. Elfriede Anklam then took him in for four weeks, before he hid in Silesia and Pomerania. When the local authorities became aware of him in November 1944, he returned to Berlin. Through a dentist, he was able to stay with the businessman Harald Gambke and his mother Anna Keue in Kreuzberg. The situation there grew too dangerous and in the spring of 1945 Gambke took Spitzer to an acquaintance in Lichterfelde, Walter Stier, with whom he survived the last few weeks of the war. In July 1949 he emigrated to New York, where he called himself Schuman.
