Georg Bruns was a police sergeant working at the Richard-Wagner-Platz precinct in Berlin-Charlottenburg. An opponent to the regime, he supported his Jewish friend Adolf Rosen and his family with food. However, he could not prevent Adolf and Minna Rosen’s deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1942.
The Rosens’ daughters Elsbeth Rosen and Hildegard Cohn fled from their parents’ Charlottenburg apartment on January 7, 1943, and Bruns and his wife Elisabeth took them in. Hildegard Cohn and her five-year-old son were picked up a few days later, however, and deported to Auschwitz.
The Bruns family home in the Steglitz district was destroyed in an air raid on March 1, 1943. They found new quarters in Charlottenburg, taking Elsbeth Rosen with them. When this building was also hit by a bomb in November 1943, Elisabeth Bruns left Berlin with the children. She left her employment record booklet for Elsbeth Rosen, who survived the war living with Georg Bruns.
In 1961 Georg and Elisabeth Bruns were honored as Unsung Heroes by the West Berlin senate.