The interior designer Erich Büngener lived with his wife Erika on Grolmanstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Their two daughters were born in 1943 and 1944. At the request of their Jewish friend Max Mandel, Erich Büngener and his wife hid Max’s sister Ester Kantorowicz and her husband Kurt from March 1943. When the building they lived in was damaged in an air raid in November 1943, Erika Büngener took the Jewish couple along to stay with her parents. They were able to return to Grolmanstrasse a few days later. From February 1944, they also took in Max Mandel and his 15-year-old son Gert.
On July 19, 1944, Kurt Kantorowicz was arrested in the street by Jewish informers to the Gestapo, known as “catchers.” He was murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of 1944. Despite fearing he might have revealed their hiding place, Ester Kantorowicz and Max and Gert Mandel remained with the Büngeners and were liberated there.
Erich Büngener was honored as an Unsung Hero in 1964 and posthumously recognized by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1991.