The Jewish family, Broder, hail from Galicia. Thereafter they moved to Krakow, Poland, then Tarnow. Around 1900 they moved to Leipzig, Germany. The donor's maternal great grandfather, Moses Broder, who had established a scrap metal business and a foundry, where he produced ingots for the army and the railway amongst other contracts, moved the business to Leipzig. Moses had 5 sons, one of whom, Jakob, was the donor's grandfather. Both he and his elder brother, Elias, fought on the side of the Austrian army in World War I, where Elias was awarded the Iron Cross amongst other awards. Jakob eventually made it to Great Britain.

The youngest son, Leon, to which this collection predominantly pertains, was born in Leipzig in 1906. Too young to fight in World War I, he went to Brussels to study engineering. thereafter he completed his PHd. Most of the Broder family managed to escape the Nazis. Leon, along with his family, remained in hiding in Amsterdam until they were denounced then sent to Westerbork, Terezin then Auschwitz where his wife and son, Manfred (born 1931) were murdered. Leon managed to survive as a slave labourer for Krupps in Essen until the end of the war. During the post war US occupation of Germany Leon managed to escape execution by the occupying powers for being a suspected hidden SS officer, when one of the arresting officers recognised him. He was thereafter assigned a driver to assist him in his (ultimately futile) search for survivng family members. The driver, Hilde Wallheimer-Freund, a German Jew from Berlin, had fought with the resistance during the war in Belgium. Leon and Hilde eventiually got married and later moved to Switzerland where Leon became a successful businessman.