Ernst Levy Collection

Ernst Moritz Levy (1894-1982) was the oldest child of Flora (neé Brandt) and Alfons Levy. Along his sisters Hanna Lilli (married Treitel) and Meta Alice (married Imbach) he grew up in an affluent middle-class household in Berlin. The non-observant Jewish family originated from Posen (Poznan) on the maternal side and from Krotoschin (Krotoszyn) on the paternal one.

Fighting in World War One had been a formative experience for Ernst. Having started his military service in the Imperial German Army the previous year, he was on active duty from 1914-18. Deployed to both the Eastern and Western Front, Ernst was promoted Lieutenant and awarded the Iron Cross.

Upon studying law in Munich and receiving his PhD from the University of Würzburg, he became a partner in his father’s successful timber sales business in the mid-1920s - a sector he would continue to work in for most of his entire career.

On a business trip in the mid-1930s, he met his future wife Helen Thilo. In the wake of his father’s passing and the ‘aryanisation’ of the company, Ernst emigrated from Nazi-Germany in summer 1938 and settled with Helen in London. The couple would have two children.

Although interned by the British authorities as ‘enemy alien’ from 1940-41, Ernst settled in well in his country of refuge both privately and professionally. With the end of the Second World War, he took up the task of tracing relatives murdered in the Holocaust, and assisted his now scattered family with restitution and estate matters.

His wife Helen Levy-Thilo (1910-1956) was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, into the city’s vibrant community of German immigrants. She was the youngest of four children of Martha neé Ephraimson (born in Neustrelitz) and Eugen Thilo (born in Neisse, now Nysa). Her parents had moved to the north of England for Eugen to manage a wool factory.

In 1912 the family relocated to Hamburg and then to Berlin where Helen grew up in an affluent, cultured and atheist environment along her siblings Eduard/Edward Fritz, Hans Arthur and Margarethe Malwine (married Schweiger and Hellendahl). An avid violinist, she eventually trained and worked as foreign language secretary (English, French, and Spanish).

Upon the passing of her mother and the increasingly hostile atmosphere in Germany, Helen and her father moved to England again in 1936. Holding both German and British citizenship, they assisted the emigration of Helen’s future husband Ernst and other members of his family. Helen died early in 1956.