The Diana Pharmacy on Turm Strasse in Berlin’s Moabit district was founded in 1885. In 1907 the Jewish pharmacist Ernst Isidor Levy took it over. He ran it as a successful business until 1936, when the Nazis took one step after another to dismantle everything that Ernst Isidor had built up. At first he was forced to lease his pharmacy, and in 1939 he was forced to sell it. German Jews no longer had the legal right to own their own businesses. In August 1938 Levy then left Germany and emigrated with his wife to Scotland.

What does all of that have to do with Freie Universität Berlin? Much more than might seem apparent at first. And definitely more than Hans-Martin Meis expected when he encountered documents about the Levy Foundation about three years ago.

At the time Meis was a program manager in the Division of International Affairs at Freie Universität. He says that he had never heard of this foundation before and assumed that it was an institution in Israel. However, that was not the case. Meis could not find any information about it on the internet. “Then I really began to get interested in finding out more about it,” says Meis.

No One Knew the Background of the Levy Foundation

He asked various members of the university what they knew about the Levy Foundation, but no one was of any help. Finally, Meis found someone else who took an interest in it. Ansgar Koch, the program coordinator of degree programs at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, had already been trying to procure funds from the Levy Foundation to support Israeli exchange students at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies.

Together Meis and Koch found internal documents in the archives of Freie Universität. According to these papers, the foundation is not an institution, but an individual: Dr. Werner Levy. Who was this man? And why did he donate 30,000 German marks to Freie Universität in 1965 to support German-Israeli academic cooperation? Koch and Meis devoted many hours of their free time looking for answers to these questions.

In 1965 Werner Levy had written a letter to the president of Freie Universität: “I would like to donate a certain sum of money to Freie Universität from the reparations my father received to fund a scholarship of about 1000 German marks per year for students.”

Research in Berlin-Lankwitz, Scotland, New Zealand, the United States, and England

Originally, Levy intended to use the money as an award for a student essay competition. This idea could not be implemented because too few essays were submitted. And those that were submitted were of a poor quality. Koch says, “The university was able to convince Levy that the money would be more useful to strengthen ties between Freie Universität and its partners in Israel, for example, with the recently founded university in Tel Aviv.”

As they conducted more research, Meis and Koch learned more about the history of the family and the life of the donor Werner Levy. Their research took them virtually from the University Archives in Berlin-Lankwitz to Scotland, New Zealand, the United States, and England. They did research in museums, archives, and newspapers.

Koch points out that several times they reached a point, where they did not know how to proceed. Then, one coincidence led to another, and they were able to continue their work. With each new newspaper article that they found, with each letter, and each new piece of information, Werner Levy took shape as a person. “That was very touching for me personally,” says Meis.

Werner Levy, born on May 6, 1916, in Berlin, was the son of Ernst Isidor Levy, the Jewish pharmacist who with his family fled from the Nazis to England in 1938. At least two of Ernst’s sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.

Werner Levy studied medicine in Glasgow beginning in 1934 and later worked as a medical doctor in London. He remained single and childless. The money that he donated to Freie Universität came from reparation payments that his father had received from the State of Berlin. The compensation was for his extensive pharmacy warehouse confiscated by the Nazis as well as jewelry belonging to Ernst Isidor Levy’s wife Betty, which had also been confiscated by the Nazis. The university invested the donation in securities. Today it amounts to almost 70,000 euros, and its interest is used to fund scholarships for exchange students between Israel and Freie Universität.

December 20, 2022, was a special day in Koch and Meis’s long research process. On that day they had an appointment for a video call with a relative of the donor Werner Levy. Peter Neville lives near London and is a nephew of Werner Levy.

Meis describes the call: “For one thing, Peter Neville is very open minded and a very nice person. Besides that, he was able to tell us a lot about his uncle’s character.” Levy was very warmhearted and socially committed, but he was also a bit eccentric, for example, he had no employees in his practice because he was convinced that there should be nothing between the physician and the patient.

Why Freie Universität Berlin?

One question remains unanswered even after the conversation with Peter Neville: Why did his uncle donate the money to Freie Universität Berlin? Meis hazards a guess: “We can only surmise that it was his way of coming to terms with his family’s history.” Koch adds, “It could have been an attempt to maintain a connection with his hometown of Berlin.”

It is a connection that continues to this day. The money from the Levy Foundation, which originally came from reparations for Nazi injustice, is now used to support Israeli students who attend Freie Universität Berlin.

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This article originally appeared in German in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.