Memorial Sign for Helmuth Silberberg,
Seidlvilla, Nikolaiplatz 1b

Helmuth Silberberg was the youngest of six siblings and spent his childhood years with his family in Hannover. However, after the death of his father, his mother placed him in an orphanage at the age of eight, where he was very unhappy. As a teenager, he began an apprenticeship at the Israelite Horticultural School, where his sister Sofie also worked. The fact that Sofie emigrated to Palestine in 1934 hit Helmuth hard; shortly afterwards, he attempted suicide and received psychiatric treatment.

He then moved to the Jewish Community's training centre in Munich, but he found it difficult to settle in and was admitted to the Eglfing-Haar sanatorium and nursing home. From there, he begged his mother to pick him up and flee Germany with him. However, this was no longer possible for his mother, who was now destitute due to Nazi persecution.

His siblings were able to emigrate to Argentina, but Helmuth Silberberg was deported from Eglfing-Haar to the Hartheim killing centre near Linz and murdered in the gas chamber in September 1940 as part of the so-called Aktion T4, organised throughout Bavaria by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior against Jewish institutional patients. His mother Kula Silberberg was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and murdered there.