Irma Mayer was born in Bad Kissingen on October 21, 1895 as the daughter of the respected spa host and Bad Kissingen Town Councilor Nathan Bretzfelder, owner of “Villa Holländer”, and his wife Klara, née Goldstein. After 27-year-old Irma had married the 33-year-old doctor Sally Mayer from Fürth on March 26, 1923, the young couple didn’t move to Fürth but settled in Bad Kissingen’s Bismarckstrasse 32 (then 12a). The reasons for that may have been the special reputation of the Bretzfelder family, their deep roots in Bad Kissingen and the fame of the town as a World-famous Spa. 

Irma and Sally Mayer didn’t have any children and, therefore, may have been even more involved in the social life of Bad Kissingen. This bourgeois life abruptly ended in 1933 when the Nazis seized power and when her husband Sally was forbidden to practice his profession any longer in 1938. On March 15, 1939 Irma accompanied her husband to Würzburg where she lived with him in the suburb of Frauenland in Konradstrasse 7. Nowadays, there is a stumbling stone in front of this house in her memory. 

Together with her husband she accompanied the group of what was left of his mostly old and helpless patients into Theresienstadt Concentration Camp on September 23, 1942. There she supported her husband in his work as a doctor. From there, two years later, on October 19, 1944 Irma and Sally Mayer were deported together to Auschwitz/ OświęcimConcentration Camp where they died. Irma Mayer is officially regarded as “missing in Auschwitz/ Oświęcim”. 

(Sigismund von Dobschütz)