Nathan Oberzimmer was born in Bad Kissingen on February 15, 1884 as the son of the cattle dealer Maier Oberzimmer and his wife Fanny, née Berliner from Westheim. He had an older sister Laura and a brother Theobald who was six years his junior. Nathan entered Kissingen Realschule, the predecessor of contemporary Jack-Steinberger-Gymnasium, in September 1894, got his graduation certificate in July 1901 and later became a merchant and cattle grower. In October 1922, the young man left his hometown and moved to Stolp in Pomerania. There, he established a business for growing and dealing with cattle together with his brother Theobald who had also apprenticed as a merchant and cattleman. There were wide plains for grazing and stables for the business. The brothers moved on the estate partly on horseback and partly in a car, as Martin Walter, a nephew of Nathan, described in his application for compensation to the “Entschädigungsamt in Berlin” (Berlin Office for Compensation). 

In 1935, the two brothers suffered a fatal blow. In a car crash, both of them were severely wounded. Nathan was treated in the hospital of Deutsch-Krone for two years and stayed an invalid. As anti-Semitic intimidations and boycott actions also became more and more serious in those years, the brothers gave up their business in Stolp and moved to Berlin in 1938. Theobald Oberzimmer died in a Berlin hospital in 1940 at the age of 49.

Nathan Oberzimmer, who stayed unmarried all his life and didn’t have any children, lived in Berlin in very modest circumstances, at the end as a subtenant in a small room in Berlin-Halensee. Sönke Petersen writes about that in his Stumblingstone biography of Nathan Oberzimmer:

“On October 1, 1942, Gestapo came to Hektorstrasse. Like all the deported Jews, Nathan Oberzimmer was forced to write a declaration concerning his possessions. He didn’t write a lot into the official form: “1 wardrobe, 1 desk, 1 leather chair, 1 bedside table, 1 bed”. The official bailiff (Gerichtsvollzieher) later evaluated his possessions as being worth 599.75 Reichsmark.

Two days later, Nathan Oberzimmer was deported to Theresienstadt on the so-called “third great transport of the old” (train number “Da 523”). In Theresienstadt, the “forecourt to hell” (Carlo Ross), which the Nazis tried to equip as a model ghetto for old people, he stayed for nearly two years. Old and weak, he had to get onto another train in October 1944. The destination of that train was Auschwitz/ Oświęcim Extermination Camp. There, Nathan Oberzimmer was murdered on October 19, 1944. 

For the Nazis, the file of Nathan Oberzimmer was not closed at that time. In his declaration of his possessions they had detected a possession that was interesting to them: “A field at lower Sinnberg in Bad Kissingen”. Several authorities were summoned. Then they had reached their aim: “The estate is retracted and transferred to the state” (Sönke Petersen, Stolperstein Hektorstrasse 15, Berlin-Halensee).

Nathan’s sister Laura succeeded in emigrating to the United States with her family, but she took her own life there in October 1943.