Irma Dehler, née Frank was born in Steinach on September 24, 1898 as the youngest of six children of the cattle dealer Lazarus Frank and his wife Clara, née Ansbacher. He father was highly regarded in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities there: He was elected into the parish council in 1896, where he successfully fought for a village doctor and a water pipeline for Steinach. In the Jewish community, he was the chairman of the cultural administration for years. 

In 1905, the Frank family moved to Bad Kissingen: “Because of the expansion of my horse business”, Lazarus Frank states, “I had a lot of work to do in Bad Kissingen. And as Steinach didn’t have a train station and couldn’t expect to get one and, in addition, didn’t have a vet, I decided to move to Bad Kissingen. I didn’t easily make up my mind to do that, as I enjoyed living in my place of birth that had been the residence of my family for hundreds of years and I was generally honoured and respected there. In Kissingen, I bought my house from builder Bernhard Kiesel and we moved into it on January 4, 1905” (Michael Hansch (Berlin): Frank, Lazarus: Meine lieben Kinden. Autobiografische Aufzeichnungen Lazarus Franks für seine Kinder aus dem Jahr 1936. Unveröffentlichtes Manuskript, p. 7). Whereas the conservative father was more rooted-in-the soil and had problems leaving his place of birth, his wife Klara and their children enjoyed the cultural and social life the spa could offer to them (See: H.-J. Beck, Kissingen war unsere Heimat).

Like her older siblings Thea and Julius, Irma married a non-Jewish partner, which was difficult to cope with for the conservative father. Their mother coming from a more liberal parents’ house didn’t have such problems with it. In 1925, Irma Frank had got to know the solicitor Thomas Dehler from Bamberg who was a confident supporter of the of the democracy of Weimar Republic and became committed to the left-wing liberal “Deutsche Demokratische Partei” (German Democratic Party) and Reichsbanner “Schwarz-Rot-Gold” (Black-Red-Gold Banner of the Realm= umbrella organizational flag for all Social Democratic dominated paramilitary forces during the Weimar Republic). Irma Frank and Thomas Dehler married in Munich in December 1925 and moved to Bamberg where their only daughter Elisabeth was born.

Dehler couldn’t complain about the economic situation of the family in the first years of the Nazi regime. The family lived a bourgeois life thanks to Dehler’s successful legal practice. But the young solicitor increasingly had to face political pressure and the hostilities of the Nazi authorities, first and foremost because of his marriage to Irma Frank, which was categorized as “privileged intermarriage” according to Nazi law. But Thomas Dehler stuck to his marriage and kept on taking on mandates by opponents of the regime and Jewish clients proving himself to be unimpressed by the threats of the NSDAP. The Nazi paper “Der Stürmer” called him a “truthful comrade of the Jews” because of that. After the Pogrom Night, Thomas Dehler was arrested and “exposed to a painful interrogation”, in which his divorce from his “Jewish wife” was demanded of him and he was threatened “to be send to a concentration camp”. After Irma’s sister Paula and her brother-in-law Siegfried Jordan had been deported in November 1941, Thomas Dehler tried to find information on their fate. He learned that deported people had only small chances of surviving. As his wife was only protected as long as he lived, and as the legal situation could change any time, the possibility of Irma Dehler being deported was imminent for the couple all the time. For some time, the Dehlers thought of emigration, but that was no longer possible at that time (end of 1941) (See: H.-J. Beck, Kissingen war unsere Heimat).

According to Wolfgang G. Jans, Irma Dehler is reported to have found shelter with the nuns in Vierzehnheiligen Monastery and was thus protected from an impending deportation. After he had been fighting in World War II for three quarters of a year, Thomas Dehler was regarded as “unworthy of fighting” and expelled from the Wehrmacht (German army) because of his Jewish wife. Their daughter was also increasingly exposed to the restrictions of the Nazi regime. She had returned from her boarding school in England to Bamberg via Switzerland shortly before the war but had to leave the Middle School there in 1942 because of her Jewish origins. In 1944, her father could only just prevent her from being sent into a closed work camp by finding a job in a business in Bamberg that was essential for the war effort for her. Thomas Dehler’s contacts to Resistance circles led to his being forced into laboring for “Organisation Todt”, from which he was released after only four weeks because of his poor health. After his release the conditions of life for the Dehlers became more and more depressing. Dehler tried to “live as inconspicuously as possible” and not to endanger his family so shortly before the end of the Nazi Dictatorship that was becoming apparent more and more clearly. Immediately before the arrival of the Americans, the Dehlers withdrew into the summer house of friends on the outskirts of Bamberg. When the town was occupied by the American troops, the house was bombed but the Dehlers were not hurt.

Thomas Dehler became a leading politician in the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei Deutschlands = Liberal Democratic Party of Germany) in the Adenauer Era. He was a member of the Parliamentary Council and contributed to the phrasing of the Grundgesetz (basic laws of the constitution), became the Minister of Justice of the first Cabinet of Konrad Adenauer, co-founder of the FDP in Bavaria, chairman of the FDP in Bavaria and the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the Vice President of the Deutscher Bundestag (German Parliament). There he often proved to be a very controversial character who could polarize and wasn’t afraid of confrontation. His character was completely different from his wife Irma’s: She was “a calm dark beauty, with an assured style, eager for literature and – a Jew” (Wolfgang G. Jans, Thomas Dehler, ein Bamberger Kämpfer für Freiheit und Rechtsstaatlichkeit, ein Gegner totalitärer Ideologien, p. 10).

Irma’s husband died in July 1967 at the age of 69. After his death, Irma moved to Munich in 1968 and died in Starnberg in March 1971 at the age of 72.