Erich Diller was born in Poppenlauer in July 1924 as the only child of the non-Jewish butcher’s assistant Kasper Diller and his wife Bertha, née Klau. Later – presumably at the beginning of the 1930s - the family moved to Garitz (now a suburb of Bad Kissingen) where Erich’s aunt Hedy and her family lived in the immediate neighbourhood, too. Erich’s father and his uncle Edmund Werner ran two restaurants in Garitz. His father was the landlord of the ‘Gasthaus zum Hirschen’ and Edmund Werner ran the ‘Gasthaus zur Erholung’. Erich Diller who was categorised as “half Jewish” by the National Socialists got a Catholic baptism.

In March 1936, the 12-year-old Erich emigrated to the United States with his parents where the family first lived in New York. He attended a High School for three years there and joined the US Army in July 1943. There is only little information to be found about his further life. In September 1948, he married Dorothy Gekeler from Unterhausen near Reutlingen in New York, who had already emigrated to the USA in 1932. She attended the Grover Cleveland High School in New York. In the school’s Yearbook of 1945, she is characterised as a person “who is found everywhere where there is fun”.

Erich Diller died near Los Angeles/ California in April 2015 at the age of 90, only few weeks after the death of his wife Dorothy Paula.