Meinhold Müller spent his apprenticeship as a merchant in Bad Kissingen. He was born in the little village of Marisfeld in the District of Hildburghausen in Thuringia on November 19, 1919 as the second child of the merchant Max Müller and his wife Klara, née Nussbaum. His parents had married in 1912 and Max Müller had promised to his wife, who came from Bad Hersfeld, to move into a bigger town. Due to the prevailing circumstances, he was only able to fulfil his promise 17 years later. Therefore, all their children – Herbert (1913), Meinhold (1919), and Willi (1922) – were already born in Marisfeld. In 1929, the family moved to the neighboring small town of Themar where Meinhold’s father ran a textile business in Meininger Strasse 17. The house where the Müller family lived was on the same estate.

Meinhold Müller attended the Gymnasium in Hildburghausen, but had to leave school shortly after the beginning of the Nazi era and therefore moved to Bad Kissingen in April 1934 to begin an apprenticeship. He lived at Theresienstraße 4 as a tenant with Klara Dreifuß and started an apprenticeship as a merchant in the Grünebaum textile business. Two years later he returned to Themar but left Germany in the same year 1936 in order to emigrate to Italy. His parents had realized in the meantime that there was no future life possible in Germany for their three sons and did everything to find places for their children where they would be safe from Nazi terror. Meinhold’s youngest brother was able to emigrate to Palestine before the November Pogrom of 1938. And in July 1941 – few months before the ban on exits for Jewish citizens - the oldest brother Herbert and his wife Flora succeeded in fleeing via Lisbon to New York.

In Italy, the situation of Jewish citizens also became increasingly precarious, which caused Meinhold to flee to Sweden in 1938. There he worked in agriculture near Göteborg and later in a kibbutz. Initially, he seems to have planned – like his younger brother – to emigrate to Palestine.

Between December 1938 and May 1942, Klara and Max Müller regularly wrote letters to their two sons who had already emigrated, Meinhold in Sweden and Willi in Palestine. This correspondence reflects the difficult condition of Meinhold’s start in Sweden but especially the increasingly desperate situation of his parents in Themar. Different from their children, salvation remained unobtainable for them. In spite of all efforts, no country was ready to accept them as refugees. Although their relatives in the USA had already paid for their crossing, they hadn’t reached a place on the waiting list that would have granted them the right of immigration to the USA till October 1941 – when the general ban of exit was imposed in Germany. In May 1942, they were deported together with 350 other Jews from Thuringia to Belzyce ghetto in occupied Poland and murdered there. Two days before their deportation, they wrote their last lines to their son Meinhold:

“Dear Meinhold!

As we wrote before, we will go away from here tomorrow morning with the Neuhaus family. We can’t send you an address at the moment but will give you our new address as soon as we are able to… As we are in a great hurry, I write only briefly today. Lots of greetings, your Papa. Most intimate kisses, your Mama.”

(The collection of the letters and postcards of Klara and Max Müller to their sons can be found here.)

 Meinhold Müller stayed in Göteborg. In August 1947, he married Rebecka, née Liwerant who had been born in Hamburg in 1922 as the child of Polish immigrants. She had emigrated to Belgium with her family before 1930 but lived in Germany again in the 1930s. As she didn’t have German citizenship, she was deported to Poland at the end of October 1938 as part of the so-called “Polenaktion”. In 1940, she was deported to Lòdz ghetto (Litzmannstadt) where her mother and her brother were also imprisoned. She experienced the end of the war in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and was sent to Sweden by the Red Cross in the autumn of 1945. There she soon got to know her husband-to-be. Her mother and her brother also survived their imprisonment in the concentration camps.

Especially with his younger brother Willi, who had fled to Palestine, Meinhold had a very warm and friendly relationship. He visited him several times in Israel after the war and both wrote to each other regularly.

Only little is known about Meinhold Müller’s further life. He was active in the Jewish community and was president of the Jewish Community of Gothenburg for several years. The couple didn’t have any children. In the 1970s, he once again visited his home in Themar, Thuringia, then located behind the Iron Curtain. Meinhold Müller died in Göteborg in June 1993 at the age of 73. His wife outlived him by more than two decades and died in 2015.