Heinz Steinitz
Heinz Steinitz was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) on April 26, 1909, to Walter Steinitz (1882-1963), a cardiologist and zoologist, and Marta Schindler Steinitz (1885-1926). He grew up in Breslau and was greatly inspired by his father to study science and to be an active Zionist. He studied medicine from 1927-1933 in the universities of Breslau, Freiburg and Berlin. Although he passed the Medical Board examination in 1933, and would have started work in a hospital in Berlin and in the Jewish hospital in Breslau, he was prohibited from practicing by the Nazi regime which came to power that same year. Together with his wife Ruth Aber Steinitz (1907-1995), a medical student as well, he left Germany in 1933 and immigrated to Palestine.
Günther von Reibnitz
As an officer of the Army Reserve, Reibnitz was recalled to active service at the beginning of the Second World War. However, he was not a very loyal party member. In 1937 he had been summoned to appear before the highest party tribunal accused of denigrating the swastika flag. By reaffirming his loyalty, he was able to extract himself from the affair; he had also referred to the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, as the "chicken farmer". Soon after he rejoined the armed forces on active service, Reibnitz was sent back to the home front due to heart problems. He informed the SS of his marriage (on 17 December 1941 in Breslau) to his second wife Maria Anna Countess Szápáry de Muraszombath, Széchysziget et Szapár (1911–1998), a daughter of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Count Frigyes Szapáry (1869–1935), but he did not inform them of his intention to seek an annulment of his first marriage so that he could marry his second wife in a Roman Catholic ceremony, nor that the children of the marriage would be raised in that faith. This was interpreted by the regime as disloyalty. It was also seen as incriminating that he and his wife practiced their faith openly. Because his wife was already under observation by the Gestapo over her contacts before the war with supposed British Secret Service agents, as well as in connection with a range of essentially minor "transgressions", his situation became increasingly critical, and in 1944 he was dismissed from the Nazi Party, from the Cavalry SS, and from the post of Regional Director of Hunting for Silesia.
On 16 November 1942, Reibnitz's son Friedrich was born in Breslau, and on 15 January 1945 his daughter Marie Christine was born in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), near the estate of her maternal grandmother Countess Hedwig Szápáry, a daughter of Alfred III, Prince of Windisch-Grätz.