Manfred Marcuse was born on April 17, 1927, in Berlin, Germany. His father, Bruno Marcuse, owned and ran a construction business. His mother, Hedwig Marcuse, was a homemaker who loved creating art. Although Hedwig was a Gentile, Manfred and his family observed Jewish holidays. Manfred had two half-siblings, a brother and a sister, from his father's previous marriage. In 1933, only months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Bruno's business was seized. Manfred witnessed violent anti-Semitic attacks and saw the burning of a synagogue during Kristallnacht.
In 1940, Hedwig died of natural causes. In 1943, Bruno was arrested and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. From 1942 to 1944, several of Manfred's places of residence were destroyed by Allied bombings, but he was able to find shelter with friends. In the spring of 1944 he was deported to work in a Nazi concentration camp in France, but because of the Allied invasion he was marched to Alsace instead and forced to dig military fortifications. He was soon transferred to the Wasseralfingen concentration camp in Germany where he performed forced labor constructing an underground aircraft factory for the Luftwaffe. As the Allies approached, Manfred was put on a truck for transfer from Wasseralfingen, but he escaped and fled into the woods with another prisoner.
Manfred was liberated in Temmenhausen, Germany, on his eighteenth birthday, April 17, 1945. He was appointed mayor of the town by the United States Army, a duty he fulfilled for six months. He later was appointed to implement policies of the Allied military government of occupation. In 1947, he went to work for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and was sent to the former ghetto in Theresienstadt where he was reunited with his father. In May 1947, Manfred immigrated to the United States. He moved to Chicago, Ill., where he married his wife, Charlotte. The couple had no children. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and was stationed in Germany.
