Julius Baer grew up in Wiesbaden. He was the son of the merchant Hermann Baer and his wife Rosalie (Sali) Silbermann (1876-1941). After graduating from a humanistic high school, he studied medicine in Freiburg, Munich and Strasbourg. He passed the state examination in Strasbourg in 1899, and received his license and doctorate.1
At the Charité in Berlin and in Strasbourg
After an initial assistantship at the Strasbourg Ear Hospital, he moved to the II. Medizinische Klinik of the Charité under the internist Carl Jakob Christian Adolf Gerhardt. He returned to Strasbourg for his habilitation, where he became a private lecturer in internal medicine in 1907. He was appointed associate professor in 1913, but was not made a civil servant.
During World War I, Baer first worked in an epidemic hospital for typhoid patients in Laon on the Western Front, and later as a departmental physician in the field artillery and in the fortress of Strasbourg.
Escape to Palestine
After the war, he interrupted his university career and settled in Frankfurt am Main as a specialist for internal diseases. There he became a member of the medical faculty in 1920 and an associate professor in 1922. He lost his teaching license in 1935 and was dismissed.2 He managed to escape to Palestine the same year.
Baer was married twice. His first wife Mathilde (Thilde), born in 1892, died in 1915; he married his second wife Olga in 1920. Julius Baer had two sisters, Gisela Reis and Bertha Hitz.3