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= Johannes Ilmari Auerbach = Johannes Ilmari Auerbach (May 24, 1899 - February 7, 1950) was a Jewish-German and British artist, writer, communist, professor, member of the Bauhaus in Berlin, and victim of the National Socialist regime. Throughout his life, he also served as a bricklayer, draftsman for the Wehrmacht, and member of the British War Office.

Early Life
Auerbach was born on May 24, 1899, into a Jewish-German family in Breslau, Silesia of the German Empire (modern day Wroclaw, Poland). Although ethnically Jewish, his parents converted to Christianity in 1898. He was briefly drafted into the Imperial German Army in 1917 to serve in France, though was sent to a military hospital due to contracting bronchitis shortly after arriving to the front.

Life in Weimar Germany
Following Germany's surrender in 1918, Auerbach joined the German Communist Party (KPD) and began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar. He was among the first students to join the Weimar Bauhaus, an art school dedicated to combining art with commercial activities like architecture, of which he designed the school's first signet. With a biosophist student in Weimar named Hugo Hertwig, Auerbach sought to create a communist rural commune in 1920, but it failed financially in 1921 and drove Auerbach to attempt suicide, which he detailed in his book Der Selbstmörderwettbewerb (English: The Suicide Competition). In the same year, he received work designing the tomb of Karl Ernst Osthaus, a German art collector. He married Ingeborg Harnack in 1922 and moved near Darmstadt to Kranichstein Hunting Lodge. With Harnack, he fathered a son named Wulf in 1925.

Life in France
In 1925, Auerbach moved to Paris where he participated in many art exhibitions under the name Joannès Ilmari but had very little financial success. In 1926, he fathered a second son named Claus. In 1930, Auerbach and Harnack divorced, and his ex-wife and children moved to Germany, after which he had little contact with them. (His son Claus would later die in 1944 after serving as a German marine in the Wehrmacht.)

Return to Germany
In 1930, Auerbach was forced to flee France and return to Germany following a death during the construction of his studio in France. He ultimately settled in Hamburg in 1933. From January to March 1933, he was a member of a resistance organization against the National Socialist government, leading to intermittent imprisonment in concentration camps between April 1933 and December 1945. In 1935 and 1936, he was part of the Jewish Cultural Association in Hamburg. In 1936, he also participated in the Hamburg Reich Exhibition of Jewish Artists. In the same year, he married Ingeborg Fraencke, an art historian, and emigrated to the United Kingdom under the name John Ivor Allenby. In 1937 and 1938, the couple lived in the British colony of Cyprus, but they relocated to London in 1938.

Life in the United Kingdom
Auerbach worked in the British War Office from 1938 to 1946, after which time he taught courses in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oxford. He also made sculptures for the church of St. Etheldreda in Horley from 1947-1949. Auerbach died of a heart attack in Oxford, U.K. on February 7, 1950. He was fifty-years old.