Erich Simenauer was born in the Upper Silesian town of Gleiwitz on 31 August 1901. After graduating from high school, he began studying philosophy and medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1929. In the autumn of that year he transferred to Berlin. Simenauer earned his PhD in 1926 and worked as a doctor in various Berlin hospitals until 1933, including the women‘s clinic at the Charité and the Rudolf Virchow Municipal Hospital.

Simenauer was not only an expert surgeon but also a well-known psychoanalytic theorist. However, the Nazi regime prevented him from completing his habilitation and taking up a professorship in the spring of 1933. He was expelled from the German Surgical Society in March of that year and worked only for a short time as a doctor at the Urban Hospital before being arrested on 1 April.

After four weeks of incarceration in the SA prison, Simenauer was provisionally released and immediately emigrated to Cyprus with his wife, Erna. The island was still a British crown colony at the time and Simenauer opened a surgical and gynecological practice there. When the German authorities refused to renew the couple‘s German passports in 1939, they took British citizenship.

The Simenauers remained in Cyprus until 1941, but were then forced to leave the island due to the war in the Mediterranean. They moved to the port city of Tanga in present-day Tanzania, where Simenauer was once again able to work as a hospital physician.

In 1957 Simenauer returned to Berlin. He taught at the Psychoanalytic Institute and was one of the first researchers to study the long-term psychological effects of persecution on the Nazis‘ victims. In 1980 the city of Berlin awarded him an honorary professorship in recognition of his services.