When Josef Fillo, born in Bodenheim in 1879 as the child of Adam Fillo, a teacher, and his wife Berta Schreiber, came to Dortmund is uncertain. However, his presence in Dortmund is documented from 1904 at the latest.

For some time, his mother and elder sister Fanny also lived with him. In the First World War, he did military service. Berta Fillo died in 1917 and therefore probably no longer experienced the marriage of her son Josef with Antonie Pauline Rosalie née Tretzak, widowed Hörster, the precise date of which cannot be determined. Fanny married Karl Paul Emil Finger, a Roman Catholic, in 1918, and went to live with him in Bochum.

In 1923, the childless Fillo couple moved into the house at Stiftstrasse 15, which they had acquired at some unknown time and which remained in the possession of Josef Fillo at least until 1938. Up to that year, Josef carried on an agency for furniture and a bed business from the building.

As Antoine was not a member of the Jewish faith, Josef enjoyed the protection, up to the death of his wife in March 1943, of a “privileged mixed marriage”. However, this privilege ceased on Antoine’s death. In early April 1943, Josef was detained in the Steinwache police jail.

He died there on 24 April of a heart attack. Although, in view of his advanced age, this is not an improbable cause of death, the circumstances of his death are viewed as dubious and his demise as having been brought about by his persecution through the Nazis. His sister Fanny also fell victim to the Shoah in early January 1943.