Fritz Moritz Heichelheim was the son of a banker, Albert and his wife Bertha (née Simonsfeld).
Heichelheim was a pupil of the ancient historian Richard Laqueur at Gießen where he took his doctorate in 1925 and his habilitation in 1929.
After lecturing there for nearly four years, he, like his colleague at Gießen, Margarete Bieber, was dismissed in 1933 following the National Socialists’ "cleansing" of the universities (see Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service).
However, he was dismissed a few months earlier because of a defiant lecture on Jews in Roman Palestine and Syria.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he volunteered to join the branch of the British Army for noncitizens but was refused because of his age.
He was one of the early members of Congregation Habonim Toronto, a liberal synagogue founded by Holocaust survivors and refugees from Central Europe, who arrived in Canada after World War II, and one of the first Holocaust refugee/survivor congregations to develop in Canada.
It was through his initiative that the two institutions embarked on a cooperative project, that of editing and publishing the Greek, Coptic, and certain Latin papyri preserved in the university library at Giessen.
A modern discussion is found in Roman Coins in Iceland by David Bjarni Heidarsson on http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/5084/15120/2/Badbh.pdf.