Käthe Edler, nee Lehrs, was born on 21 November 1896. She
was the middle of three siblings. Older brother Leopold Edgar, who later took
on the name Ernst, was born in 1894 and her younger brother Rudolph was born in
1901.
The Lehrs family converted to the German Lutheran religion
when the children were very small. It was already clear that it was not prudent
to hold on to their Jews nationality.
Katharina’s father died in 1918, partly because of wounds he
had sustained in World War 1.
Käthe enjoyed quite a comfortable middle-class life until
the Nuremberg race laws were created in 1935 and the general difficulties that
faced Jews during the 1930s in Germany.
Unusually for a woman, she went to university and even more
unusually she studied science. She actually received lectures form Albert
Einstein and Max Planck was Dean of the University of Berlin at the time. He
still lectured in physics. Unfortunately she was not able to complete her
degree. She fell in love with one of the young lecturers, Hans Edler, who was
only two years older than her. This type
of relationship between a lecturer and a student would not be tolerated then so
she left the course. She and Hans married on 19 May 1923 at the Berlin
Wilmersdorf registry office. Their only daughter Klara Renate Edler was born on
5 July 1925.
The marriage was reasonably happy to start with. Käthe
carried on showing a pioneering streak. She was the first woman in Munich to
obtain her driving license. She astounded her husband by driving to meet him from
the airport in the dark. She astounded the taxi-drivers at the airport even
more by opening the bonnet and cleaning the sparking plugs. “Well,” she said,
“the engine was misfiring and I knew the sparkling-plugs must have been vey
unsparkling.”
Her husband had a cousin who worked for the government. He
warned the couple that life was about to become dangerous for Käthe and Renate.
Whilst she was at the county hall in Nuremberg obtaining some papers that later
made her emigration to England easier, she was asked to wait in a small room.
Another door was opened and she had a full view of Adolf Hitler, just a few
feet from her. Later, she remembered that she had a small pistol in her handbag
and it would have been easy to shoot him.
She came to England in March 1939. Her brothers Ernst and
Rudolf were already in England and had found her daughter Renate a foster home
with a certain Smith family. The same family offered Käthe a job as
housekeeper.
On 27 January 1942 Hans Edler petitioned for divorce. It was
all done in the name of the German folk and it was probably an enforced
divorce. On the petition she is named Katharina Sarah Lehrs. Her second name
was really Theresa. All Jews were assigned the name Sarah or Israel if their
names were not particularly Jewish.
Käthe and Hans were never reconciled and Hans remarried.
Käthe took on British nationality of 21 September 1948. She
lived in London until she died in 1977. She made many English and Jewish
friends and in her spare time gave English lessons to other refugees. She
understood only too well the difficulties faced by people suddenly thrown into
a new culture in a country where they didn’t speak the language. She worked at
Saatchi and Saatchi until two weeks before she died. For several years she
shared her home with her friend, Eva Kaiser, also a German Jewess.
