Käthe Edler

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. 

Ernst Lehrs

Leopold Edgar was Ernst Lehrs’ real name. He was born on 30 July 1894, the son of Ernst Julius and Clara Lehrs.

He volunteered his services for World War I and became an officer. He came back from this war believing, as did many young people of his generation, that society must be fundamentally changed.

He discovered anthroposophy and became interested in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. To his mother’s disappointment, he gave up his career as a scientist and became one of the first teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School in 1921. At this point he also took on his father’s name, Ernst. This worried his mother even more.

However, he remained close to his mother and together they extended their knowledge and understanding of the cultures around them.

Clara Lehrs remained sceptical about the teachings of Steiner. Yet she worked for the Anthroposophist Conference Centre in Jena for a while, and as she wanted to give that up, Ernst persuaded her to build a house with him in Stuttgart that she could run as a boarding house for children at the Waldorf School. The house was completed in 1928.

From 7 April 1933 “non-Aryans” were no longer allowed to teach. It counted for nothing that Ernst had fought for Germany in World War 1 and that he had received the Iron Cross. He was no longer allowed to be a teacher. The arguments went back and forth but Ernst was dismissed from the Waldorf School with three other teachers: Freidrich Hiebel, Alexander Strakosch and Karl Schubert.

He was now without a job and saw no future in Germany. He emigrated first to Holland and then England, in both cases continuing to work for the Steiner schools. He only came back to Germany in 1952. He worked then as a lecturer at the newly established course in anthroposophical curative education in Eckwälden, where he remained until his death on 31 December 1979. He wrote several books about anthroposophy.

Clara Lehrs

Clara Lehrs, nee Loewenthal, was born on 7 October 1871 in Schwerin in Mecklenburg. Her parents were Jewish. He father was a corn merchant. Her mother was an immigrant from Holland. She had eight siblings.

In 1892 she married Ernst Julius Lehrs. Her first child Leopold Edgar, was born in 1894. Katharina Theresa was born in 1896 and Rudolph in 1901. Her husband Ernst worked in sales in industry. They converted to Christianity so that they could enjoy contemporary society.

Ernst was very badly injured in World War I and had to stop working. He died in 1918, aged 56.

Her son Leopold Edgar served in World War I and became an officer. He returned from the war convinced that society had to change. He became interested in the work of Rudolph Steiner and converted to anthroposophy. Much to Clara’s disappointment, he gave up a career as a scientist to become a teacher at the newly founded Waldorf School in Stuttgart in 1921. At about the same time, he started calling himself Ernst  

Although Clara had a very close relationship with her oldest son and although they shared a love of humanity and culture, she wasn’t entirely convinced about the teachings of Steiner and actually found the man himself rather strange.  

By 1927, Clara was determined to return to Berlin. Ernst junior managed to persuade her to set up house with him. They built a house together in 1928, at number 20 Schellberg Street. In order to finance the building, Clara sold some of her jewellery and borrowed money from her brother and from a friend of the family. The house was used not just as their home but also as a place where Waldorf School pupils might board and where meetings were held for the Anthroposophy Organisation.

Clara gained a reputation as a very cheerful, caring person. She became reconciled to anthroposophy and found a new purpose in life looking after her students. It was because she cared about them so much that she continuously put off leaving Germany. Her sons found refuge in England and America and her daughter and granddaughter in England. Clara left it too late. However, before the Nazi regime caught up with her, she made many more contributions to humanity. 

In the school year 1921 / 1922 a Special Class was created for severely disabled children by Karl Schubert. From 24 April 1934 he was allowed to run this as a private class within the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was closed by the Nazis in 1938. Clara Lehrs offered her home as a place for the class. No one is quite sure how, but this class was tolerated throughout the war and beyond.

In 1939 Clara was forced to sell the house on Schellberg Street for 30,000 Reich marks to Emil Kühn, a friend of the family and the president of Waldorf School Association. Jews were not allowed to own property anymore and anyway she had to pay various debts to the authorities and to various Jewish societies. She was able to rent a room in the house on Schellberg Street for a little while longer. By 1941, she was registered as Klara Sarah Lehrs – the authorities gave her first name German spelling and gave her the second name Sarah – all Jews who did not possess an obviously Jewish name were given an extra name of Sarah or Israel to show that they were Jewish.

In 1942, just like all other elderly Jewish people, she was ordered to live in one of the ghettoes in Württemberg. She actually lived for a short while in Rexingen, with other Jews in one of the oldest Jewish communities in the area. Again, here she gained a reputation for being generous of spirit.  

Her time in Rexingen was short. On 22 August 1942 she was transported to Theriesenstadt. From there she was transported on 29 September to Treblinka, where she was murdered. Towards this transport and the promised home in the east she had to pay out her last 6246- Reich marks.  

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