Maurice Rossel

Maurice Rossel worked for the Red Cross. It was in his remit to inspect prisoner of war, labour and concentration camps. He was relatively inexperienced at the time. The Nazi officers who supervised the camps were also very clever and managed to make things look fine. Probably also it would have been very difficult to believe what was actually happening.

Rossel describes himself at the time he inspected the camps. “Yes, I was 25 years old, thus I was still quite naive, if I say so myself, however a real naive, a real know-nothing who had come from his village and studied in Geneva, who knew nothing of anything but that apprenticeship in the field, that was all.” 

Read more here.  

To start with he dealt mainly with the prisoners of war camps.  These were overseen by the German Red Cross. Rossel claimed that the people who worked for this organisation were of the old order and not Nazis at all. Red Cross parcels were sent to these people and Rossel and his colleague found that only 5-8% of the goods went missing.

It was quite risky travelling from camp to camp as they were crossing a war zone. They were put up in some luxurious houses, however. Was this an attempt by the Nazis to soften them up?

Rossel in an interview conducted in 2009 claimed that he and his colleagues were ignorant about the extermination camps in 1942-1943. As they met inmates, and he remembers French prisoners of war in particular, they made promises that they would get them out.

He made a surprise visit to Ausschwitz. He had no authorisation to go there. He was received by the camp commander and was offered coffee. They talked about bob-sledding. He was no allowed to meet any of the internees but he was shown the infirmary. He saw nothing of the camp itself though he saw the barracks in the distance.  He saw nothing of Birkenau which was just one kilometre form the main camp. He was given the impression that the camp was doing something useful. He noticed some people and it did register that they were rather thin.

He is perhaps most well-known for his visit to Theresienstadt. The whole camp was sanitised somewhat so that it seemed almost like a holiday camp. It had parks, cafés a synagogue and what looked like reasonable living quarters. In the main square they had constructed a pavilion on which an orchestra played. He saw one single watch tower. He saw two-tier bunk beds, not the more normal four tiers. The really thin people were hidden form him.
Some of the Jews had to act quite cleverly and look as if they were having an easy time. .   

He visited three times altogether, the last time being 23 June 1944. Rossel could see that wealthier Jews had been accommodated there. They were often elderly and had often fought in World War I. His visits there lasted two to three hours.     

Rossel was told that the inmates received 2400 calories per day. In fact, they were only given 1200.    

Later, Rossel realised that he had been fooled.             

     

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. 

Karl Schubert

Karl Schubert was born in Vienna in 1889. His mother was Jewish but had converted to Catholicism. He spoke six foreign languages, the last one he learnt being Russian when he was a prisoner of war during World War I.

In 1903 he became interested in theosophy, becoming a member of the Theosophy Society in 1907. This was a stepping stone towards anthroposophy. 

In that same year he took his Abitur and went on to study Law and Languages. In 1908 he met Rudolph Steiner for the first time. He continued his studies: summer 1909 Sorbonne, winter 1909 /10 London, Kings College, 1911 back to the Sorbonne.     

From 1915, he was involved in World War I

On 20 May 1916 he married Helene Nierl in Vienna. Later that year he was made a prisoner of war by the Russians.

He returned at the end of the war and worked as a teacher in a private commercial school. He got to know Steiner better. His son was born on 21 February 1919.   

He became a teacher at the Stuttgart Waldorf School in 1920. At first he taught English, French, Latin and Greek.  

In 1921 he took charge of the “Hilfsklasse” – the Special Class for children with learning difficulties. The children were integrated into some normal lessons. From then onwards, Schubert dedicated his life to teaching disabled children and children with learning difficulties. After he was dismissed from the Waldorf School for being a non-Aryan he asked if he could carry on with the class as a private arrangement.  Surprisingly, he was given permission to do this. However, he although he could raise money to support the class he could not earn enough to look after his family so they only survived through the help of friends.

He then used this as argument for the class carrying on when the Waldorf School was closed in 1938. This time he was not so fortunate.  At this point, Clara Lehrs stepped in and offered her home to the class. There were 30-40 students in the class at this time including many Downs Syndrome children.   

The class carried on at Haus Lehrs on 20 Schellberg Street throughout and after the war. On just a few days, lessons were interrupted because of bombing. Only in 1944 did a member of the Gestapo come to fetch Schubert to take him to a labour camp. A family friend, a certain Frau Geraths, spoke up on his behalf and he wasn’t taken, according to one account. In another, he was taken away but friends intervened and got him back. http://www.wegmaninstitut.ch/schubert-archiv.html. The novel favours the latter. In the novel he does go away for a few weeks.

It was always a mystery that the children survived.  It is slightly ironic that during the Nazi regime, two people who according to the Blutschutzgesetz were Jewish managed to shelter and nurture a group of physically disabled children with severe learning difficulties.  

The Special School carried on at 20 Schellberg Street until 1969 when it moved into a new building in nearby Degerloch. It was never reintegrated into the Waldorf School and Schubert had to support himself and the school by applying for grants.

Schubert died in 1949. Since his death, the school has been named after him.

Hans Edler

Hans Edler was born on 16 September 1893 in Göttingen. His father was Wilhelm Edler and was a professor at the university.

He obtained his Abitur in 1912 in Jena and then went to the Technische Hochschule in Breslau and Danzig where he studied engineering and electronics.

From 1919 to 1922 he was an assistant at the Institute of technical Physics at Jena University. He worked mainly in electronics but also supervised the work of his students.

Shortly after this he spent some time in Berlin at the university where he met Käthe Lehrs. She had to give up her degree to marry him on 19 May 1923 at the Berlin Wilmersdorf registry office. Their only daughter Klara Renate Edler was born on 5 July 1925.

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.

Emil Kühn

Emil Kühn was born on 6 February 1886 in Schwäbisch-Gmund, Germany. The family moved to Stuttgart when his father, who had a silverware factory, died in 1895.

He went to the Gymnasium (Grammar School) and the Realschule  (Technical grammar School) in Stuttgart. He studied geology and mineralogy in Freiberg and his PhD thesis was about the preservation of precious metals.

He worked for a lead and silver mining company immediately after his studies and from 1912 he worked for the Behr furniture factory. There he learnt about anthroposophy form the women he would later marry, Martha Behr. In 1920 he became a member of the Anthroposophy Association.

He was active in the founding of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart. From 1936-1938 and then from 1945-59 he was the chairman of Waldorf Schools Association. He was also for many years the chairman of the Anthroposophist Building Union and treasurer of the building fund.

In 1939 he bought Haus Lehrs from Clara Lehrs for 30,000 marks. This enabled her to pay the money she owed to the authorities and allowed the work of the Special Class to go on.  

After 1945 to 1965 he was the CEO of the German Anthroposophy Society.

He continued his connection to the Waldorf / Anthroposophy movements and celebrated his 80^th birthday with a Eurhythmy display in the Rudolph Steiner Haus in Stuttgart, a house he had helped to build.

He died on 9 November 1968.