Who was Karl Klaar? He was born on July 10, 1890 in Lengsfeld, from 1896 Stadtlengsfeld, into a Jewish family. At the age of 29, the businessman became co-owner of the newly founded Erfurt company H. Schloß, a laundry and apron factory with a textile goods wholesaler, and came to Erfurt from Berlin to do this. From 1928 the company operated as the Erfurt Tapestry Manufactory Klaar und Schloß.
After the National Socialists came to power on January 30, 1933, Karl Klaar, like all 1,290 Jews in Erfurt, became the target of anti-Semitic attacks. In a list drawn up by the Erfurt NSDAP district leadership in 1935, in which the population was “warned about non-Aryan companies,” the Klaar und Schloß tapestry factory at Trommsdorffstrasse 5 was also listed. A year later, the company was expropriated as part of the “Aryanization” and Karl Klaar was thus deprived of his financial basis for existence.
Since 1930, Karl Klaar has been treated several times at the Pfafferode sanatorium and nursing home near Mühlhausen. After five months in the state sanatorium in Hildesheim, he lived in the Pfafferode sanatorium and nursing home from the end of 1934. In September 1938, Karl and Helene Klaar divorced.
Since 1933, the German health system had been systematically geared towards the goals of “hereditary and racial care”. People with psychological, intellectual and physical disabilities were considered “useless” and Jews were considered “foreign race”. As a Jewish patient in a sanatorium and nursing home, Karl Klaar's life was doubly threatened
From January 1940 to the summer of 1941, 70,000 people in sanatoriums and nursing homes were selected for murder in “Operation T4” and taken to killing centers. After the gas murder with carbon monoxide, their bodies were burned in incineration ovens built especially for this purpose by the Berlin company Kori and the Erfurt company Topf & Söhne.
Karl Klaar was the victim of this first systematically organized mass murder under National Socialism. From Pfafferode in August 1940 he was taken via various intermediate institutions to the “T4” killing center in Bernburg on November 28, 1940 and murdered immediately. The mass murder had only begun there a week before his arrival.
Karl Klaar died four months after his 50th birthday.
Source: Press releases from the state capital Erfurt