Klara Kaus was born in 1903 and she grew in a home of democratic ideas in southern Germany. She, her parents and her husband condemned the persecution of Jews by National Socialists.
During the year 1943 a known Jew asked her if she was willing to helping persecuted Jews. Thus, Klara made contacts with the Jewish spouses Adolf and Sophie Loebel and their two daughters Hannelore and Ellen. Klara visited the family in the city of Karlsruhe and spontaneously offered to hide the daughters in her house of Mannheim to protect them from imminent deportation. Due to the fact that Mrs. Loebel had already organized a hideout for herself and her youngest daughter Hannelore, she asked Klara Kaus to help her daughter Ellen. By the end of June 1943, Ellen went to the Kaus’ house in Manheim. They housed the 16 year-old girl who had no papers of money, hid her and kept her at their home. After Mr. Kaus was called to the military service, his wife had the responsibility.
Klara Kaus took care of the girl until the end of the war. She took Ellen – who in the meantime had gotten the birth certificate of a non-Jewish girl – to the house of Gabriela Ambruster in Heidelberg numerous times during the ever more frequent air raids. Ellen Loebel and Klara Kaus spent the end of the war at their house in Mannheim. Ellen’s father, Adolf Loebel also survived. He was saved by his best friend Otto Hoerner who was hiding him in his garden hut.
