Sylvia Klar was born on March 26, 1885 in Munich. Her parents, Dr. Arnold Adlerstein, a judicial counsellor, and Ida Adlerstein, née Gotthelf, divorced when she was a child. Nothing is known about Sylvia Klar’s childhood and youth. She married Dr. Max Klar, a physician, when she was 25. The couple moved to Jutastraße 24 in 1931. Like her husband Max, Sylvia Klar was closely affiliated to the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany). Both were friends of the politician Wilhelm Hoegner, who after the war would become Bavarian Minister President. In 1933 the SPD was banned and Hoegner was forced into hiding. At first he was able to hide in the Klars’ hunting lodge near Ingolstadt and then later in their apartment in Jutastraße. On July 11, 1933 Sylvia Klar drove him and two friends in her husband’s car to a drop-off point near Mittenwald. From there Wilhelm Hoegner fled across the border into Tyrol. Sylvia Klar also had ties to the resistance group “Neu Beginnen” (“New Beginning”), above all through her friend Lotte Branz, who acted as a courier for the group abroad. When Lotte Branz’s husband Gottlieb was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp in the summer of 1933, Sylvia Klar supported her friend financially. A year after her husband Max Klar was murdered in Dachau, the Gestapo (Secret Police) arrested Sylvia Klar on December 1, 1939. Two months later she was transported to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp as a “political prisoner.” In June 1940, she was additionally charged with currency offences: she had helped friends who were emigrating to move valuables abroad. Sylvia Klar was moved back to Munich for the trial in March 1941. On March 4, 1941 the Landgericht München I (district court) sentenced her to four months prison and fined her 1,000 Reichsmark. She was again deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp; at the end of May / early June 1942, Sylvia Klar was murdered in the killing site Bernburg. (text Ingrid Reuther, editor C. Fritsche, translation P. Bowman)
