TODAY IN BERLIN: HERMANN CLAJUS’S FLIGHT INTO DEATH

18th of March 1933

On this day in 1933, an ardent social-democrat, Berlin MP and since 1926 official director of Berlin’s Strandbad Wannsee, the popular lido at the bight of the river Havel, Hermann Clajus committed suicide to escape imminent loss of his post, imprisonment and possibly tortures at the hands of Nazi thugs.

Having been warned by his friends about the planned arrest, Clajus knew what happened to others who shared similar fate fate: on March 11 1933, for instance, the whole Jewish and politically “not welcome” medical staff at the municipal hospital, Krankenhaus am Urban, in Berlin-Kreuzberg were fired, and some of them brought to makeshift Nazi chambers of torture. Hermann Clajus chose to flee that fate on his own terms: he shot himself in his office at the lido.

His body was cremated at the Wilmersdorf Crematorium.

Today a Stolperstein (stumbling stone) before his house in Schützallee 45 and a plaque at the Wannsee lido, commemorate his name.

Portrait of Hermann Clajus, via Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (The German Resistance Memorial Centre), Berlin.

Stumbling stone for Hermann Clajus, image via Projekt Stolpersteine Teltow-Zehlendorf at stolpersteine-berlin.de.