Lotte Strauss, (born Lotte Schloss; August 2, 1913 – September 6, 2020) was a German-born author who wrote about her experiences as a Jewish woman in

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

Biography

Strauss was born to Louis Schloss (1881–1967) and Johanna Bildesheim (1885–1942) in

Braunschweig Braunschweig () or Brunswick ( ; from Low German , local dialect: ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the ...

, Germany in August 1913. She had a brother named Helmut (1915–1991). She was married to Herbert Arthur Strauss (1918–2005). Between 1942 and 1943, Strauss and her husband hid in Berlin to avoid arrest by German authorities. They were finally able to flee to

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

with the help of her uncle Ludwig Schöneberg. In 1946, the couple had a daughter, Jane Helen. That same year, they immigrated to the United States, moving to New York. In New York, Strauss worked as a secretary at the New York State

League of Women Voters The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonpartisan American nonprofit political organization. Founded in 1920, its ongoing major activities include Voter registration, registering voters, providing voter information, boosting voter turnout and adv ...

. The film ''We Were German Jews'' (1981), directed by Michael Blackwood, followed Strauss and her husband as they fled Germany. In 1997, Strauss published ''Over the Green Hill: Personal Memoir, Germany 1913-43''. Strauss died in September 2020 at the age of 107.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strauss, Lotte 1913 births 2020 deaths 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American writers German women centenarians German emigrants to the United States Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to Switzerland Writers from Braunschweig American women centenarians 21st-century American women Jewish centenarians