Klara Pächter was born on April 18, 1889 in Datschitz (Moravia, today CZ) as the daughter of Heinrich and Eleonora Schön. Her father was rabbi of the small Jewish community in Steyr (Upper Austria) from 1896, so the family moved from Moravia to Steyr. There they lived in an apartment at Bahnhofstrasse 5, in the same building where the Steyr Synagogue was located.
At the age of 24 she married Siegfried Pächter, who died early. Klara Pächter then moved to her sister in Vienna.
Klara Pächter was treated several times in the 1920s at the Am Steinhof clinic in Vienna. She was later admitted to the Niedernhart sanatorium in Linz after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. On June 6, 1940, Klara Pächter was taken from Niedernhart to Hartheim with 119 other people and suffocated in the gas chamber there at the age of 51.
Klara Pächter's family received the news that she had been transferred to Brandenburg/Havel and died there on June 29, 1940 of a natural cause. At that time her three sisters Therese, Ida and Gertrud were still living in Vienna. They were probably the ones who requested the alleged ashes from Klara Pächter from Brandenburg in order to bury the urn on August 12, 1940 in her parents' grave in Vienna. This tombstone can still be seen today at the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Klara Pächter was the first, but not the only member of her family to be murdered by the Nazis. Only a few of her seven brothers and sisters managed to escape abroad. Her brother Erwin was able to emigrate to Shanghai with his wife Ludmilla in 1938 and later to Australia. Their thirteen-year-old daughter Hanna fled with them.
Since 2008, Klara Pächter has also been remembered in her home town of Steyr. Her name is on a commemorative plaque with all 86 Steyr Shoah victims in the Jewish cemetery.
(Source: Martin Hagmayr, Klara Pächter, in: Lebensspuren. Biografische Skizzen von Opfern der NS-Tötungsanstalt Hartheim. Hg. v. Florian Schwanninger und Irene Zauner-Leitner, Studienverlag: Innsbruck – Wien 2013, p. 83-85)
