Walter Chrambach was born into a rich Jewish family with many cultural and political contacts. He studied law at the Leipzig University and worked as a Saxon government council, as Dresden is the Saxon state capitol. He was also responsible for the construction supervision in Dresden-Hellerau, a district built since the 1910s as part of the European garden city movement. He and his wife Bertha Chrambach were members of the Waldorf school movement, a school system to support anthroposophical views. They opened in Dresden the first Waldorf school in 1929.
After his both parents died in 1928 he decided to sell their house and to built a new residence in Dresden-Hellerau, a part of the city he knew well.
But during the Nazi regime in Germany he lost his job in 1937, because he was declared to be half Jewish. In 1944 the Gestapo police arrested him. They found letters, in which he criticized Adolf Hitler. This was taken as an opportunity to classify him as a political opponent. He was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died a month later. A horrifying act was when the Gestapo sent his ashes to the family for Christmas 1944.
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Buildings
Dresden, Germany
Chrambach