Wharton, Karin M., 1915-2014

Biography

Half-sister of Henry Lowenstein. Formerly Karin Steinberg. She was born March 16, 1915, in Helsinki to Maria and Erich Steinberg. Her mother was an artist who had studied at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her father, an architect, served in the Russian army constructing fortifications and buildings for Tsar Nicholas II in Helsinki. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, the family fled to Estonia and then Germany. Wharton's widowed mother moved to Berlin, where she met and married Dr. Max Lowenstein, a physician who loved theater and art. Wharton was 10 when Henry was born, and the children enjoyed the culture of Berlin in its golden days of the 1920s. German composer Kurt Weill often visited their home, along with many others in the thriving art scene: musicians, dancers, painters and architects. But that all stopped when Adolf Hitler came to power. Although Wharton's parents were not Jewish, her stepfather and half-brother were Jewish, so she was considered the same. In 1943, she and her mother joined one of the most significant events of opposition to the Holocaust: the Rosenstrasse Protest. Shortly after the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Gestapo rounded up the last Jews living in Berlin — about 1,800 Jewish men, almost all married to non-Jewish women. Wharton's stepfather was among those men. Hundreds of German women faced off with Gestapo agents holding machine guns and demanding that their husbands be released. Four weeks after the war ended, Wharton went to work as an assistant to Otto Grotewohl, who became a leader of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. One day, she became part of a secret meeting between Grotewohl and Wilhelm Pieck, leader of the German Communists. Hearing of their plans against the Western Allies, she made an extra copy of the plan and passed the information to an American contact, which put her in great danger. The next day, she was riding in Grotewohl's limousine — one of the few in Berlin — when Russian soldiers surrounded it, then took control, ready to take her to prison. But when the Russians stopped at various places to show the limousine to their friends, the chauffeur hit the gas and escaped to the American zone. Because Wharton had betrayed the Communists, her life was in danger, so the Americans arranged for her and her family to emigrate to the U.S. in 1946. In New York, she worked at the Museum of Natural History. One day, she planned a lunch date with a friend, diplomat Richard Sears, whom she had met in Berlin when he worked as a top official at the U.S. Office of Military Government. Sears, who later co-founded Friends of Chamber Music in Denver, suddenly had to fly to Berlin, so he sent a friend in his place for the date. Karin fell in love with that friend, a journalist named James Wharton, and they were married until his death in the mid-1960s. Their son, Jeffery Wharton, is an archaeologist based in Aztec, N.M. In 1967, she moved to Denver to join her half-brother, who was producing shows for the Bonfils Theatre, later called the Lowenstein Theater.

Found in 7 Collections and/or Records: