Austria was subsumed into Germany in 1938. Germany had been governed by Nazis since 1933, according to the twin tenets of populism through the ages: hope and hatred. The hatred was focused on Communists and Jews, and took increasingly sinister and destructive forms. Clara Katharina Pollaczek was subject to antisemitic persecution. She may have owed her survival to her possession of a Czechoslovak passport, acquired as a result of the marriage to Pollaczek. Two days after German troops were welcomed by cheering crowds into Vienna marking Austria's incorporation into Nazi Germany, she crossed to Prague where she lived for a while. When, in 1939, the Germans completed their occupation of Czechoslovakia, she was visiting friends in Switzerland. She stayed in Switzerland, receiving financial support from relatives, till war ended in 1945. During this period she became a Roman Catholic. (The last practicing Jew in her family had been her grandfather.) In 1945 she joined her son Karl who had ended up in Gillingham in England, but he was married with children: the home was cramped and, unlike her younger son, Clara did not feel settled in England. It was her brother, the lawyer Otto Loeb, who organised her return to Vienna in 1948.