Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store

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The Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store on - then - Engelbosteler Damm 38 at the corner of Sandstrasse at the beginning of the 20th century

The Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store in Hanover was a department store founded at the end of the 19th century , which, due to its Jewish owners , was not de jure but de facto " Aryanized " as a result of National Socialist boycott measures .

history

Wolff family from Oesdorf

The Wolff brothers came from a Jewish family from Oesdorf near Pyrmont . Albert (born January 26, 1866 in Oesdorf; died June 25, 1935 in Bad Tölz ) married Gertrude .

Eduard Wolff (born September 24, 1867 in Oesdorf; died November 28, 1933 in Bad Oeynhausen ) married Rosalie , née Oppenheim (died September 2, 1933 in Bad Oeynhausen). The two were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Vlotho .

Alice Wolff (died 1948 or later) was a relative of the Wolff family. She married Hermann Werblowski (died 1948 or later), the later owner of the Berlin department store, with whom she had daughters Ruth (born in 1922 in Hanover) and Ilse (born in 1924 in Hanover). The Werblowski family went into exile in London on March 23, 1939.

The first department store in Linden

The brothers Albert and Eduard Wolff learned the trade of merchant , both worked temporarily in the capital Berlin during their youth and during the founding of the German Empire .

In 1896 the Wolff brothers opened their first joint company in Linden , the then independent industrial city near Hanover. With the naming of their jointly operated Berlin department store , initially in the Deisterstraße 14 at the Black Bear , the brothers Wolff knüpften associative to their experiences and expectations of customers a wide range of previously established mainly in Berlin Department Stores at.

The Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store

The Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store on Engelbosteler Damm , seen from the Lutherschule (right foreground) on the corner of the street An der Lutherkirche around 1900;
Postcard no. 216 of the North German paper industry , collotype

In 1898, Albert and Eduard Wolff opened a branch of the Berlin department store on Engelbosteler Damm at the corner of Sandstrasse, which was initially only intended as a branch in the Hanoverian suburb of Schlosswende to the rapidly developing Nordstadt district .

In the small shop, which was initially only rented, demand developed so quickly that the Wolff brothers soon acquired the entire building as their own and completely redesigned it into sales rooms.

In the meantime, the two brothers had opened further branches in Döhren as well as on Limmerstrasse and Vahrenwalder Strasse , but also in the cities of Barsinghausen , Delmenhorst , Einbeck , Hameln and Bad Pyrmont . Shortly thereafter, the two brothers parted entrepreneurial Eduard took over in Linden which then "store Eduard Wolff" said Department Store , Albert the department store at the Engelbosteler dam as a sole proprietor and all chain stores, which it then but sold to the respective branch.

View from the intersection of An der Lutherkirche and the - later Kopernikusstraße - to the north through Engelbosteler Damm; left behind the tree the on the facade redesigned Berlin department store Brothers Wolff ;
Postcard number 56172 from Stengel & Co .; around 1920

The economic success on Engelbosteler Damm prompted Albert Wolff as early as the spring of 1901 to demolish the old building and erect a larger commercial building there in order to be able to offer the complete range under the roof of a modern department store.

According to the address book, city and business manual of the royal residence city of Hanover and the city of Linden from 1910 , Albert Wolff lived in the house at Im Moore 21 at the time .

In the times of need of the First World War , laundry and clothing were particularly popular among customers.

At the beginning of the Weimar Republic , Albert Wolff took on his long-term employee, the trained businessman Hermann Werblowski (born June 11, 1889 in Leipzig ) as a partner , who took over the management on April 1, 1924 after the end of German hyperinflation . Around this time, the owners joined the Central German Wholesale Association, which was founded in 1921.

After a renovation of the entire facade of the business building and a change in the internal organization, the Berlin Gebrüder Wolff department store soon became one of the leading department stores in Hanover, which was also included in the work The Book of Old Companies in the City of Hanover, published under the head of Paul Siedentopf Year 1927.

But unlike their customers, the successes of department stores in general were viewed with suspicion by some retailers out of concern for their own sales. In addition, the National Socialists ' party , the NSDAP , and the Hanover local group in what was then Braunschweiger Strasse 2 were founded in the 1920s . In January 1928, its board member Felix Kopprasch rushed against the “[...] screeching advertising that was mainly used by Jewish department stores with a leaflet that he had printed and published at his private address at Klewergarten 3 , under the heading“ Season Sale ” would contribute artfully to the 'beautification' of our cityscape ”. The diatribe named the Hanoverian companies Karstadt , Sternheim & Emanuel , Molling , Elsbach & Frank , Bor Maß and also “[...] Wolff etc.”. These would be " predatory institutions , [...] branch of the international high finance , [... the] means of mass and junk goods systematically plundering operate the working Germans" would. The against the alleged " fraud " and the alleged " fraud maneuvers " of the "department store pirates" seven mentioned agitating struggle sheet concluded with a call for the "German comrades", a presentation of the NSDAP Gauführers of Thuringia , Fritz Sauckel to visit on "raids of department stores and consumer associations ”and ended with the threat“ Jews are not allowed in ”.

Felix Kopprasch responded with a new leaflet to an interim injunction for the distribution of the leaflet, which had already been obtained on January 26, 1928 : The NSDAP was "[...] none of the 'big' parliamentary parties [...] that demonstrated their willingness to take responsibility according to democratic principles on their voters ”. He and his “German Volksgenossen” would defend their goals “[...] to the last breath”, but “[...] also fight in a different way.” Party comrade Wagner would do this on February 10th of the year in the Hofbrauhaus in Hinüberstrasse will give a lecture under the title "Ways into the Third Reich ".

Such calls for boycotts and the global economic crisis that soon set in halved the sales of the "[...] Berlin department store from 1928 to 318,000 RM in 1932" - that is, even before the seizure of power .

In the meantime Albert Wolff had withdrawn from his business "and probably left it to his partner Hermann Werblowski as sole owner in 1931." The harassment of the National Socialists, however, intensified: In 1935 the NSDAP member Heinz Siegmann published his anti-Semitic list " Jews in Hanover ", in which, among other things, the Berlin department store and Hermann Werblowski is listed as its owner, but also Albert Wolff and his private address An der Markuskirche 3 , where Wolff lived with his wife Gertrude . Albert Wolff died in the same year at the age of 69 on June 25, 1935 in Bad Tölz .

Despite the hostility, the new owner of the Berlin department store , Hermann Werblowski , was able to continue his company to some extent, as his customer base included many workers and employees in the surrounding large factories such as Continental AG , Bode-Panzer , Sprengel , Feinkost Appel or the Hävemeyer & Sander elevator factory . However, the steadily declining sales forced the family to give up their apartment at Rühmkorffstrasse 1 in January 1936 and move into a much smaller apartment near the Berlin department store at Bessemerstrasse 6 .

But then the National Socialists put up posters in all the surrounding factories with the inscription:

"Anyone who buys in a Berlin department store will be fired immediately!"

Now no employee or worker dared to go shopping at Werblowski. But the Nazis went even further: In addition to propaganda against Jews in general, they now smeared their abuse with chalk and white paint on the sidewalk in front of the Berlin department store. In addition, they took up posts in front of the Jewish department store in order to refuse customers entry or to be able to denounce them later .

Soon the first suppliers also refused to supply the Berlin department store with their products .

In August 1938 - a few weeks before the so-called " Reichskristallnacht " - Hermann Werblowski finally sold the department store to Oskar Haas for 60,250 RM . Werblowski was just able to use the money to pay the debts that had now accrued . On March 23, 1939, only a few months after the first deportation of Polish Jews from Hanover and a few weeks before the first deportations to the extermination camps , Hermann Werblowski and his wife Alice , née Wolff (a relative of the Wolff brothers) were able to join their two daughters Ruth (born 1922) and Ilse (born 1924) go into exile in London .

View from the corner of Asternstrasse over the "E-Damm" at the time of the new construction after the air raids on Hanover ; to the right behind the steamroller the ruins of the Oskar Haas department store ;
35mm photography , around 1954

In the Second World War , which soon began, however, the department store now run by Oskar Haas - like many other buildings in Nordstadt - suffered severe damage from the incendiary and high-explosive bombs during the air raids on Hanover . As one of the few buildings on Sandstrasse, the former Berlin department store remained in ruins right up to the first floor , the windows of which Oskar Haas was able to wall up after the war and paint it with the name Haas .

View of the new Kopernikusstraße 1 / 1A (in the center), now a residential and commercial building with a branch of the Deutsche Bank on the ground floor

The former owner Hermann Werblowski did not apply for reparation against Haas after 1945 . Werblowski assured him and his wife in writing in 1948 that "[...] the sale and takeover at that time had been carried out correctly". Ultimately, however, the sale of the Berlin department store was not decided voluntarily at the end of the 1930s, but was de facto an “ Aryanization ”, solely due to the National Socialist boycott measures.

Today there is in place of the destroyed Brothers Wolff Berlin department store , a new building , in the ground floor of a branch of Deutsche Bank its services offering.

Archival material

An archive can be found for example,

literature

Web links

Commons : Berliner Warenhaus Gebrüder Wolff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Deviating from this, the anonymous author on the website Lebensraum-linden.de in the version of March 6, 2016 (see there) names 1906 as the year of the business separation of the two brothers.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Paul Siedentopf (Red.): Berlin department store Gebrüder Wolff . In: The book of the old companies of the city of Hanover in 1927 , Jubiläums-Verlag Walter Gerlach, Leipzig (1927), p. 265
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Hans-Michael Krüger (responsible), NN (text): Gebrüder Eduard and Albert Wolff ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website Lebensraum-linden.de in the version from March 6, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lebensraum-linden.de
  3. ^ Klaus Mlynek : Linden. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 406ff.
  4. ↑ Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (ed.): Development of the Hanover city area up to 1993 , overview map with sketch and legend, in this: History of the City of Hanover , Vol. 2: From the beginning of the 19th century to the present , Hanover: Schlütersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1994, ISBN 3-87706-364-0 , pp. 806f.
  5. ↑ Compare the entry in Section II, p. 73
  6. ^ Yearbooks for economics and statistics (= Journal of economics and statistics ), G. Fischer Verlag, 1921, p. 3; Preview over google books
  7. ^ A b NSDAP leaflets “Season Sale” and resolution , printing and publishing house Felix Kopprasch, Hanover, January 1928, template: Lower Saxony State Archives (Hanover location) , signature Hann. 171 Hanover No. 28 , digitized on the website Lebensraum-linden.de in the version of March 6, 2016
  8. ^ Waldemar R. Röhrbein : Appel - HWA, Feinkost AG. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 31
  9. ^ Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Hävemeyer & Sander, elevators. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 248
  10. ↑ Peter Schulze : Reichskristallnacht. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 520
  11. ↑ Peter Schulze: Deportations of Jews. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 124
  12. ↑ a b c d For example, compare this photograph to a larger series of documentary photographs in the Engelbosteler Damm category on Wikimedia Commons
  13. ^ A b Klaus Mlynek : Nordstadt. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 482f.
  14. ^ Klaus Mlynek: Second World War. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , pp. 694f.
  15. ↑ Compare, for example, this recording from a photo documentation

Coordinates: 52 ° 23 '14.7 "  N , 9 ° 43' 24.6"  E