Hermann Tietz and Wertheim, 1933–38

01Stralsund · Gera · Berlin

Two Jewish families built Berlin’s great department stores

In 1875 Ida and Abraham Wertheim opened a small shop for clothes and manufactured goods in Stralsund, on the Baltic. Their sons took it to Berlin in 1885. In 1897 the first part of Alfred Messel’s store on Leipziger Straße opened; the corner building on Leipziger Platz followed in 1904. For the first decade of the century Wertheim was, in the words of its historian Simone Ladwig-Winters, “the top Warenhaus in Germany”. It was the first to give all its staff Sundays off.

Oscar Tietz opened his first shop in Gera in 1882, and named it after the uncle who lent him the money: Hermann Tietz. The firm came to Berlin in 1900, on Leipziger Straße, and built its great store on Alexanderplatz in 1905. “Nearly all the founders of Warenhaeuser happened to be Jews,” Ladwig-Winters writes. That made the stores a target long before the Nazis came to power: a special Prussian tax on department stores was nicknamed the “lex Wertheim”.

A narrow old street with gabled houses and a modern department store front, tram rails in the cobbles. — Wertheim in Stralsund, about 1910. The family firm began in this Baltic town in 1875.Unknown photographer, c. 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A postcard with a photograph of a store front lettered HERMANN TIETZ, an oval portrait of a man, and printed text about an opening celebration. — Gera, where the first shop called “Hermann Tietz” opened in 1882: a card for the opening of the firm’s new Gera building, 23 October 1904.Unknown photographer, 1904. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Black-and-white portrait of an elderly man with a white moustache, seated, in a dark suit. — Oscar Tietz, who founded the firm and named it after the uncle who financed it. He died in 1923.Unknown photographer, before 1923 (reproduced in Kurt Zielenziger, Juden in der deutschen Wirtschaft, 1930). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A tall stone department store with a steep roof and vertical bands of windows, behind railings and trees. — Alfred Messel’s corner building for Wertheim on Leipziger Platz, 1904.Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 1904 (photographer not credited). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Portrait of a bald man with a beard, in a dark suit. — Alfred Messel, the architect of Wertheim’s Berlin stores.Unknown author, 1909. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A coloured postcard of a department store with a glass facade and a globe on its tower, carriages in the street, captioned Berlin – Waarenhaus Hermann Tietz in der Leipzigerstrasse. — Hermann Tietz on Leipziger Straße, where the firm came to Berlin in 1900. Postcard, about 1900.Georg Brunner, Nürnberg, c. 1900 (postcard; Zeno.org). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Germany’s department-store groups, around 1930

Bars on one linear scale from zero: employees, 1930. Hermann Tietz and Wertheim together employed 26,908 people in 1930. Figures from Ladwig-Winters’s table of the groups in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Kaufhof chain was a different Tietz firm: Leonhard Tietz of Cologne, whose head, Alfred Tietz, was forced out in April 1933, after which it was renamed Westdeutsche Kaufhof AG. Karstadt, the largest group, was not Jewish-owned; it sought an agreement with party leaders early on to escape the boycotts.

021 April 1933 – 1940

Tietz went first, and fast. Wertheim was taken apart over five years

Neither firm was seized by decree. The banks that held their debts, the party and the ministries pressed from different sides, and the owners were pushed out step by step. The two stories ran side by side; the chart keeps them on one time scale.

Two firms on one time scale, 1933–40

Scroll on: the two takeovers, step by step.

Three SA men stand in front of a locked iron grille, the middle one wearing a placard reading Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!, a passer-by on each side. — SA pickets at the locked entrance of a Berlin store, April 1933. The archive record does not name the store.Unknown photographer, April 1933. Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

1 April 1933

The doors stay shut

On the day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, the department stores stayed closed all day, though customers stood at the doors asking to come in. SA men held placards: “Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!”.

24 July 1933 · 29 July 1933

A loan with a condition

Hermann Tietz needed RM 14 million more from its banks. The condition: Hertie, a new company led by Georg Karg, joins the management, with “Aryan predominance”. Karg himself could put up only RM 50,000.

mid-1934

The Tietz brothers are pushed out

Their partner Hugo Zwillenberg had gone at once. Georg and Martin Tietz stayed personally liable while auditors went through the group, until mid-1934, when they were forced to resign. The firm took a new name.

Portrait of a thin elderly man in a dark suit, holding a folded newspaper. — Georg Wertheim, portrait by Emil Orlik, 1931.Emil Orlik, 1931. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

1934

Georg Wertheim hands his shares to his wife

After the Tietz takeover, Georg Wertheim gave his shares to his wife Ursula, who was not counted as Jewish. He was unofficially barred from his own stores and never entered them again.

1 January 1937

“The store is declared to be German”

On 1 January 1937 Georg Wertheim had to leave his firm. The banks made it sell land far below market value, some of it for the new Reich Chancellery.

late 1937 – early 1938

Three conditions from the party

To count as “Aryanized”, Wertheim needed non-Jewish owners, non-Jewish employees and a new name. In early 1938 the last 34 Jewish employees were dismissed. 13 of them were later deported and murdered.

The stone facade of the Wertheim department store with arched entrances, crowds and a lamp post in front. — Wertheim on Leipziger Platz, about 1910.Otto Hagemann, c. 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

1938

Wertheim becomes AWAG

In 1938 the last Jewish co-owners were removed and the firm became AWAG: Allgemeine Warenhandelsgesellschaft, not “A. Wertheim”, as customers believed. At the party’s demand Georg and Ursula divorced that December.

31 December 1939 · 1940

Wertheim dies; Karg owns Hertie

Georg Wertheim died on 31 December 1939, nearly blind, refusing to emigrate. Of his family, 3 were murdered in Auschwitz. By 1940 Karg owned Hertie outright.

03Alexanderplatz

The family went. The name stayed, cut short

“Hertie – das war die Abkürzung von Hermann Tietz”: Hertie was the abbreviation of Hermann Tietz. The historians Johannes Bähr and Ingo Köhler call the takeover the “largest Aryanisation in the early years of the Nazi regime”, and Georg Karg, its managing director, its main beneficiary.

An ornate department store with a tower topped by a globe, on a street corner, photographed around 1906. — The same building when new: Hermann Tietz on Alexanderplatz, about 1906.Unknown photographer, c. 1906. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A large domed department store on a city square, the word HERTIE in tall letters on its roof, Olympic rings and torches on the facade, a swastika flag on a pole above, crowds in front. — The same building in 1936: HERTIE on the roof, a swastika flag above.Photo: Fortepan / Lőrincze Judit, 1936 (Fortepan 17429). Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

What the family got for the whole group is told three ways. All three sources agree it was a small part of what the firm was worth.

Ladwig-Winters, from the Deutsche Bank files

about RM 1.2 million

paid to the family members “as compensation for the whole enterprise”

Neue Deutsche Biographie (1977)

12 million marks

the settlement with which Georg and Martin Tietz left

Deutsches Historisches Museum

RM 8 million

for the family’s shares, valued at RM 24 million

The three figures measure different things, and the sources do not reconcile them, so they are not drawn as a chart.

A tall atrium under a glass roof, galleries on every floor, sales counters and staircases below. — Inside the Alexanderplatz store: the atrium of its second extension, 1911.Unknown photographer, 1911. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Liquidating the firm was never an option. It would have put 14,000 jobs at risk, and the banks’ own money. So the stores stayed open, under a shortened name. By 1940 Karg owned the group outright. After the war the Tietz heirs made claims, and in 1949 the two sides reached a settlement; its terms were not published.

Ladwig-Winters: “In the case of the Hermann Tietz take over, the new owner was simply interested in enriching himself.”

051944 – today

The store on Leipziger Platz is gone; the claim was settled in 2007

The Wertheim buildings were severely damaged in an air raid in 1944 and stood as empty ruins after the war. Instead of being rebuilt, the store was pulled down in 1955–56, and when the Wall went up the square lay on the border itself.

Its vaults survived underground. In March 1991 a techno club opened in them and named itself after them: Tresor, “the vault”. Today the Mall of Berlin stands where Wertheim stood.

An aerial photograph of a dense city with an octagonal square and a busy junction beside it, a park at one side. — Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz from the air, about 1920. Wertheim stood on Leipziger Platz.U.S. Army Air Forces photo 18-AA-170-45B, 1920. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A long glass-roofed shopping arcade with galleries on both sides and coloured umbrellas hanging overhead. — The Mall of Berlin, built on the Wertheim site on Leipziger Platz, 2022.Lukas Beck, 2022. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The heirs’ claims ran for decades. In March 2007 KarstadtQuelle agreed to pay €88 million to the heirs for the Lenné triangle at Potsdamer Platz, land that had belonged to the Wertheim family.

The Hertie Foundation, heir to Karg’s fortune, founded the Hertie School in Berlin in 2003. In 2018, former students who wanted to know more about the foundation’s history set up an initiative and lobbied for research. They called it Her.Tietz.

Georg and Martin Tietz emigrated to the United States.

Their name stayed over the doors, cut down to HERTIE.

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Hertie was Hermann Tietz with the Tietzes taken out