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| Wertheim property to be developed
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Computer Simulation of the completed Leipziger Platz
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BERLIN (EJP)--The heirs of Berlin’s Wertheim department store have finally decided to sell their prime real estate in the centre of Berlin, ending years of bitter court battles.
The ground of the department store on the fashionable Leipziger Platz is up for sale, the Jewish Claims Conference, which represents the family, said in a press release.
The 22,000 square metre property is currently undeveloped. The real estate was the centre of a decade-long battle between the Wertheim heirs and the Karstadt-Quelle corporation, which is the legal heir of the property that was nationalised by the Nazis in the mid-1930s.
The department store that used to stand on the site was destroyed during the Second World War.
The land on which the store once stood is one of the last pieces of undeveloped property in the heart of Berlin – directly on the former no-man’s land area between democratic West and communist East Berlin. It lies directly across the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house of parliament.
For the past decade, the Karstadt-Quelle corporation has contested being the legal heir of the Wertheim properties. Last year, after 60 years, the courts finally decided that the Karstadt-Quelle conglomerate is legal successor to the Wertheims together with the state.
For the heirs’ of the former property on Berlin’s Potsdamer and adjacent Leipziger Platz, that translates into 145 million euros.
Jewish stores in Berlin
At the turn of the last century, a handful of Jewish families changed the German shopping landscape and buying habits by introducing the modern department stores into the market.
The Tietz and Wertheim families made the largest impact on German consumerism. Their names continued to be plastered on the front of hundreds of shopping temples throughout Germany, even after the war though they were no longer owned by their founding families.
From 1934, Jewish stores were systematically arianised. By 1938, Jewish owners who had not sold their stores below market value were arrested and their properties forcibly nationalised.
The Herman Tietz stores were renamed Hertie after their forced arianisation in the 1930s. The Wertheim stores continued operating under the same name.
In the 1980s Hertie bought Wertheim, which was gobbled up by the Karstadt chain in the early 1990s. Karstadt merged with Germany’s largest catalogue company Quelle in the 1990s.
Karstadt-Quelle ‘successfully’ removed the Hertie brand from the market at the beginning of this year. Only two stores using the Wertheim name exist in Berlin today.
Heritage building
The Wertheims were already twice compensated for their losses. The first time, was when they sold undermarket value prior to 1938.
The second time, was in the years following the Second World War – when they were compensated by the West German state. However, real estate property lying in eastern Germany was not compensated.
Since the early 1990s, Jewish heirs with real estate lying in East Germany have been filing their claims.
The Wertheim store on the Leipziger Platz was constructed in 1897. It was considered a shopping temple way ahead of its time. Only the former “Tresor”, the underground vaults housing the store’s safes survived the war.
When the wall fell, the Tresor was immediately occupied by musicians who transformed it into one of the most renowned techno dance clubs in the world. The Tresor closed last year.
The vaults have been demolished and a new pre-construction infrastructure has already been laid in preparation of construction.
The current claims by the Wertheim family throughout Germany are valued at 400 to 600 million euros in Berlin, Rostock and Stralsund.
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