Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin

by Dina Gold, Stuart E. Eizenstat (Foreword by)

Overview

“This former BBC journalist’s passionate search for justice is a suspenseful confrontation with World War II history. A fascinating journey.” —Anne-Marie O’Connor, national bestselling author of The Lady in GoldDina Gold grew up hearing her grandmother’s tales of the glamorous life in Berlin she once led before the Nazis came to power and her dreams of recovering a huge building she claimed belonged to the family - though she had no papers to prove ownership. When the Wall fell in 1989, Dina decided to battle for restitution. Built by Dina’s great grandfather in 1910, the property was the business headquarters of the H. Wolff fur company, one of the largest and most successful in Germany during the early part of the last century. In 1937, the Victoria Insurance Company foreclosed on the mortgage and transferred ownership of Krausenstrasse 17/18 to the Reichsbahn, Hitler’s railways, that later transported millions of Jews across Europe to the death camps. The Victoria, headed then by a German businessman and lawyer with connections to the very top of the Nazi Party, is still today one of Germany’s leading insurance companies. But during the war it was part of a consortium insuring workshops at Auschwitz. When the Third Reich was defeated in 1945 the building lay in the Soviet sector – just past Checkpoint Charlie – and beyond legal reach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627229708
Publisher:	Ankerwycke
Publication date:	08/07/2015
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Dina Gold was born and brought up in Britain. She is now an American citizen living in Washington, DC where she is on the board of the Jewish Community Center and co-chair of the Washington Jewish Film Festival. A senior editor at Moment magazine, she started her career in London as a financial journalist after postgraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Later, at the BBC, she worked as an investigative reporter and television producer.

Table of Contents

Foreword Stuart E. Eizenstat xi

Cast of Characters xv

Glossary xix

Map xxiv

The Building xxv

Prologue xxvii

Part 1

1 I've Come to Claim My Family's Building 3

2 H. Wolff 9

3 My Mother's Birth 17

4 Well-heeled Nomads 29

5 The Gathering Storm 33

6 Palestine 41

7 Entjudung (The Removal of Jews from the German Economy) 55

8 "What Would I Do Without the Luneberger Heider?" 67

9 Making Her Own Way 73

10 After the War: Love and Marriage 79

11 Those Who Survived and Those Who Did Not 87

Part 2

12 A Question of Ownership 97

13 My Life in Britain 101

14 What Had My Grandmother Once told Me? 105

5 Our Investigation Begins 109

16 Lawyers and Wills 115

17 The Smoking Gun 119

18 Proving the Line of Inheritance 129

19 The Reichsbahn's Motive 135

20 Claims and Counterclaims 139

21 Who's Who in Nazi Germany 149

22 Dr. Hamann and the Victoria Insurance Company 153

23 Back to Berlin: The Frustration Grows 159

24 The Formal Claim 165

25 Getting Their Own Back 171

26 Light at the End of the Tunnel 177

27 Negotiating a Price and Dividing the Payout 181

Part 3

28 New Archives, New Answers 189

29 New Evidence from Sachsenhausen 193

30 The Fate of Dresdener Strasse 97 197

31 Fritz's Life During the War 201

32 Exit from the Reich 211

33 Deutsche Bank 215

34 The Victoria's History 219

35 The Terrible Truth about Kurt Hamann 227

36 Coda 241

Epilogue 247

Select Bibliography 249

Acknowledgments 253

Index 257

Editorial Reviews

2016-01-15
Gold's debut recounts her family members' fight to reclaim a building that Nazis took from them during the Holocaust.The place in question belonged to the Wolff family's fur business until 1937, when it became property of the Nazi-controlled German government. After the end of World War II, the building became part of East Berlin and was claimed by the East German authorities. When the country later reunified, Gold and her family seized the opportunity to claim their property, which led to a yearslong legal process. The author blends the legal narrative—which deals with establishing the chain of ownership and determining who had inheritance rights—with a history of her secular Jewish family, which escaped to Palestine in 1933. The many family dramas keep the story from getting bogged down in complex legal terminology and include infidelities, lost wealth, and difficulties coming to terms with Jewish identities. Gold, a veteran investigative journalist, knows how to tell a compelling story, and she keeps the pages turning as she tells of the many scavenger hunts and fortuitous discoveries that led her from one clue to the next. One of the most compelling threads traces the fate of her great-uncle, who chose to stay in Germany and didn't survive the war. Overall, this is an engaging, well-written depiction of how the Holocaust destroyed individual lives as well as families and community relationships. Although the story centers on a valuable piece of property, Gold's measured, compassionate prose makes it clear that it's not a tale of financial gain but one of justice and the survival of a persecuted people. A highly readable account of one family's fight for personal and financial vindication.

Kirkus Reviews

The research for stolen assets remaining in Hitler’s Germany led some survivors of famous German-Jewish families to write historic and moving works which mix, at the same time, judicial investigations and human epics – that's the case for Dina Gold's Stolen Legacy. Her property becomes in a way the reader's property and we follow with great interest and intensity her efforts to recover not only a material legacy but the entire history of her family.

Serge Klarsfeld

Dina Gold has written a crisp, page-turning nonfiction whodunit, and proves herself to be an unyielding sleuth in the pursuit of justice for her family. At the same time, it is meticulously researched journalism that provides a fresh perspective on history.

Nadine Epstein

Dina Gold digs deep into her history and leaves no stone unturned in her riveting account of the struggle for restitution of the property taken from her family by the Nazis. This is a meticulous and finely written account of her struggle to seek belated justice for her mother, with all the twists and turns one would expect from a fictional detective story — but it is all true.

E. Randol Schoenberg

An exceptional adventure in Holocaust literature. Dina Gold combines investigative journalism with a keen sense of history to uncover a story everyone should read.

Marvin Kalb

The Holocaust—the project of exterminating Europe’s Jews—was an immense act of murder. It was also an immense act of theft. The murder was, of course, the incomparably greater crime. The dead could never be brought back to life. The ash from crematoria was dumped into rivers or spread across fields; the bodies shot into ravines decomposed in Europe’s mutilated earth. Yet the stolen property—of those who were murdered and the minority who escaped or otherwise survived—was seized and passed on, first by the Nazis and then by the governments that followed, to new possessors, public and private. Some pretended to own that property; most knew its real origins; few were willing to part with it. This is the story of a single such property that, by indefatigable effort, was reclaimed, at least partly, two generations later. It’s the story of the theft. But it’s also, by inference, a small part of the story of the murder. And it’s the story of a rare act of belated and incomplete, but symbolically resonant, historical justice.

Walter Reich

Dina Gold tells the fascinating story of the uphill attempts of one family—her own – to regain the property that had been stolen from them by the Nazis. It is an amazing story.

Walter Laqueur