“This is a meticulous and finely written account of Dina Gold’s 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.”
When Dina Gold was a little girl, her grandmother told her stories about the glamorous life she had led in pre-war Berlin and how she dreamed of one day reclaiming the grand building that had housed the family business.
Dina’s grandmother died in 1977, leaving behind no documents, not even an address, to help locate the property or prove its ownership. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dina had not forgotten her grandmother’s tales and set out to find the truth.
In 1990, Dina marched into a German government ministry at Krausenstrasse 17/18, just two blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, and declared:
“I’ve come to claim my family’s building.”
And so began her legal struggle — to reclaim the building that had belonged to her family.
The six-story office block had been the headquarters of the H. Wolff fur company, one of the most successful Jewish fashion firms in Germany. Built by Dina’s great-grandfather in 1910, it was foreclosed on by the Victoria Insurance Company in 1937. Ownership was transferred to the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Hitler’s railways, that later transported millions of Jews to death camps.
Today the Victoria is part of ERGO, a leading German insurance company. Few are aware that the Victoria was once chaired by a lawyer with connections to the top of the Nazi party. The Victoria was also part of a consortium that insured SS-owned workshops using slave labor at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Dina has delved deep into archives across the world and made shocking discoveries. What she found has repercussions even in today’s Germany.
In a major victory, Dina persuaded the German government to put up a plaque in July 2016 acknowledging in both German and English the history of “The Wolff Building.”
Mannheim University’s FORUM magazine interviewed me for an article entitled “An Awkward Legacy” in which I tell the story of what I discovered in the course of researching “Stolen Legacy”.
This is the culmination of many years of research into the past of Dr. Kurt Hamann – one-time head of the Victoria Insurance Company which foreclosed on my family’s property in 1937. Dr. Hamann had a foundation named in his honor at the university. The result of my investigations was to uncover his unsavory history during the Third Reich – which led to the university deciding to rename the foundation.
Read all about it.
The Times of Israel has published an article by me about the decision of Mannheim University to rename the Dr. Kurt-Hamann Foundation. The name change to “Foundation for the Promotion of Insurance Science at the University of Mannheim” will become final when approved by the regional government in nearby Karlsruhe, to which the paperwork has been sent.
This decision was prompted following my discovery of information relating to the activities of Dr. Hamann, the former head of the Victoria Insurance Company, during the Third Reich.
Past president of the university, Professor Dr. Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden has written to me saying:
I am most grateful to you for all the work you have done to shed light and make progress on the Kurt-Hamann Foundation. Without you, I do not think that the University would have known what it knows today and would have been able to act the way it has in the last few years. The whole university owes you a debt of gratitude.
When I spoke in Munich in March at the Institute for Contemporary History, I interviewed Dr. Carolin Lange about her upcoming project to discover how ordinary Germans feel about possessing once Jewish-owned goods bought, during the Third Reich, cheaply at auction or stolen.
Her daily blogspot has historical factoids about books and can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/deborahkalbbooks. Follow her on Twitter @deborahkalb
There have been news reports recently about two former SS officers in their 90s who have been charged with participating in hundreds of murders at the Stutthof concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
New legal reasoning allows German prosecutors to charge Nazi collaborators even if there is no evidence of specific criminal acts.
I have written a blog piece about complicity during the Third Reich and how it links to Stolen Legacy.
