Berlin's stolen city center

Berlin's central Mitte district is synonymous with a massive construction site. Near the TV tower and the Rotes Rathaus, or Red City Hall, one scaffold meets another. Most people don't realize that most of the property in this area was once Jewish-owned. Today, profits are being made without involving those who once owned the land. It's the topic of a provocative Berlin exhibition.

Of the 1,200 buildings in Berlin's city center, at least 225 belonged to German Jews before 1933. After Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Jews were systematically excluded from the "national community." As a result, discriminatory laws were adapted that required Jews to register their property, which was later confiscated.

One of the measures used to gain access to Jewish ownership was to strip Jews of their citizenship, force them to immigrate as enemies of the state, then confiscate their assets. Those who hadn't left Germany by 1938 suffered during the Kristallnacht pogrom, a night of wide-spread destruction of Jewish businesses and homes.

After 1938, the "de-Jewification of Berlin land ownership" was openly discussed. Unlike many other cities across Germany, the stolen property didn't fall into private hands, rather the state made itself the direct beneficiary. The exhibition "Robbed Center" in Berlin's Ephriam Palace shows the details. Even the very location of the exhibit had once been "Aryanized."

The reason behind the nationalization of the buildings? Hitler's favorite architecht, Albert Speer, was slated to built a new imperial capital - Germania. The historic city center was set to be replaced by a monumental administrative building. The center point of Germania would be the Great Hall, shown here in the picture to illustrate its massive dimensions compared to the Brandenburg Gate.

For this purpose, Hitler named the architect Speer as Berlin's General Bulding Inspector. All Jewish homes in the capital were registered and reported to Speer for consideration as to whether the state wanted to exercise its right to purchase. If the homes were located on the planned East-West axis, which ran through the middle of the city center, they were to be blown up.

Even private "Aryanization" occured in the city center. One prominent case included Wertheim. At the turn of the century, the famed Berlin department store had been mentioned in the same breath as London's Harrod's or Lafayette in Paris. Here, the Jewish department store appears in a sea of swastikas during the 1936 Olympic Games. On January 1, 1937, the company was declared "German."

During excavations of the Red Town Hall in 2010, 11 sculptures that had been defamed by the Nazis as "degenerate art" were discovered. The sculptures had been confiscated in 1937 from German museums and private collections and had been reported missing or destroyed. A Jewish home once stood at the site of the discovery, and the family had been expatriated.

Not only has its name changed, but the former Königstrasse, or King Street, near the Red City Hall is no longer recognizable. A vacant lot now gapes from where house Nr. 50 once stood, marked red in the photo. This is where Berlin's current problem of once-Aryanized homes begins.

Vacant lots have long gaped where Jewish homes once stood. Either the plans for Germania had already led to their destruction, they were bombed in the war, or the communist East German government had removed the ruins after the war.

East Germany did not pay restitutions after the Holocaust. The argument? In the communist country, there should be no private property anyway. So it was even better if the state already owned it. After German reunification in 1990, when heirs of the orginal property owners once again sought compensation, they received minimal, if any payment.

Those in charge based their value estimates off of 1990 appraisals, which measured the land's value in its current state. As a result, heirs of Jewish families were often only repaid 10 percent of the original value. If an empty field was all that was left of the property, the resistitution value was correspondingly low. Pictured is the once-famous Gerson furniture store, ca. 1890.

By now, however, those former vacant lots are becoming home to more and more new buildings in Berlin's Mitte - a prime location. The exhibition "Robbed Centera" questions whether or not the heirs' restitution should be renegotiated, or if the sales of the land should be funneled into a foundation.