Georg Wertheim

Georg Wertheim ( born February 11, 1857 in Stralsund, † December 31, 1939 in Berlin) was a German businessman.

Life and work

Wertheim grew up in Stralsund. After a commercial apprenticeship at Wolff and Apolant he took over in 1876 along with his brother Hugo, the store founded in 1875, the parents (Abraham and Ida Wertheim ) for short and ornamental trimmings in Stralsund (see also Wertheim Group ).

The two brothers quickly brought new ideas into the business: customer had the opportunity for exchange of goods, the prices were not negotiable but it reliably, and was sold only against strict cash. Since he ( risk premium, storage costs) renounced certain currently used system of costing items, he could offer his goods cheaper than the competition. The concept was successful, he was able to open a larger business at the Old Market in Stralsund market, and after the opening of a branch in Rostock, a first branch was founded in 1885 Rosenthalerstraße in Berlin-Mitte and extended the offer to house wares.

Wertheim quickly recognized the changing demands of the growing metropolis in the period of industrialization and opened in 1890 in Berlin- Kreuzberg at Moritz / corner of Orange Street, the first designated as a department store retail business. The sales rooms were spacious and had to be a better presentation of the goods were freely interpreted, and larger numbers allowed a cheaper sale.

Increasingly, however, showed the limitations which brought the stores in the middle of residential development with it: the rooms were not very big and hardly offered the expanding business opportunities.

Georg Wertheim had trained at the Berlin Art Academy in Saturday courses, and began to design a building that should serve only the sale of the goods together with the hitherto little-known architect Alfred Messel. 1892 a branch was opened in Leipziger Strasse, and in 1894 began the sale in the first planned for this purpose and built department store in the Orange Street.

The famous Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz, which was begun in 1896 and opened in 1897, went a step further. Wertheim wanted the upscale clientele that had been kept rather of department stores can fulfill all your wishes under one roof, and the new building on the busiest square in the city was opened soon. In the following years Messel had to repeatedly expand the building. The Wertheim am Leipziger Platz was mentioned in one breath with the Harrods in London and Lafayette in Paris. Was famous especially the great market hall with its vaulted glass roof, more than twenty meters high square columns and the larger than life statue of a woman with shopping cart, a work of the sculptor Ludwig Manzel. The wall paintings by F. Gehrke - an ancient port and its modern counterpart, the steamer Germany, celebrated the trade.

Other department stores in Rosenthalerstraße (1903), the King's Road (1911) and again at the Moritz Place (1913 ) followed. In the 1920s, Wertheim funded a track laying of the new subway line D on the Moritz place to enable customers according to the model of his rival Rudolph Karstadt ( department store at Hermann Square ) has a direct access from the subway platform.

1911 acquired Georg Wertheim Castle Saßleben, where the family spent their holidays in the following decades. In order to protect his wife from the effects of Nazi racial laws, Georg Wertheim mid-1930s divorced by his wife Ursula, and then gave this castle, which was withdrawn from the expropriation efforts of the Nazi bureaucracy. The castle was destroyed in 1945 after the war by a fire of unknown origin down to the ground and later demolished.

1913, the Wertheim Group was the largest German companies of its kind The success soon called also envious of the plan, and since most buying and department stores as well Wertheim were in possession of Jewish family, there were a variety of campaigns against the department stores. It was assumed them to work with incorrect measurements offer inferior goods to exploit the employees and jeopardizing the customer morally. The Wertheim family tried to counter such accusations with special quality and safety precautions for their employees.

After the seizure of the NSDAP in 1933, the Jewish members of the Wertheim family were forced to the Shares " aryanize 'in the transaction to. To January 1, 1937 Georg Wertheim resigned from the company. The company was declared as" German " and in General Merchandise trade Association ( dialer ) renamed.

Georg Wertheim died on 31 December 1939 in Berlin from pneumonia. He was in a family grave in the Trinity Cemetery II at the Bergmann Strasse in Berlin -Kreuzberg buried (field H).

After the Second World War Wertheim was expropriated in the GDR in 1949, in the Federal Republic of Germany bought the Hertie Waren-und Kaufhaus Group 1951, the majority of shares and continued the business under the name Wertheim on. The members of the family received a small compensation and gave all claims on the company's shares sold at Hertie on. 1984 acquired Hertie the rest of the Wertheim shares.

For a long time the department store in the Steglitz Castle Street, corner Treitschkestraße of great importance. In the 1960s, it has been greatly expanded, resulting in the restructuring of an entire residential area ( direction Schildhornstraße ). In the following decades emerged next to the Wertheim department store a large Karstadt department store and several covered shopping centers to the corner of Castle Street / Born street, where for a long time been a department store chain hero, later Hertie was.

1994 was also the only remaining department store Wertheim am Kurfürstendamm over together with the Hertie Group in the possession of the company Karstadt.

The descendants of the Wertheim family now live in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA and have brought lawsuits against the company in 2003 Karstadt to compensation in the year. One of them operated restitution of the expropriated in the GDR parts of the company and land failed 2004 court. 2005, a lawsuit filed by Karstadt Quelle was rejected, made ​​a compensation so likely. On 30 March 2007, the Karstadt Quelle Group announced to indemnify the heirs of the expropriated by the Nazis Jewish merchant family Wertheim. The group said that the Jewish Claims Conference out of court settlement has been reached.

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