Stiftung Nordhav

The Nordhav Foundation was a charitable foundation established in 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich and the SS associated, which completed real estate transactions for the SS.

Establishment and purpose of the Foundation

The Foundation Nordhav whose name goes back to an old Germanic name for the North Sea, was launched in the summer of 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich to life. Their official recognition by the State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart on August 3, 1939. Statut moderate your purpose was in the acquisition and maintenance of rest houses for SS and police members. But besides this official function they served especially the private interests of Heydrich, who used it for his own benefit, to acquire property for a private purpose.

Heydrich appointed in 1939 four foundation directors: Karl Wilhelm Albert, Werner Best, Kurt Pomme and Walter Schellenberg.

Business of the Foundation

The first action of the Foundation consisted in the purchase of the St. Catherine's Court on Fehmarn, Heydrich intended to use as a private holiday home. The purchase of eleven acres, with beach location - which included, among other things, a passage grave, a beach house and stables - was conducted by Schellenberg. Due to the Polish campaign, the Foundation was then six months inactive.

The most important financial transaction of Nordhav in November 1940, when they the property at the Wannsee 56-58, a stately villa with park, for 1.95 million Mark bought from the industrialist Friedrich Minoux. Heydrich's long-term intention was, in the future its service and set up in that apartment property. For the time being he had the building but converted into a guest house of the SS. Celebrity got this building as the venue of the Wannsee Conference in the spring of 1942, on the Heydrich and some other organizational baselines for the so-called " Final Solution of the Jewish Question", that is, the genocide of the European Jews, firmly laid.