Wertheim was one of Germany's most spectacular retail empires, built by the Jewish Wertheim family from a modest 1875 clothing and manufactured-goods shop in Stralsund into a nationwide department-store chain. Its Berlin flagship on Leipziger Platz, designed by Alfred Messel and expanded into a vast 26,000-square-metre architectural landmark with 83 elevators, two glass-roofed atriums, monumental sculpture, and multiple sales floors, represented the commercial confidence of modern Jewish-owned Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, that success made the company a target. Jewish employees were expelled under government orders, while the family attempted to preserve control by transferring shares to Georg Wertheim's wife, Ursula, who was classified as Aryan under Nazi racial law. The couple even divorced in an effort to place the company in legally 'Aryan' hands, but the maneuver failed. The family was ultimately forced to sell its remaining shares to non-Jewish owners at reduced prices, an act of state-engineered expropriation rather than a voluntary business transaction. In 1939 the company was stripped of the Wertheim name and renamed AWAG, Allgemeine Warenhandelsgesellschaft A.G.; the Wertheim family fled Nazi Germany.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1930s-2000s
The Nazi Aryanization of Wertheim: How Germany's Department-Store Empire Was Seized from Its Jewish Founders
Wertheim department stores / AWAG / Karstadt / 1930s-2000s
Wertheim was one of Germany's most spectacular retail empires, built by the Jewish Wertheim family from a modest 1875 clothing and manufactured-goods shop in Stralsund into a nationwide department-store chain. Its Berlin flagship on Leipziger Platz, designed by Alfred Messel and expanded into a vast 26,000-square-metre architectural landmark with 83 elevators, two glass-roofed atriums, monumental sculpture, and multiple sales floors, represented the commercial confidence of modern Jewish-owned Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, that success made the company a target. Jewish employees were expelled under government orders, while the family attempted to preserve control by transferring shares to Georg Wertheim's wife, Ursula, who was classified as Aryan under Nazi racial law. The couple even divorced in an effort to place the company in legally 'Aryan' hands, but the maneuver failed. The family was ultimately forced to sell its remaining shares to non-Jewish owners at reduced prices, an act of state-engineered expropriation rather than a voluntary business transaction. In 1939 the company was stripped of the Wertheim name and renamed AWAG, Allgemeine Warenhandelsgesellschaft A.G.; the Wertheim family fled Nazi Germany.
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