Alsterhaus

The Alsterhaus is a five-story department store at Jungfernstieg 16–20 in Hamburg that opened in 1912. From 1994 to 2014 it was a branch of the department store group Karstadt (as part of Karstadt Premium GmbH), after which it was made a part of KaDeWe Group GmbH together with Oberpollinger in Munich and the KaDeWe in Berlin. The department store has a sales area of around 24,000 m2 (260,000 sq ft) and specializes in items such as perfume, accessories, clothing and delicatessen. On the fourth floor there is a Le-Buffet restaurant with a view of the Binnenalster. It is open Monday to Saturday from 10 A.M. to 8 P.M. The Alsterhaus also has its own parking garage, which can be reached via Poststraße and Bei der Stadtwassermühle street.

The Gera merchant Oscar Tietz opened the first branch of his department store Hermann Tietz (Hertie) in Hamburg on March 1, 1897, on Großer Burstah with a wide range of products on textiles, food, furniture, carpets and books. He acquired a 5200 square meter area on Jungfernstieg, which had developed into the first address in Hamburg. On the area where Scholviens Passage, the Hotel zum Kronprinzen and other houses were located, he built a new branch of his "Hermann Tietz department store", which opened on April 24, 1912. The construction costs for the department store with an upscale range and furnishings such as marble and crystal chandeliers amounted to 4½ million gold reichsmarks. The plans were drawn up by the architectural firm Cremer & Wolffenstein, and Richard Jacobssen from Hamburg was in charge of construction. The property was previously secured with 5,000 oak posts that were driven into the soft earth on the banks of the Alster.

In the economic crisis after 1929, sales at Tietz department stores fell by up to 46%. The Aryanization of the department store was preceded by a liquidity bottleneck, which resulted in the refusal of a credit line that had already been promised in 1933. In March 1933, the managing directors, the brothers Georg and Martin Tietz, as well as their brother-in-law Hugo Zwillenberg, were presented with a debt relief plan, which ultimately led to the sale of the Tietz family's shares to Commerzbank, Deutsche and Dresdner Bank without direct government intervention ("cold Aryanization") led. On July 24, 1933 the creditor banks founded the Hertie Kaufhaus-Beteiligungs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. (short : Hertie GmbH). On July 29, 1933, the banking consortium forced the immediate resignation of Hugo Zwillenberg from management and ownership with a formal inheritance law settlement agreement. Instead, the banks appointed the textile department manager of Hermann Tietz OHG, Georg Karg, as a representative of Hertie GmbH with a 50,000 Reichsmark deposit as one of the managing director and shareholder of the department store group. Hertie GmbH came into being without any capital contribution of its own, but had a majority of votes among the shareholders. The Jewish Shareholders had to hand over their shares to Hertie GmbH and were reimbursed an amount of 1½ million Reichsmarks for their severely undervalued company assets of 21½ million Reichsmarks. The von Eglau, Neumann and from Munzinger Archive circulated "AbfiHowever, the "foundation of twelve million marks" cannot be proven. Two Aryan managers were appointed for the department stores. One of the two managing directors was Georg Karg, who had previously been in charge of textile purchasing for the Tietz houses. He acquired the shares from the banks in two installments during the war. The Hermann Tietz department store on Jungfernstieg was then given its current name Alsterhaus in 1935. (For more information see: Expropriation of Tietz.) Historians have found evidence that in 1943 and 1944 the Alsterhaus sold textiles that had been

Data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).