Austrian Society for Contemporary History (ÖGZ) honours study on the history of the building at Rothenbaumchaussee 38
Hendrik Althoff M.A., affiliated scholar at the IGdJ, was awarded the Alma Rosé-Prize of the Austrian Society for Contemporary History (ÖGZ) in Vienna on 16 December 2024. The prize is named after the Viennese violinist Alma Rosé, who was murdered in Auschwitz, and honors final theses that deal with the history of expropriation under National Socialism and the postwar reappraisal of property confiscation.
In his award-winning master's thesis “Rothenbaumchaussee 38. The biography of a house between robbery and restitution”, Hendrik Althoff investigated the history of a city villa that had served as an administrative building for Hamburg's Jewish community since 1916. After 1938, the building had to be forcibly sold to the Gestapo, which used it from 1941 to 1945 and organized the deportations of over 7,500 Jews from here. The Jewish community in Hamburg, which was newly founded in 1945, fought for the restitution of the property until 1960. A more detailed account can be found in a new article in the Vienna Research Blog on the Global History of Refugees, which was published on the occasion of the award ceremony.
Drawing on this case study, Hendrik Althoff is currently researching the property of the Jewish community in Hamburg in the DFG-funded project “Surviving Sites? The Property of German-Jewish Communities between Robbery and Restitution” under the direction of Prof. Dr. Birthe Kundrus and Dr. Kim Wünschmann at Universität Hamburg.
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