Faceless and barren: GBO apartment buildings during the Nazi era

Between 1936 and 1939, the GBO built a total of 55 rental apartments in 11 buildings in the Tempelsee district: at Brunnenweg 35-37 and 88-96, Weserstraße 45-47 and Wilhelm-Schramm-Straße 7-9. The GBO's construction activities came to a standstill at the beginning of the Second World War. The Tempelsee apartments were intended for people who were considered "underprivileged" and therefore earned little money. This was no different to the early days of the Weimar Republic, when the GBO was founded at the end of December 1921.

The fact that the apartment buildings in the Tempelsee district appear dreary is no coincidence, but an expression of the Nazis' architectural ideas for rental housing. Its aesthetic sparseness was the counterpoint to the ostentatious neo-classicism that the Nazis staged with their monumental representative buildings in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and Linz.

Whether the GBO adapted its architectural ideas to the Nazi doctrine or whether those who were responsible for the housing construction company at the time preferred aesthetically sparse rental housing of their own accord cannot be determined due to the scarcity of sources. What is clear is that the National Socialists sought to control housing construction centrally from the very beginning of their dictatorship. Reich decree followed Reich decree, some of which were still in force until the 1960s.

The Nazi control mania also encompassed "building design". On November 10, 1936, the "Decree on Building Design" was issued. According to this, the houses had to be an "expression of a decent architectural spirit and a workmanlike design" (§1).

From the sparse archive material held in Offenbach and Darmstadt, the GBO's behavior during the Third Reich can only be traced in broad strokes. There is no doubt that Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 was also a turning point for the GBO. This affected, for example, the appointment of notaries who had to certify property purchases and financial transactions.

The founding document of the building society from December 1921 was initialled by the Jewish lawyer and Hessian notary Dr. Siegfried Guggenheim. Guggenheim, born in Worms in 1873, had been a partner in the renowned Offenbach law firm of Otto von Brentano since 1900. Von Brentano later became Minister of the Interior and Justice in the state of Hesse.

Guggenheim, who worked as a patron of the arts in Offenbach for decades ─ a close friend of the Protestant type designer Rudolf Koch, who worked at the Klingspor Bros. type foundry and at the technical colleges ─ was the last chairman of the Offenbach Jewish Religious Community, founded in 1707, before the Shoah. From June 16, 1933, however, Guggenheim was no longer allowed to work as a notary. This was a consequence of the anti-democratic and racist "Professional Civil Servants Act" passed by the Nazis on April 7, 1933. According to this law, Jews could no longer practise professions with so-called public law or public effectiveness. Guggenheim was removed from the list of the Hessian Chamber of Notaries. Later, Guggenheim was only allowed to work as a lawyer for Jews.

After the November pogrom of 1938, Guggenheim was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and tortured there for three weeks. The Gestapo forced him and his wife Eugenie to leave Germany in December 1938. The Guggenheim couple sought refuge in Flushing, New York, USA. In October 1948, the city of Offenbach made Guggenheim an honorary citizen. After much hesitation and initially reluctantly, Guggenheim accepted this honor.

Offenbach notary Josef Goedecker was involved in the legal handling of the first building project created by GBO during the Nazi era at Brunnenweg 86-96. As a notary, he notarized the deed of debt and mortgage order for the GBO on August 10, 1936.

Goedecker's office stamp stands out on the document. Below the imperial eagle, whose head, seen from the viewer, is turned to the left, the swastika is attached to the eagle's claws: The national emblem of the Nazi state. The certificate of debt bears this symbol on the first and last page, together with the name of the law firm in the emblem.

Not only did the Hessian notaries Guggenheim and Stein part ways with the GBO at the beginning of the Nazi era, but different attitudes towards the Hitler dictatorship also emerged among the GBO's founding members. On March 27, 1933, the National Socialists removed Mayor Aull, who had represented the city of Offenbach on the Supervisory Board when the GBO was founded in 1921 and in the following years, from office. The Social Democrat had only been re-elected as mayor for 12 years in 1929. Aull ─ married to a Jewish woman who managed to emigrate to China in time ─ hanged himself in Offenbach on November 25, 1938 out of despair over the November pogrom against the Jews in Germany.

In the meantime, the traditional and internationally renowned Collet & Engelhardt machine tool factory, whose owners were among the founders of the GBO, had been transformed into a model National Socialist company. In the canteen of Collet & Engelhardt, which had almost 1000 employees, a large swastika banner of the NSDAP hung at the front. The nationalist "workers' poet" Heinrich Lersch ("Germany must live, even if we have to die!", 1914), who was an NSDAP member, was invited to give a reading to the workforce in January 1936.

In October 1938, Collet & Engelhardt's "company community" pledged unwavering loyalty to the "Führer and Reich Chancellor" in a telegram to Hitler on the occasion of a fundraising campaign for student German refugees ─ according to the Nazi newspaper "Offenbacher Zeitung", the workers had given up their company outing ─ and promised a donation of 10,000 marks.

Throughout the Nazi era, representatives of Collet & Engelhardt remained on the supervisory board of GBO, as did leading figures from other large companies, each of which supported the Nazi regime in their own way.

Collet & Engelhardt was one of the companies that employed the most forced laborers during the Second World War: 304 people in 1943. Maschinenfabrik Hartmann AG, whose representative was also one of the GBO founders, employed 117 forced laborers. The company Gebr. Heyne employed 234 forced laborers that year. Three members of the Heyne family were among the founders of GBO. During the Nazi era, several members of the family joined the NSDAP, albeit late, around 1940, including Julius Heyne, co-founder of GBO. During the so-called denazification process after the end of the Third Reich, he was classified in "Group IV": "fellow travelers".

Whether the remaining circle of GBO founders had anti-Nazi attitudes can hardly be determined from the current sources. However, a handwritten note on a letter from the "Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft" (Society for the Promotion of the Institute for the World Economy) is worthy of note. It reads: "Temporarily resign (/) resignation declared 9.12.42". The note can be read on a letter that the Society for the Promotion of the Institute for World Economics had sent to the board of Hartmann AG on December 1, 1942. It was about increasing the annual sponsorship contribution from 50 to 100 Reichsmarks. Hartmann AG had not responded to this request.

What kind of institution was the Kiel-based "Institute for the World Economy"? In short, it was a "think tank" for Hitler's military and racist conquest of Eastern Europe. One of its most zealous employees was the agricultural scientist Theodor Oberländer, who later worked for seven years under Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as Minister for Expellees during the "reconstruction" era, a rabid enemy of the Jews who was still practicing what we today call "ethnic cleansing" in this country in the 1950s. What prompted the Offenbach-based Hartmann company to leave the sponsoring association for this institute in 1942 is an open question: should operating costs be reduced? Were they opposed to Hitler's military conquests in the East? Were they generally opposed to the Nazis?

However, even in the early years of the Hitler dictatorship, GBO was not without competition in the field of rental housing for the "underprivileged". One of its rivals was the small housing association "Odenwaldring". This company was supported by the city administration, whose highest official since 1934 was the NSDAP mayor Helmuth Schranz.

In 1936, a total of 55 tiny houses were built on the corner of Weikertsblochstraße and Sprendlinger Landstraße, known as "Volkswohnungen" in Nazi jargon. Further buildings followed in 1938, including the "Milchhof" on Sprendlinger Landstraße and "Volkswohnungen" in Bürgel as well as eight detached houses on Donauweg in the "Tempelsee" district. In June 1938, the Nazi newspaper "Offenbacher Nachrichten" praised the fact that the small housing construction company "Odenwaldring" had been in "very close contact" with the city administration on these construction projects.

On January 1, 1943, the three most important Offenbach companies for rental housing construction were merged: GBO merged with the housing construction company that it had founded in 1929 with the Frankfurt construction company Philipp Holzmann ("Holzmannblock") and with the small housing construction company "Dornbusch", which GBO had also formed in 1929 together with Offenbach construction companies.

The fact that housing construction had been in decline since the beginning of the Second World War and that the financial resources of the respective companies were likely to have been scarce probably played a role in this merger, as did the Nazi authorities' desire to centralize authority. At the time of unification, the society had 96 houses with a total of 769 apartments and six stores.

The Allied air raids during the Second World War caused severe damage to the GBO. The air raid on March 18, 1944 alone destroyed 18 houses in Lilistraße and Andréstraße. These houses were located near the Offenbach harbor and important Offenbach metal industry companies, such as Collet & Engelhardt. These were strategic targets for the Allied Nazi opponents. In the "Holzmannblock" on the corner of Waldstraße and Birkenlohrstraße, 202 apartments were destroyed by the air raids. Of the other GBO apartments, 250 were damaged, up to a third of them.

However, the GBO recovered quickly after the collapse of the Hitler dictatorship. The housing shortage was still great and the will for a democratic new beginning had grown. The GBO repaired the damaged apartments and even built new ones. The first new houses were ready for occupation as early as January 1950: 24 apartments at Dornbuschstrasse 1 and 3.