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The area that the building occupies was once farmland owned by the Bötzow family. In 1885, the family, rich from agriculture, started selling off parcels, and investors began to build housing. The plot that would become 35 Lippehner Straße was bought in 1903 by mason Herrmann Knoll, who designed and built an Art Nouveau apartment building that he sold to Isidor and Lina Lewy. For the next few decades, 35 Lippehner was home to residents from a variety of social classes, some Jewish. Isidor died in 1936, leaving the building to Lina.¹ In 1938, the Nazis issued a decree that prohibited Jews from owning real estate, and Lina was forced to sell the building for a pittance to Richard and Charlotte Klaus, a Nazi-aligned couple who signed all their letters “Heil Hitler!”

The same year that Lina Lewy lost the building, the Nazis passed a law accelerating ghettoization by enabling landlords to evict Jewish residents without reason, claiming that “German-blooded” people should no longer have to live with Jews. The building was designated housing for Jewish families; the law required that tenants accommodate uprooted Jews as lodgers in their own homes, and the house began to fill.² Lina Lewy was arrested and deported in 1942; her daughter Charlotte Gossels was forced to work as a slave laborer and later killed at Auschwitz, but not before she managed to put her young sons Peter and Werner on a train to France in 1939. Four residents, Edwin and Rita Löwenberg and the sisters Hulda and Margarete Glasfeld, committed suicide in the house; sixty-five were transported to camps. Lütgemeyer tracked many of the transports through accounts of residents’ assets, written upon their arrest. Dealers often removed their furniture from 35 Lippehner within a day.