Freundlich Kaltlagerhäuser GmbH

<p>The first world war saw&nbsp;a further extension of business of the Maschinfabrik A. Freundlich .</p><p>In 1915, on request of the military, a cold storage house was built&nbsp;with the intention of a moth-secure&nbsp;summer storage of 120.000 fur coats, which had been donated as part of the so called &quot;Hindenburg-Spende&quot;, for soldiers at the eastern front. As the coats never returned from the front, Abraham Freundlich, the proprietor,&nbsp;started to successfully experiment with how to freeze whole halves of&nbsp;cows and pork, something&nbsp;which until then had not been done successfully. Thus&nbsp;the storage facility became an important element in safeguarding the provision of meat for the population of the Rhine/Ruhr area during the war.</p><p>In those days there where probably only about a dozen such cold storage companies in Germany and with 3.000sqm storage space it was one of the more sizable once.</p><p>With the ascent to power of the Nazis in 1933 everything was to change for the business and the families. The anti-Semitic boycott and recrimination against the family made it impossible to carry on and in March 1936 the family was forced to sell&nbsp;its main business the Maschinenfabrik A. Freundlich,&nbsp;at an inappropriate low price to an &ldquo;aryan&rdquo; proprietor.</p><p>In 1938&nbsp;after, even by the standards of the time,&nbsp;particularly nasty and personal campaign against the business&nbsp;by the then Lord Mayor of D&uuml;sseldorf, Hans&nbsp;Wagenf&uuml;hr, who in September&nbsp;1936 brought legal charges against all firms and persons still using the &quot;no-&nbsp;aryan&quot; cold storage facilities of&nbsp;the Freundlich family,&nbsp;the cooling storage facilities (Kaltlagerh&auml;user)&nbsp;also had to be sold&nbsp;well below market value to a local &quot;aryan&quot;, butter trader&nbsp;Robert&nbsp;Lemmerholz. Even that insufficient&nbsp;purchase&nbsp;price was&nbsp;not fully paid to the family, but had was&nbsp;partly converted into a &quot;compensatory levy&quot; in favour of the NSDAP by Lemmerholz.</p><p>In 1953, the Neuss based,&nbsp;Sch&uuml;tten&nbsp;&amp; Lemmerholz GmbH agreed to pay&nbsp;a court approved&nbsp;compensation payment in lieu of restitution to the family.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>