Residential building for survivors of the Shoah from the Föhrenwald DP camp

In the 1950s, Nassauische Heimstätte (now the Nassauische Heimstätte/Wohnstadt (NHW) group of companies) also built apartments for survivors of the Shoah in cooperation with the city of Frankfurt am Main. To this end, in 1953 the city increased its capital contributions in favor of Heimstätte and the housing associations it manages by two million Deutschmarks. With this amount, Nassauische Heimstätte built 30 social housing units in Ostend, more precisely on the corner of Waldschmidtstraße and Röderbergweg, for so-called "DPs" (displaced persons); these were around 125 Jewish women, men and children who came to Frankfurt from the Bavarian DP camp Föhrenwald near Wolfratshausen, which had been dissolved by 1957. In addition to the Main metropolis, eight West German cities had agreed to take in "DPs". This was preceded by lengthy disputes over the building site between the Free State of Bavaria, the federal government and the municipality, but the apartments were finally occupied in 1957, albeit against the wishes of Frankfurt's head of social affairs, Rudolf Prestel, who did not want to take in any Jewish "DPs". The two buildings at Waldschmidtstraße 129 and 131 quickly became known among non-Jewish Frankfurters as the defamatory term "Jewish block". Childhood memories of contemporary witnesses say: "We were the underdogs. We were the Eastern European Jews in Ostend." The parents' generation spoke almost exclusively Yiddish; the grandparents' generation had been murdered in the Shoah. Compared to other new Nassauische Heimstätte buildings, the furnishings of the apartments, for example in the kitchen and sanitary facilities, were more primitive.