About this place
Rising above the Meßberg square, this eight-storey Kontorhaus is one of the founding buildings of Hamburg's famous office-house quarter, completed in 1924 to designs by the Jewish architects Hans and Oskar Gerson. It was originally named the Ballinhaus after Albert Ballin, the Jewish shipping magnate who built the HAPAG line into the largest in the world. Its warm clinker brick, crystalline entrances and monumental pilasters make it a proud example of North German brick expressionism, and it stands today as part of the UNESCO World Heritage Speicherstadt and Kontorhaus District. Yet its beauty carries a terrible shadow. From 1928 the upper floors housed the trading firm Tesch and Stabenow, known as Testa, which from 1941 supplied nearly all of the Zyklon B pesticide used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Majdanek and other camps. In 1938 the Nazi authorities erased Ballin's name from the facade, and after the war the building became a site of long dispute over how, and whether, to remember what had been ordered from within its walls.
Key facts
- 1924 year — Completed as the Ballinhaus, designed by the Jewish architects Hans and Oskar Gerson
- 1938 year — Renamed the Meßberghof after the Nazis stripped away shipping magnate Albert Ballin's Jewish name
- 1946 year — Bruno Tesch, whose firm here delivered Zyklon B to the camps, was tried and executed
📍 Pumpen 17, 20095, Hamburg