Klauser’s 1930s Expansion Through the Aryanization of Jewish Shoe Shops

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Klauser’s 1930s Expansion Through the Aryanization of Jewish Shoe Shops

Klauser Schuhe / Klara Klauser / 1930s

Klauser Schuhe’s early growth was intertwined with the Nazi-era expropriation of Jewish businesses. In 1936, Klara Klauser purchased a shoe shop from Walter Kamp, who was emigrating to the United States; the transaction is described in the company’s historical record as an acquisition of a Jewish business by an “Aryan” entrepreneur. Two years later, in 1938, Klauser took over a second shop from Siegfried Rosenberg after he was forced to abandon it amid a boycott campaign against Jewish commerce. The company also acquired the Schuhpalast in Barmen, an established business founded in 1889 and previously owned by Emil Rosendahl and Max Guggenheimer. Rosendahl later died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, placing the shop’s transfer within the broader system of economic persecution that stripped Jewish families of livelihoods before and during the Holocaust. These were not ordinary commercial acquisitions: Nazi boycotts, coercive antisemitic laws, emigration, and deportation created the conditions under which Jewish-owned enterprises could be sold or seized at drastically diminished value. Klauser subsequently became a major German shoe retailer, but its foundation-era acquisitions remain a stark example of how German retail fortunes could be built through the “Aryanization” of Jewish property.