The July flood killed almost 190 people and caused billions in property damage.

Thousands of people in the particularly affected areas in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia have lost almost all of their mementos with their household items.

In some places, however, the floods have brought things that have long been forgotten to the surface.

Pure burger

Political correspondent in North Rhine-Westphalia.

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In Hagen, behind a torn lightweight construction wall, a house owner came across a brick shaft with largely intact old letters, documents, brass knuckles, gas masks and a portrait of Hitler. It is material from a local office of the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV). The find, secured in around a dozen large plastic boxes by employees of the Hagen city archive and archaeologists from the Westphalia Lippe Regional Association, is currently still being viewed.

NSV members had thrown the underlay into the 30 centimeter wide cavity when American troops marched into Hagen in April 1945. "That must have happened very hectically," says archive manager Ralf Blank of the FAZ. "Such hasty disposal operations are known from countless diary campaigns, but to actually be able to secure such a find once, that alone is a very exciting thing."

Blank does not only consider the find interesting in terms of urban history, he hopes that the objects and documents will help historians to research the workings and the entanglement of the NSV and its members in the NSV injustice regime. The National Socialist People's Welfare, about which little has been published so far, was a party organization of the NSDAP. When the workers' welfare organization was smashed in the course of the “Gleichschaltung” in 1933, its employees persecuted and their property confiscated, the NSV joined the remaining welfare organizations as a state organization. The NSV did not get the welfare monopoly, but it played an increasingly important role in the “Third Reich”. Numerous municipalities transferred youth welfare tasks to the National Socialist organization.

The NSV ran its own kindergartens and several aid organizations and from 1940 organized the so-called Kinderland Dispatch. There is evidence of all these aspects in the Hagen find, says Blank. "We hope, for example, to come across files on the distribution of so-called Jewish furniture." Because the NSV benefited from the systematic robbery of Jewish citizens. A recently published study shows that the then legal department of Frankfurt donated the assets of Jewish foundations to the NSV, among others.