Nobody gave the SS its name
Studying law in Berlin
Gerhard Kallmann grew up with three siblings in Berlin. His father, who worked as a lawyer, died when Gerhard Kallmann was 17 years old. At the request of his father's younger partner, Gerhard Kallmann decided to study law in 1932 so that he could then become a partner in the company.
Assumption of power and emigration
After the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, Gerhard says he witnessed how SS men stood up threateningly in a lecture by the popular Jewish law professor Martin Wolff and tried to document the names of the students present, who were still being taught by a Jewish lecturer. In the following months, Wolff's lectures were repeatedly and loudly disrupted by members of the SA. At the end of March, Martin Wolff was violently dragged out of the lecture theatre by SA men, as another Jewish fellow student, Alfred Estreicher, recalls.
The news of the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 reached Gerhard over the radio when he was on a skiing holiday at the end of the semester. The sons of the rector of the university, Eduard Kohlrausch, with whom he was friends, were also there.
After the "R?hm murders" in June 1934, Gerhard decided to emigrate. He now realised that Hitler would never step down. He initially stayed with a good friend of his father's in Vienna for six months before emigrating to London, where he met his mother and siblings in 1936.
Training as an architect
Gerhard Kallmann was unable to apply his knowledge of the German legal system in England, especially as he had only got as far as the intermediate exam after three semesters of study. As he was already very interested in architecture as a schoolboy and had written about an international exhibition, for example, he decided to change subjects and studied architecture in London for five years.
As little was built in the UK after the Second World War, Gerhard followed his family to the USA, where he hoped to have better career prospects. He taught at various universities, founded an architecture firm in the 1960s that became famous for the new Boston City Hall and took part in the architectural competition for the US Embassy in Berlin in the 1990s.
Gerhard Kallmann died in Boston in June 2012.