Felicia Mosse was the daughter of Rudolf and Emilie Mosse, born in 1888 and adopted by the couple in 1889. She was the Mosses’ only child, and the heir to their vast publishing empire and valuable estate. In 1909, Felicia married Hans Lachmann, an accountant who worked for her father, and they combined their last names, becoming the Lachmann-Mosses as a nod to the importance and weight of the Mosse legacy.

Hans served in the German army during the First World War, but returned home and took over leadership of the Mosse empire as Rudolf shifted into retirement. He was dedicated to the business, so much so that during an uprising in 1919 when Marxist revolutionaries occupied the Mossehaus, the publishing offices of their flagship newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, Hans spent the entire night with the revolutionaries in the building, debating their leaders and ensuring that the newspaper was printed and delivered the following day. The building was damaged in the uprising, and Hans oversaw its reconstruction under the direction of architect Erich Mendelsohn, who revitalized the Mossehaus with a compellingly streamlined and futuristic style that gave the building a distinctive look.

After Rudolf passed away in 1920 and Emilie in 1924, Hans and Felicia took over the Mosse empire. The couple continued the family’s dedication to philanthropy and patronage of the arts, supporting charities throughout the nation and adding to the Mosse Art Collection. The 1920s were an extremely difficult era in Germany, with much economic hardship, and Hans tried to keep the business afloat while ensuring their charitable efforts remained well funded to help the increasingly strained German populace. Felicia served as president of the Mädchenhort, a program to support working mothers and young girls that had been co-founded by her mother, and also ran a soup kitchen as well as an information booth for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Russia and Poland.

Hans served as chairman of the Jewish Reform Community of Berlin and as a board member of the Berlin Philharmonic. A music lover, he oversaw a collection of recordings of his Jewish community’s musical liturgy, performed by some of the greatest musicians and singers in Berlin. These recordings have been used in synagogues around the world, and today they remain a remarkable artifact of pre-WW2 Jewish culture.

Hans also carried on his father-in-law’s dedication to a democratic Germany, and his newspapers took a strong stance against the rise of Hitler and National Socialism as they began to gain support in the nation. The Mosse empire was so firmly against the fascist movement that Nazi leadership began to call the Mosses out by name as symbols of the hated “Jewish press.”

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, a top official in the Nazi Secret Police (Gestapo) visited Hans and forced him to sign over the company and the estate. In return, the Mosses and their Jewish workers were allowed to leave the country. The Nazis claimed the Mosse empire was bankrupt and that they were saving their newspapers and other holdings, but this was a lie. While the company had endured a challenging decade as the Great Depression further exacerbated Germany’s existing economic hardships, it was by no means bankrupt. Hitler simply wanted the Mosses out. The Nazis liquidated the Mosse Art Collection, partly through public auction and partly through back channel deals with their supporters, and the publishing empire was dismantled. 

Hans, Felicia, and their children, Hilde, Rudolf, and George, fled the country, and the couple divorced soon after. Hans moved to Paris, where he married Carola Strauch (the daughter of German writer Alfred Bock), who had a child, Karl, from her first marriage. Everyone in the family eventually emigrated to the United States, where the children continued the commitment to education and social progress that had epitomized the Mosse legacy in Berlin. Hans died in 1944 in Oakland, California, where he’d become a patron of the local art scene. Felicia died in 1972 in New York City, where she lived near Hilde. She never remarried, and the stresses of the decades previous were hard on her mental health, but her family cared for her well.