About us
A German Story.
A Calling That Became myWelt.
I’m German, living in the US, and I grew up in Hamburg. This isn’t a company that started with a business plan. It started with a family story — and a conviction I’ve carried my whole life.
A Family That Became
International — the Hard Way.
My family, the Raloffs, became a very international family — not by choice, at first, but because of German history. I have relatives today in Denmark, Sweden, the US, Canada, and Chile. That spread across the world didn’t happen by accident.
Why My Family Had to Leave Germany.
My great-uncles were part of an SPD family in Hamburg — Eimsbüttel and Altona — six brothers, all raised into the socialist youth movement by their parents. When the Nazis took power in 1933, every one of them lost their livelihood. Some paid a far higher price than that.
Karl Raloff was a member of the Reichstag for the SPD. In March 1933, he was one of only 94 members of parliament who voted against the Enabling Act — the law that handed Hitler the power to rule by decree, and that most of the Reichstag approved. Karl had to go into hiding almost immediately afterward. He fled to Denmark later that year; his family followed him months later. In 1938, Germany stripped him of his citizenship — he was stateless. When Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940, he had to flee again, escaping to Sweden in a small rowboat with three companions. He didn’t return to Germany until after the war, and didn’t get his German citizenship back until 1951.
Georg Raloff, Karl’s brother, was arrested on June 16, 1933, at the offices of the Hamburger Echo, along with the entire Hamburg SPD leadership meeting there that day. During interrogation, six of his teeth were knocked out. He was released about six weeks later, when the charges against him couldn’t be made to stick — but his home was searched repeatedly, his library of more than 400 books was confiscated, and he lived under police surveillance for a time. After the war, he spent nearly twenty years as a member of Hamburg’s parliament, until his death in 1965. A street in Hamburg — the Georg-Raloff-Ring — carries his name today.
A third brother, Friedrich, a jurist, volunteered for the Wehrmacht rather than accept a posting as a judge on the Nazi Sondergericht in Kiel. He didn’t come home from the war.
I grew up knowing this history — not as something distant, but as the reason my family looked the way it did, scattered across countries that had taken them in when their own turned on them.
Guests From Everywhere,
at Our Table.
My parents were always open to international people — it was simply how our house worked. We had guests from all over Europe, from Africa, from South America, at our table, for weeks or months at a time. I grew up believing something very specific: that international exchange, real exchange between people and families, is one of the few things that actually prevents wars — and prevents the kind of desperate fleeing my own family once had to do.
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
Galatians 6:9Never Again. That’s the Whole Point.
Because of my family’s story, I’ve always felt a kind of calling to do everything I can to make sure what happened in Germany during the Nazi era never happens again. myWelt is one small, practical way I know how to act on that — bringing young people from around the world to live, study, and actually understand life in Hamburg. Real exchange, not tourism. The same thing that once meant survival for my own family.
Start an Application →