Ludwig Roselius, born in Bremen in 1874, founded Café HAG in 1906 on a process that steamed green coffee beans in brine, opened their pores, and washed out the caffeine with benzene. He poured the fortune into avant-garde art, backing Paula Modersohn-Becker and sculptor Bernhard Hoetger, and from 1902 turned Böttcherstraße in Bremen into a brick expressionist work of art, adding his Glockenspiel house in 1928. His Coffee HAG albums of town coats of arms worked like a loyalty program built on regional pride.

Roselius became chairman of Bremen aircraft maker Focke-Wulf in 1925, and by 1938 his coffee group held 46 percent while ITT, through Lorenz AG, held 28 percent. He was a patron member of the SS and met Hitler as early as 1922, yet the party rejected his membership twice over his expressionist art and his theory of a Lower German race. After a 1934 bone cancer diagnosis cost him his left leg, he hired philosopher Barbara Goette, who he said saved his life after Hitler denounced him at the September 1936 Nuremberg rally, and who pushed him toward joining the German resistance in 1942.

• Barbara Goette had passed her state exams with distinction in mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Kiel.
• She urged Roselius to address the conditions of forced laborers and prisoners of war at Focke-Wulf plants.
• He had a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 fitted with 26 seats because her birthday fell on the 26th.
• She cared for him at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin until his death in May 1943.
• After the war Coffee HAG funded the rebuilding of bombed Böttcherstraße, now home to the Ludwig Roselius Museum.