The single-family house, the predecessor of the current Molthan house, was built in 1960 by my father, Josef Molthan.
My father was born in Mainz in 1897 and, as a high school student, volunteered for military service at the beginning of the First World War in 1914. After four years of military service in France, he returned home as a first lieutenant and then passed his high school diploma. He was unable to study law as he intended because he had to take over the company of his father, who died unexpectedly. In the economically difficult 1930s, after inflation and high unemployment in 1923, he liquidated the company - it was a wine wholesaler - and joined the re-established Wehrmacht in 1936. In 1938 he was transferred to the military district command in Darmstadt and was then head of the military registration office until almost the end of the war, ultimately with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
On the night of the fire in Darmstadt on September 11, 1944, he and his family suffered the fate of many Darmstadt residents: the total bombing at Heinrichstrasse 140. In the years that the family spent in the countryside in Groß-Umstadt - everyone had gotten out of the cellar of the burning house - he tried to make his long-held dream of owning his own house come true.
