Nazi Cloud Hangs Over One of the Largest Jewelry Sales in History

Blazing sapphires and plush emeralds drip from the necklaces, brooches and bracelets. One standout piece, the “Briolette of India,” features a 90-carat diamond and carries a excessive estimate of $7.8 million.

They are among the many 700 jewels from the property of an Austrian heiress that may go on sale at Christie’s on May 3 as a part of one of many largest jewellery gross sales in historical past. The public sale home is predicting that jewels from the property of Heidi Horten, the heiress who died final 12 months, will deliver in additional than $150 million, surpassing the $137 million taken in through the 2011 sale of Elizabeth Taylor’s assortment.

The proceeds are to profit a charitable basis established by Horten, whose husband, Helmut, was a German retailing billionaire whose specialty was department shops.

“It’s one of the most beautifully curated collections that will ever come up in the jewelry world,” mentioned Anthea Peers, president of Christie’s Europe, Middle East and Africa. “This is a sale that will do an enormous amount for philanthropy. That’s important for the estate and for us.”

But the public sale home has acknowledged that, in deciding to host the sale, it additionally needed to grapple with the truth that Helmut Horten’s enterprise empire was constructed atop his buy of firms from Jews who had been pressed to promote by the Nazis.

“We are aware there is a painful history,” Peers mentioned. “We weighed that up against various factors,” she added, saying that the muse is “a key driver of philanthropic causes.”

The Heidi Horten Foundation funds medical analysis and runs a museum within the coronary heart of Vienna that options the expansive artwork assortment she constructed. Several historians and the daughter of a businessman who labored for a Jewish-owned firm focused for acquisition by Helmut Horten through the Nazi period mentioned the philanthropic advantages right this moment should not adequate to warrant a gross sales occasion that has the impact of obscuring the roots of the household’s fortune.

“He laid the foundations of his wealth during the Third Reich by acquiring companies on the cheap at fire-sale prices from Jewish business owners under duress,” mentioned David de Jong, the writer of a latest ebook on Nazi billionaires. De Jong mentioned that in a number of cases, such because the 1936 buy of the Alsberg division retailer in Duisburg, Germany, Horten had paid not more than 65 % of the corporate’s worth.

Horten was 27 on the time of the Alsberg sale and marketed his buy in a Nazi social gathering newspaper, saying the shop had “passed into Aryan ownership.”

The Aryanization of Jewish companies in Germany passed off in two levels. Before 1938, stress from the Third Reich led Jews to promote their companies, at instances at deep reductions. After 1938, the gross sales had been usually pressured, and the costs paid typically sank even decrease. Horten was lively throughout each phases, in accordance with historians, who mentioned he was concerned in offers that spanned the Nazi takeover of Europe from Amsterdam to East Prussia.

Last 12 months, a historian employed by Heidi Horten to analyze the character of her husband’s fortune launched a prolonged report that mentioned Helmut Horten had clearly benefited from the acquisition of Jewish companies bought beneath duress, however that the extent of wealth he realized from these actions had been exaggerated.

The historian, Peter Hoeres, mentioned in his report that whereas Horten had exploited his alternatives, he had initially paid “quite normal market prices” for the Jewish firms, had been “comparatively fair” in relation to the offers struck by different German businessmen and needed to navigate his personal complicated relationship with the Nazis.

The research concluded that Horten’s actions had been ruled by an opportunistic enterprise sense slightly than Nazi ideology, and it cited a number of cases by which Horten saved on some Jews as both workers or suppliers, in distinction to the federal government’s efforts. It additionally famous that, though Horten was a Nazi social gathering member, he was later expelled.

Critics of the report have mentioned it downplayed the extent to which Horten benefited from Aryanization.

“As a historian, I could not agree with the main narratives in the Hoeres report,” mentioned Birgit Kirchmayr, a member and senior adviser of the Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, explaining that it was not sufficient to simply say that Horten “was not worse than others.”

Hoeres has defended his research as balanced, although in an interview he mentioned he regretted utilizing the phrase “comparatively fair,” which he mentioned had led some to mistakenly conclude he was minimizing the influence Horten had on Jewish enterprise homeowners. He famous that his report had surfaced data that Horten used pressured labor at a Berlin firm he bought in 1943 that repaired airplanes. “We have done research in 27 archives in Europe and have read thousands of articles and talked to a lot of contemporary witnesses,” he mentioned in an e-mail, calling the outcomes a “good job.”

“We have tried to get the facts and we have not tried to whitewash it,” Hoeres mentioned. “What you have is a mixed picture of Horten.”

Among those that have taken situation with the report is Stephanie Stephan, a journalist in Munich, who launched a ebook final 12 months detailing Horten’s acquisition of Jewish companies. She mentioned the topic had been fairly private to her as a result of her father, Reinhold Stephan, had been on the board of one of many firms, Gerzon, a trend home with headquarters in Amsterdam. She mentioned the Jewish homeowners had been pressured to promote to Horten, and he or she revealed an affidavit from considered one of them, Arthur Marx, who mentioned Horten had threatened them with being deported to focus camps in the event that they resisted his takeover.

“My father rebelled against Horten from the very beginning because he knew that he had already forced several Jewish owners of department stores in Germany to sell their department stores for ridiculous sums,” Stephan mentioned. “He immediately dismissed my father. Horten made sure that my father was imprisoned several times and finally was expelled from the Netherlands.”

Hoeres mentioned in an interview that in an upcoming ebook he’ll cite analysis that demonstrates Horten by no means finalized the acquisition of Gerzon, and he disputed the accuracy of Marx’s affidavit, saying it was not supported by data from that period.

Heidi Horten was 19 when she met her future husband, who was greater than three many years older. They married in 1966, and when Helmut Horten died in 1987, she inherited almost a billion {dollars}.

Her husband’s conduct through the warfare surfaced as a subject of dialogue in recent times as she labored to open a museum for her artwork assortment in Vienna that’s operated by the Heidi Horten Foundation. The basis didn’t reply to questions.

The historian’s overview was commissioned then to handle the questions that had been raised.

Now these questions have surfaced once more as Christie’s prepares for the sale. Kirchmayr, the member of the Austrian restitution panel, famous that the public sale coincides with the twenty fifth anniversary of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a treaty now used around the globe to “expeditiously” promote “just and fair solutions” to restitution claims. (Christie’s organized a dialogue in Paris marking the event earlier this 12 months.)

Kirchmayr mentioned she would have favored to have seen extra transparency within the advertising supplies Christie’s put ahead to advertise the Horten sale. None of it initially talked about Helmut Horten’s dealings with Jewish enterprise homeowners.

“You can say that the jewelry itself is not looted,” Kirchmayr acknowledged. “But the money is connected with the Nazi past, and this is a fact that has to be mentioned in the biographies of the collectors.”

After some criticism of the sale surfaced, Christie’s added a point out of Horten’s buy of Jewish companies that had been “sold under duress” and mentioned it could donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to Holocaust analysis and training.

“It was never Christie’s intention to hide information about the well-documented history of Mr. Horten,” Guillaume Ceruti, the chief government at Christie’s, mentioned in a press release.

Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley contributed reporting.