The shadow of the jewelry auction: Getting rich from the assets of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany

The auction house announced that the proceeds from the sale of one of the largest jewelry collections will be allocated to the Heidi Horten Art Museum in Vienna, children's welfare and medical research.

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Photo: Reuters
Photo: Reuters
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Auction house Kristi launched today the sale of hundreds of pieces of jewelry belonging to Austrian billionaire Heidi Horten, whose husband, a German businessman, made his fortune by trading property sold by Jews while fleeing Nazi Germany.

More than 700 pieces of jewelry that were owned by that Austrian patron (1941-2022) are in this collection whose value is estimated at more than 150 million dollars.

The auction house announced that the proceeds from the sale of one of the largest collections of jewelry will be allocated to the Vienna Heidi Horten Art Museum, children's welfare and medical research.

Faced with mounting criticism over the auction, Christie said she plans to invest a portion of the proceeds from the sale in Holocaust education.

The sale was opened a little earlier for online purchases, but those interested in jewelry who want to buy in person will be able to do so today and on Friday at a luxury hotel in Geneva.

Among the items on offer will be outstanding 20th-century pieces signed by Cartier, Harry Winston, Bouaven and Van Cleef and Arpels, as well as a large selection of beads, jade pieces and Bulgari creations from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. .

The Austrian billionaire died in June 2022, a few days after she opened a private art museum in Vienna where her art collection was presented. According to Forbes, her fortune was 2,9 billion dollars.

Born in Vienna, the daughter of an engraver, she worked in a law firm before attending hotel management school.

According to the house, Kristi met her future husband, more than 30 years her senior, while on vacation with her parents in an Austrian village, and married him in 1966.

Horten, the owner of one of the largest department stores in Germany, died in 1987 in Krolj, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where there is a foundation that bears his name.

The foundation describes him as an entrepreneur with a keen sense of social responsibility who started Germany's first supermarket in the late 1950s.

On the website of Canton Ticino, it is stated that he built his empire from the 1930s during which he acquired many properties.

In 1936, three years after the arrival of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, he took over the Alsberg textile company based in Duisburg after the flight of its Jewish owners, after which he took over several other shops that belonged to Jews before the war.

Later, some accused him of profiting from the "Aryanization" of Jewish assets (measures that transferred the ownership of companies belonging to persons of Jewish origin).

"After the end of the Second World War, he was captured by the British and interned until 1948 in an institution in the west of Germany," according to the announcement of the Canton of Ticino.

According to a report published in January 2022 by historians hired by the Horten Foundation, which included Peter Heres, he was indeed a member of the Nazi party, before he was expelled and subsequently exonerated by the denazification committee.

However, the origin of his fortune, which his wife inherited, casts a shadow over this major auction sale, and some historians have criticized it in the media.

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