How a sale by the historic auction house Christie’s has sparked a huge controversy linked to the Nazis

This Wednesday the 10th and Friday the 12th, a luxurious hotel in Geneva (Switzerland) hosts an auction that will include “one of the largest jewelery collections” in the world. The more than 700 pieces that are exhibited in it will be valued at a total of 150 million dollars, according to Christie’sthe historic British auction house that will be in charge of this event.

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The problem, however, is that many of these jewels carry the pain of thousands of Jewish families who tried to escape the terror unleashed by the Nazis during World War II.

STORY OF A HOUSE

Taking advantage of the massive trade in works of art caused by the French Revolution, the young Scotsman James Christie decided to open an auction house on December 5, 1766 in London.

Named in his honor, Christie’s began to excel in its field, holding some of the largest auctions in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Between 1973 and 1999, Christie’s operated as a public company, until the French billionaire Francois Pinault decided to buy it.

Throughout its history, Christie’s has auctioned works by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt; as well as pieces worn by personalities such as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte or Princess Diana of Wales.

Currently, Christie’s carries out more than 450 annual auctions in more than 80 different categories, which are organized by one of the 53 offices they have in 32 different countries.

A PAINFUL COLLECTION

The most recent of these hundreds of auctions, however, presents itself as a real image problem for the company.

The collection, which began selling online a few days ago, was owned by Heidi Horten, an Austrian heiress whose German husband built a retail empire since the 1930s in part with department stores and other goods sold by desperate Jews fleeing Germany. Nazi.

Among the most striking pieces in the collection of Horten, who passed away on June 12, 2022, is the 90-carat “India Briolette” diamond, the centerpiece of a necklace adorned with smaller diamonds, which commands an estimated price. presale from 10 to 15 million dollars. The “Sunrise Ruby,” a massive nearly 26-carat ruby ​​ring he bought for $30 million in 2015, is also up for auction.

There’s also a dazzling diamond necklace that could fetch $15 million or more. Not to mention that the largest amount of Bulgari jewelry ever assembled for a single auction is being put up for sale.

Although Helmut Horten, Heidi’s husband, could not be considered a fan of Nazism or a true follower, he also did not resist the laws dictated by them and was able to benefit from many of those policies, according to Peter Hoeres, a historian at the University from Würzburg, to whom Heidi commissioned an extensive study on her husband’s business empire.

“We were in 27 archives in Europe, and we read thousands of pages of sources, and I think that in the end (we discovered)… that there is no saint or devil, but there is Horten who… benefited from the circumstances of the tyranny of the Nazis,” Hoeres said in an interview according to the AP agency. “It cannot be said that Horten was part of the resistance against the dictatorship.”

The truth is that the controversy has not disappeared although from Christie’s they explained that the jewels that will be auctioned were not bought directly from Jews or that the profits obtained will go to the Horten art museum in Vienna, to social assistance for children and to the medical research, plus a portion that will go specifically to fund Holocaust education.

In early May, the Simon Wiesenthal Center – one of the world’s leading Jewish human rights groups – called for the auction to be lifted as Horten’s empire had been built on the boycott and harassment of the Strauss and Lauter families, owners of the Alsberg department store in Duisburg, during the Nazism.

In short, for the organization, the billions of dollars that Horten amassed and that allowed him to have the lavish collection are the “sum of the benefits of the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish department stores” under Nazi Germany.

Source: Elcomercio

jack

I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.