Leo Bendel (born 1868 in Strezwo, Poland, then Galicia, Austria-Hungary; died 30 March 1940 in Buchenwald concentration camp) was an Austrian-born German Jewish tobacco dealer and art collector.
Bendel came to Berlin from Galicia around 1900 and became a tobacco dealer there. He was considered to be well-off, lived in Berlin-Dahlem and acquired several paintings and graphics over the years.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bendel was persecuted because of his Jewish origins. [1] [2] In 1935 he was dismissed from the position of general agent for the Job Cigarette Papers company because he was Jewish. [3] Together with his wife Else Bendel, he fled Nazi Germany, and between 1935 and 1937 he sold his art collection to finance his escape. In the summer of 1937 Leo and Else Bendel went to Vienna. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Bendel was arrested at the beginning of September 1939 and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. He died there in the spring of 1940. [4]
Else Bendel survived as a non-Jew under poor conditions in Vienna. After the war she made claims for compensation in Berlin; her application had not yet been decided when she died in September 1957. However, it was posthumously rejected. [5]
Leo Bendel's collection consisted of paintings, drawings, watercolors and etchings by Carl Spitzweg, Wilhelm Trübner, Walter Leistikow and Hans Thoma. To this day, two of the paintings by Carl Spitzweg are best known:
Rudolf August Oetker colloquially also R.A. Oetker was a German industrialist, businessman, ship owner and philanthropist. Most notably he turned Dr. Oetker, founded by his grandfather August Oetker, into a multinational food conglomerate. During World War II, Oetker was a member of the Nazi Party.
The Bavarian State Painting Collections, based in Munich, Germany, oversees artwork held by the Free State of Bavaria. It was established in 1799 as Centralgemäldegaleriedirektion. Artwork includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, video art and installation art. Pieces are on display in numerous galleries and museums throughout Bavaria.
The Museum Georg Schäfer is a German art museum in Schweinfurt, Bavaria. Based on the private art collection of German industrialist Georg Schäfer (1896–1975), the museum primarily collects 19th-century paintings by artists from German-speaking countries.
The Gurlitt Collection was a collection of around 1,500 art works inherited by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one of Hitler's official art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956), and which was found to have contained several artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis.
Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt was a German art collection owner. The son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art gallery director and Nazi-era dealer of looted art, Gurlitt inherited from his father a collection of over 1,400 artworks known as the Gurlitt trove or Gurlitt Collection, a small number of which were subsequently demonstrated to have been looted from Jews by Nazis. Upon its public discovery, the collection was impounded by the Augsburg Prosecutor's Office as evidence in a possible case for tax evasion that was never mounted; the works were not returned to Gurlitt's estate until after his death. In his will, Gurlitt left the entire collection, minus any works that turned out to be looted, to a lesser known gallery in Switzerland, the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, apparently in reaction over his perceived poor treatment by the German authorities.
Rudolph J. Heinemann, also known as Rudolf J. Heinemann, was a German-born American art dealer and collector of Old Masters. He was an advisor to Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who established a museum in Lugano, Switzerland with his help. Heinemann and later, his wife Lore, donated works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the National Gallery of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum.
Fritz Nathan was a German-Swiss gallery owner and art dealer.
The art collection of Ismar Littmann (1878–1934), a German lawyer who lived in Breslau, comprised 347 paintings and watercolors and 5,814 drawings from artists such as Lovis Corinth, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel, Max Liebermann, Käthe Kollwitz, Lucien Adrion, and Otto Mueller.
Max Silberberg was a major cultural figure in Breslau, a German Jewish entrepreneur, art collector and patron who was robbed and murdered by the Nazis. His art collection, among the finest of its era, has been the object of numerous restitution claims.
Julius Freund was a German entrepreneur and art collector persecuted by the Nazis because he was Jewish.
Dead City III is an oil on wood expressionist painting by Egon Schiele from 1911. It was owned by the Viennese cabaret artist Fritz Grünbaum before he was murdered by Nazis and has been the object of high-profile disputes and court battles. Suspected by New York's District Attorney of having been looted by the Nazis, Dead City III was temporarily confiscated from the Austrian art collector Rudolf Leopold after he loaned it to a New York museum in 1998. The ownership history of the painting has been the object of high-profile court cases in which two very different versions of the painting's journey from the Jewish Holocaust victim to the Austrian art collector collide.
Walter Westfeld or Westfield was a German Jewish art collector and art dealer whose collection was plundered by Nazis. Westfield was murdered in the Holocaust.
Lempertz is a German auction house which emerged from a bookstore and art gallery founded 1845 in Bonn, Germany. It is entirely owned and controlled by the Lempertz family and headquartered in Cologne, Germany.
Abraham Adelsberger was a German toy factory owner, councilor of commerce and art collector.
Paul Graupe was a German antiquarian bookseller and art dealer.
Swamp Legend ("Sumpflegende") is an oil-on-cardboard painting by Swiss German painter Paul Klee, from 1919. It has been in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, in Munich, since 1982, but its ownership was disputed due to its provenance. The painting was one of the works considered by the National Socialists as “degenerate art” and was confiscated from the Landesmuseum Hannover, in Hanover, in 1937. However, it was not owned by the museum, but was there on a loan from the art historian Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers. In July 2017 it became known that her heirs had reached an agreement with the city of Munich abouts its ownership.
Hedwig Frida Ullmann, née Nathan, was a German Jewish art collector and refugee.
The Warlock, also known as The Wizard and the Dragon, is the title of two oil on canvas paintings by German painter Carl Spitzweg, from 1875 and 1880. The original painting is now held in the Museum Georg Schäfer, in Schweinfurt, while the other is in a private collection. The two paintings are almost identical in motif but differ in size and color.
Justitia, also known as The Eye of the Law, is an oil on canvas painting by German painter Carl Spitzweg, created c. 1857. it is held in a private collection.
Spitzweg's The Eye of the Law (Justitia) (1857), the star lot of the auction, once belonged to Leo Bendel, a Jewish-Polish tobacco merchant and art collector who died in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940 after selling the painting under duress. It was restituted to his heirs in 2019, after it hung in the offices of eight German presidents.
Bendel was persecuted on race grounds and forced to leave his job in 1935. Planning to flee Nazi Germany, he sold some paintings to Galerie Heinemann in Munich in 1937. These included the Spitzweg painting, which was purchased there by Caroline Oetker that year. The Bendels fled to Vienna, where Leo was arrested and deported to Buchenwald in 1939. He died the following year. His wife Else survived the Second World War, but her attempts to secure compensation from the German government for their lost property were unsuccessful.
Dietrich, Frau Maria Almas. Munich, Gustav Freytagstr 5. Art dealer; personal friend of Hitler, and for a time his principal buyer of works of art. One of the most important purchasing agents for Linz. Was under house arrest at Grafing, Bavaria, autumn 1945.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
