Leo Bendel (born 1868 in Strezwo, Poland, then Galicia, Austria-Hungary; died 30 March 1940 in Buchenwald concentration camp) was a 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:
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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.