(Q105655393)
Statements
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Moritz Rosenthal (undetermined language)
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16 April 1883Gregorian
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1940s
1944
1945
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7 April 1944
18 May 1944
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However, internal documents and emails between Christie's employees show that it took the opposite approach in the case of Merry Company With A Woman Playing A Lute by the Dutch master Jacob Duck.Christie's researchers discovered that the painting had been stolen by the Nazis in 1937 from Ulla and Moritz Rosenthal, a Jewish couple who later died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But the company made no attempt to contact the descendants of the Rosenthals.Instead, it returned the picture to Carl Schünemann, a German private collector and a long-standing Christie's client, who had hoped to sell it in the firm's London auction rooms in July 2000 for £40,000-£60,000. (English)
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Moritz Rosenthal came from a Jewish family of merchants and moved to Berlin in 1900. He set up a linens factory in 1906 which he expanded within a few years. At the same time, he was a voluntary commercial judge and a city councillor. From mid-1928 he was on the loans committee of the municipal bank, which had granted loans to the Sklarek Brothers, who were later convicted of fraud. Because Rosenthal had supplied linens to the Sklarek Company, proceedings were instituted against him for preferential treatment but quashed for want of evidence. In 1930, Rosenthal was elected unsalaried city councillor in the district of Kreuzberg. In 1933 he was ousted from all his honorary posts. He and his family emigrated three years later. While his three elder children emigrated to the US, he and his wife Ulla and their youngest daughter Gabriele moved to the Netherlands. They were arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz via Westerbork camp and Theresienstadt ghetto. Moritz Rosenthal and his wife were murdered but Gabriele survived. All the family's assets in Europe were confiscated by the Reich. In 1999, a plaque was erected at Stralauer Straße 42-45, the site of the linens factory, to commemorate Moritz and Ulla Rosenthal. In 2003, there were public protests at the auction of the painting Lustige Gesellschaft by Jacob Duck, that was known to have come from Moritz Rosenthal’s stolen property, at Christies in London. (English)