Christie’s sale of Austrian heiress’ jewels stirs criticism

 

GENEVA (AP) — Christie’s is auctioning a staggering 700 pieces of jewelry from the collection of the late Heidi Horten, an Austrian heiress whose German husband built a retail empire starting in the 1930s — in part from department stores and other assets sold by desperate Jews as they fled Nazi Germany.

The auction house says the sale from “one of the greatest jewelry collections” is expected to reap some $150 million. Proceeds are to benefit her Vienna art museum, welfare for children, and medical research. Christie’s — as criticism of the auction grew — said it planned to chip in some of its profits from the sale to Holocaust education.

The sale has already begun online, but also takes place in-person in two parts on Wednesday and Friday at a ritzy Geneva hotel. There’s a record-setting ruby ring that Heidi Horten bought for $30 million in 2015. A dazzling diamond necklace could fetch $15 million or more. And the auction house says the sale features more Bulgari jewels than ever assembled for a single auction.

But the auction has been steeped in controversy: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based Jewish human rights group, “demanded” that Christie’s withdraw the sale, insisting that billions in riches that were amassed by Horten’s husband — Helmut Horten — were the “sum of profits from Nazi ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish department stores” under Nazi Germany.”

Helmut Horten’s story was complicated, said Peter Hoeres, a historian at the University of Würzburg, in Germany. He was commissioned by Heidi Horten to write an extensive study looking into her husband’s business empire.

The report lays out the creeping, and eventually overbearing, squeeze put on Jewish-owned businesses. Tens of thousands of Jewish-owned retail stores were “aryanized” — values were depressed by boycott measures, propaganda attacks, and other pressures from the authorities in the 1930s. Many Jews got no compensation; some received “hidden payments,” while most buyers — possibly like Horten — “profited” from persecution measures.  (more...)

Christie’s sale of Austrian heiress’ jewels stirs criticism