Christie’s Cancels Jewelry Auction From Heiress Fortune Made by Nazi Anti-Jewish Laws

Christie’s auction house in the United Kingdom has announced it is canceling a forthcoming auction of jewels from the fortune of an Austrian heiress whose wealth was made as a result of anti-Jewish discriminatory laws passed by the Nazis in the 1930s.

The auction house said on Friday that it would not go ahead with the auctioning off of jewels from the estate of Heidi Horten, which was scheduled to take place in Geneva, Switzerland, in November, due to international pressure.

Anthea Peers, the president of Christie’s Europe, Middle East and Africa, told a US newspaper that “the sale of the Heidi Horten jewelry collection has provoked intense scrutiny, and the reaction to it has deeply affected us and many others, and we will continue to reflect on it.”

She added that the proceeds raised “important support for philanthropic causes, including medical research, children’s welfare, and access to the arts.”

Horten, who died last year, was the widow and heiress of Helmut Horten, a German industrialist who started the Horten AG brand of department stores. When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Helmut Horten worked for the Alsberg Brothers department store in Duisburg, which he was able to acquire from the Jewish owners after they fled to the United States.

Helmut Horten’s business steadily expanded through the 1930s as he acquired other department stores owned by Jews thanks to the “Aryanization” policy, which took the wealth and property of Jews and gave them to so-called “Aryan” Germans.

Helmut’s business standing benefited from his close relationship with Nazi authorities, including giving him preferential access to otherwise-scarce goods during the Second World War.

The Hortens’ ill-gotten wealth survived the war intact, and Helmut continued to expand his business after the war until selling his majority stake in 1972. Helmut married Heidi in 1966 and died in 1987. When Heidi Horten died in 2022, at age 81, Forbes estimated her wealth to be valued at $3 billion.

After Heidi’s death, her estate began auctioning off her assets, which according to Christie’s will go toward maintaining a Vienna museum of the art she collected, as well as “medical research, child welfare, and other philanthropic activities that she supported for many decades.”

Three auctions by Christie’s earlier this year brought in some $200 million in sales, even though the auctions were strongly protested by Jewish groups. After Christie’s offered to make a large donation to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, the museum spurned the offer, which was mirrored by many other Jewish philanthropic groups.

“We are pleased to hear that the global outrage surrounding Christie’s sale of the Horten Foundation’s ill-gotten assets - derived from the theft of Jewish property during World War II - has affected the auction house and caused them to cancel their planned sale of additional Horten jewelry this fall,” David Schaecter, the president of Holocaust Survivor Foundation USA, told US media.

“We are glad that they recognized the great pain additional sales of Horten art and jewelry would cause Holocaust survivors,” added Schaecter, who survived deportation to both Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Jewish groups have opposed the auctioning off of Nazi wealth, including industrialists like Horten who benefited from the Holocaust to trinkets once owned by top Nazi officials, including those belonging to Adolf Hitler.

A huge amount of art pilfered by the Nazis during their conquest of much of Europe, or by locals enabled by the genocide of Jews and other minority groups, remains unaccounted for even today. An estimated 100,000 items have not been returned to their rightful owners.