The epic story of Heidi Horten’s jewels sold at Christie’s, over which the shadow of the Nazis stretches

What we are about to tell you is the story of an enormous economic fortune, built however on an injustice. It is also the story of an extraordinary entrepreneurial ability, of jewels from a thousand and one nightsOf paintings by Picasso and Chagall and of Nazi hierarchs whose shadow still extends to the present day.

It is the story of Heidi Horten, a young girl of nineteen, endowed with that kind of slender and elegant, almost shy beauty that one can perhaps only have at that age. When the tycoon Helmuth Horten meets her in a hotel on Lake Velden am Wörthersee, Austria, he falls madly in love with her.

It’s 1960 and he, Helmut is many years older, thirty-two, to be exact. Heidi is Austrian, Helmut German. A few years later they get married, starting a family story that during the year is distributed between Switzerland, where they fly by private jet, the Bahamas and the Côte d’Azur, often aboard one of their yachts, and Vienna, the birthplace of Heidi.

Helmut died in 1987, leaving his wife, now 46, with an estimated fortune of $1.2 billion.which over the years she multiplies, up to her death last year, to an estimated value of over three million dollars.

But where did all that money come from? Helmuth Horten was the owner of a thriving chain of department stores which, thanks to his flair for business, had grown more and more over the years, until 1972 when he decided to sell his majority shares and retire to private life.
On the beginnings of this commercial fortune lies however the heavy shadow of his Nazi sympathies.

The son of a judge, Helmut Horten was not born rich. He was apprenticed in a Düsseldorf department store belonging to Leonhard Tietz, before working for the Duisburg department store of the company Gebrüder Alsberg (Alsberg brothers). When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Horten managed to acquire the company from the Jewish owners, Strauss and Lauter, who fled to the United States.

The question was raised recently when the news broke that Heidi Horten’s immense jewelry collectionwho died last year, a few days after the inauguration of her museum, would have gone auctioned at Christie’s: an auction completed just yesterday with proceeds of 202 million dollarsall of which will go to charity through his foundation.

Lush emeralds, flaming rubies and thumb-sized diamonds dripping from necklaces, brooches and bracelets. A three-strand choker of very delicate pink pearls whose clasp, visible only to the wearer, is covered by an 11-carat pink cushion diamond. She stuff like that. Masterpieces by Bulgari, Cartier, Tiffany, Van Cleef & Arpels and Harry Winston. An unprecedented sale that Christie’s itself did not hesitate to define «The auction that happens only once in a lifetime».
Extraordinary jewels of such high value and beauty that the auction house decided it would be too much to put them on the market in one fell swoop. Three auctions, therefore, one of which is online, the last of which ended just yesterday.

But Christie’s acknowledged that, in deciding to host the sale, it also had to reckon with the fact that Helmut Horten’s business empire was built on his initial buying companies from Jews who had been pressured into selling by the Nazis.

“We are aware that there is a painful history,” said Anthea Peers, the company’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “We weighed it against various factors,” she added, explaining that finally the fact that the proceeds will all be used for philanthropic causes has been evaluated.

The Heidi Horten Foundation finances Indeed medical research and runs a museum in the heart of Vienna that features the extensive art collection he has built up, with works by Chagall, Matisse, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Klein and many others.

However, several Jewish organizations had asked that the sale be stopped, arguing that today’s philanthropic benefits are not sufficient to justify obscuring the origins of so much wealth.

But what exactly had Helmut Horten been up to?
David de Jong, author of a recent book on Nazi billionaires he explains: «Ha built the foundations of his wealth during the Third Reich by acquiring companies of Jewish entrepreneurs under pressure at fire sale prices». According to De Jong, in several cases, such as the 1936 purchase of the Alsberg department store in Duisburg, Germany, Horten had paid no more than 65% of the company’s value.

Helmut was 27 years old at the time of the sale of Alsberg e advertised his purchase in a Nazi Party newspaper, saying the shop had “passed over to Aryan ownership”.

The “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses in Germany, historians explain, occurred in two phases. Prior to 1938, pressure from the Third Reich led Jews to sell off their businesses, sometimes at steep discounts. After 1938, sales were typically forced and the prices paid often dropped even further. Horten was active during both phases and was involved in trade deals during the Nazi takeover of Europe, from Amsterdam to East Prussia.

Last year, a historian hired by Heidi Hortennow eighty years old, to inquire into the nature of her husband’s fortunepublished a lengthy report which stated that Helmut Horten had clearly benefited from the acquisition of Jewish businesses sold under duress, but that the level of wealth he had made from those businesses had been exaggerated.

the historian, Peter Hoeresexplains in his report that even if Horten had used his opportunitieshad initially paid “fairly normal market prices” for the acquired companies and had been comparatively honest with the deals concluded by other German businessmen. Moreover, the historian points out, he himself had to face a complex personal relationship with the Nazis.

The study concluded that Horten’s actions were governed by opportunistic business acumen, rather than Nazi ideology, and cites several instances where Horten retained some Jews as employees or suppliers, at odds with government efforts. The study also notes that although Horten was a member of the Nazi Party, he was later expelled from it.

Because of his Nazi sympathies, after WWII, in 1947 Helmut Horten was interned by the British Army in Recklinghausento then be released the following year following a hunger strike. He soon continued with the consolidation and expansion of his company, which he still owned.
His great commercial flair led him, after a visit to the United Statesto introduce the first supermarket ever seen in Germanycopying the business model and rapidly expanding the group.

By 1960, when he met Heidi, his fortune had grown considerably, so much so that in 1968, with 25,000 employees and a turnover of the equivalent of 1 billion euros in West German marks, had the group listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

However, the account by the historian Hoeres remains criticized: detractors argue that he minimized the benefits that the tycoon drew from “Aryanization”.

“As a historian, I could not agree with the narratives in the Hoeres report,” says Birgit Kirchmayr, a member and senior adviser to the Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, explaining that it does not seem sufficient justification to say that Horten “was no worse of others”.

Among those contesting the report is Stephanie Stephan, a journalist from Munich who published a book last year in which he details Horten’s takeover of Jewish assets.

For her the topic is quite personal because his father, Reinhold Stephan, had been on the board of one of the acquired companies, Gerzon, an Amsterdam-based fashion house. In the book it is said that Jewish owners were forced to sell to Horten, and the document of an affidavit of one of them, Arthur Marx, according to which Horten had threatened them with deportation to concentration camps if they resisted his takeover.

“My father rebelled from the start because he knew that Horten had already forced several Jewish department store owners in Germany to sell their businesses for ridiculous sums,” says Stephan. After the takeover, Horten “immediately had my father fired and arranged for him to be imprisoned several times and finally expelled from the Netherlands”.

In an interview, however, the historian Hoeres announces that in a forthcoming book he will cite research according to which Horten never finalized the purchase of Gerzonand disputes the accuracy of Marx’s affidavit, saying it is not supported by any documents from that era.

In 1966, when 19-year-old Heidi married her husband, the jewelry had not yet been purchased and the war seemed long gone.

«It can be said that the jewels themselves were not looted», acknowledged Kirchmayr, the exponent of the Committee for the restitution of art. “But the money is linked to the Nazi past, and this is a fact that must be mentioned in collectors’ biographies.”

After the criticisms, Christie’s added a mention of Horten’s purchase of Jewish businesses which were “sold under duress” and he explained that he would donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to Holocaust research and education.

Now the whole legacy of the beautiful Heidi Horten, the richest woman in Austria, it will serve to return an impressive art collection to the citizenswhose insurance alone can cost incalculable figures, thanks to the money that will support his foundation in managing the museum of 2000 square meters inaugurated last year, a few days before his death. Another rich part will be invested in medical research that the foundation has supported for years and, finally, a slice will serve to expand the knowledge of the new generations so that the past is not repeated.