A drawing by a 19th century artist renowned for his depictions of the German middle class shows a well-dressed couple. She is on piano and he on flute.
The work, Playing the Piano by Carl Spitzweg, was found eight years ago in a hoard of looted art. It may be the last of the items to be returned to its rightful owners, closing one of the most remarkable chapters of Nazi theft.
In August 1939 the Nazi authorities confiscated the drawing from Henri Hinrichsen, a Jewish music publisher. The theft added insult to injury after Hinrichsen, a philanthropist and pillar of Leipzig society who had felt safe despite Hitler’s rise to power, had been forced to sell his publishing house CF Peters in 1938 under Hitler’s program of Aryanisation. He wrote in a family chronicle in 1933 that the drawing “delights me time and again”.
Hinrichsen and his wife, Martha, left Germany in January 1940 and headed for Brussels where they waited in vain for a visa to Britain or the US. Then the Germans occupied Belgium and Martha, who was diabetic, died in 1941 after being denied insulin because she was a Jew.
Henri was arrested and was murdered in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on September 17, 1942, aged 74. His sons Hans-Joachim and Paul and three other members of the family were also killed in death camps.
Read the article by David Crossland in The Australian.