Walter Westfeld
Walter Westfeld (born March 4, 1889 in Herford ; † in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a German art collector and art dealer .
Life
Walter Westfeld, brother of the painter Max Westfeld , ran a gallery in Wuppertal - Elberfeld at Herzogstrasse 2 from 1920 to May 1936. After the Reich Chamber of Culture banned citizens of Jewish descent from selling paintings, Westfeld was forced to liquidate his business. He moved to Düsseldorf at Humboldtstrasse 24.
Via middlemen, e.g. B. the Düsseldorf art dealer August Kleucker and the Paris art dealer Robert Lebel, Westfeld was able to continue his activities in secret for a while. But the Nazi persecutors did not give up. In August 1937 he was denounced to the Düsseldorf criminal police that he was living with his former domestic worker Emelie Scheulen (born June 6, 1896 in Düsseldorf), who was a friend of his . Under the laws of the Nazi era, this was punishable as racial disgrace , as Scheulen was of non-Jewish descent. After a house search on September 6, 1937 and witness statements, the suspicion could not be maintained and the proceedings were discontinued.
Scheulen and Westfeld decided to emigrate to the USA , especially after the horrors of the Reichspogromnacht . When Westfeld secretly transferred US $ 40,000 to his brother Robert Westfeld, who had emigrated to the USA since 1910, the tax authorities found out. Westfeld was arrested on November 15, 1938 and taken into custody on November 21, 1938 for violating foreign exchange regulations.
The rest of his collection was confiscated and the public prosecutor arranged for an auction because the property was supposed to go to the German state. On December 12 and 13, 1939, Westfeld's art collection was auctioned off by a competing company, the Cologne Kunsthaus Lempertz under Joseph Hanstein. Westfeld had been forced out of custody to work on the catalog. The title of the auction was "Foreclosure ... from non-Aryan property ... on behalf of the Attorney General Düsseldorf."
In the criminal proceedings, prosecutor Dr. Peter Schiffer Westfeld on January 3, 1940 on charges. The accusation was foreign exchange shifting. As a witness, u. a. an expert by the name of Hanstein found out that Westfeld had put the value of pictures he had sent to Paris far too low. The III. The criminal chamber of the Düsseldorf Regional Court sentenced Westfeld under the direction of Regional Court Director Hans Opderbecke and his assessors, Regional Court Councilor Theodor Hoberg and District Court Councilor Theo Groove , to three years and six months in prison on July 2, 1940. Furthermore, Westfeld had to pay a fine of 300,000 Reichsmarks. Emilie Scheulen was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of 1,000 Reichsmarks for aiding and abetting.
After serving his sentence, Westfeld was immediately taken back into protective custody in 1942 because “as a Jew” he represented a threat to Germany. Westfeld wrote a letter to Scheulen in which he expressed his fear of being deported and concluded with the sentence, "There is not much fiddling with a Jew." On June 15, 1942, Westfeld was questioned again by the Gestapo in the Düsseldorf police prison . The aim was to find out where there was a painting by El Greco that was supposed to be in his collection. Hitler wanted to confiscate the picture for his Führer Museum in Linz. On September 23, 1942, Walter Westfeld wrote his will on a small piece of cloth in his cell and appointed Emilie Scheulen as sole heir. He wrote his last words to his partner, whom he called Ihmer : “I know everything will be different after the war. So you, head up! Yet. Yet! I wait for you all over the world. 1000 grape greetings from the paradise of memories. "
On October 1, 1942, Walter Westfeld was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on the orders of Police Officer Wilhelm Kurt Friedrich . Shortly thereafter, the Düsseldorf Regional Council, which did not recognize Westfeld's legacy to Scheulen, ordered the collection of Westfeld's remaining assets. Walter Westfeld was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on January 23, 1943 . His exact date of death is unknown. In May 1945 he was pronounced dead.
At the request of the Düsseldorf public prosecutor, the judgment against Walter Westfeld of July 2, 1940 was overturned on May 13, 1952. In September 1947, Emilie Scheulen asked the Lempertz Gallery for information about Walter Westfeld's assets. The gallery announced that all related documents had been destroyed.
On April 19, 1956, the Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia issued a certificate confirming that Westfeld was married to Emilie Scheulen. With the marriage certificate no. 362/1956 of the registry office Düsseldorf-Mitte dated May 30, 1956, the marriage was entered in the marriage register retrospectively to October 1, 1935. In 1956 Emilie Scheuren received compensation for the injustice suffered. When pictures that had belonged to Walter Westfeld and came from the confiscation of 1939 appeared in museums in the USA, Fred Westfeld, Walter Westfeld's nephew, tried to take action. The heirs of Emilie Scheulen refused to do this. In March 2007, Davidson County Court denied a motion by eighty-year-old nephew Fred Westfeld to appoint him as sole administrator of Walter Westfeld's inheritance. He could not prove his heir status sufficiently. In 2011, another court case that Fred Westfeld was able to speak for the legacy was not disputed. When Fred Westfeld discovered a picture that belonged to his uncle in the Boston Museum, he tried to have the entire 1939 prosecution auction overturned. The 6th Court of Tennessee dismissed this and ruled on February 3, 2011 that the heirs had no claims against Germany because of the principle of state sovereignty.
Web links
- Memorial book for the Nazi victims from Wuppertal
- Depiction of the fate of Westfeld in the book review Nazi Restitution, Life and Suffering Stories of the book Melissa Müller , Monika Tatzkow : Lost Pictures, Lost Lives - Jewish Collectors and What Became of Their Works of Art . Elisabeth-Sandmann, Munich, 2008, ISBN 978-3-938045-30-5 .
- Entry Walter Westfeld under Jewish collectors and art dealers (victims of National Socialist persecution and expropriation) in the database of the Federal Republic of Germany Lost Art.de
literature
- Herbert Schmidt: The Elendsweg of the Düsseldorf Jews - Chronology of Terror 1933-1945. Droste, Düsseldorf 2005, ISBN 3-7700-1204-6 .
- Werner J. Schweiger: Art exhibition Walter Westfeld. ( Memento of October 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at: kunsthandel-der-moderne.eu
Individual evidence
- ↑ The entire catalog can be viewed on the title page of the auction catalog from December 12, 1939 Part of the collection of digitized campaign catalogs on the Internet, last accessed on April 3, 2015
- ↑ Stefan Koldehoff : The pictures are among us. The deal with Nazi-looted art and the Gurlitt case , Galiani, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86971-093-8 , pp. 63–66.
- ↑ Stefan Koldehoff : The pictures are among us. The deal with Nazi-looted art and the Gurlitt case , Galiani, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86971-093-8 , p. 66.
- ↑ Germany Not Liable for Nazi Seizure of Art Cache , on the Courtnews homepage, http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/02/03/33886.htm, accessed April 3, 2015.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Westfeld, Walter |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German art collector and art dealer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 4, 1889 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Herford |
| DATE OF DEATH | before 1945 |
| Place of death | Auschwitz concentration camp |