A £2m collection of Meissen porcelain that was seized by the Nazis before it was discovered by the Allied 'Monuments Men' at the end of the war is coming up for sale.
The stunning hoard of Dresden antiques was acquired by industrialist Dr Franz Oppenheimer and his wife Margarethe during the 1920s and 30s'.
The Jewish couple fled their home in Berlin for the relative safety if Vienna in 1936 as the Nazis began persecuting Jewish people in Germany.
They ended up emigrating to the US the day before Austria was annexed by Germany but not before they sold off their fabulous figurines and ornaments for bargain prices to stop them falling into the hands of the Nazis.
A £2m collection of Meissen porcelain that was seized by the Nazis before it was discovered by the Allied 'Monuments Men' at the end of the war is coming up for sale
The stunning hoard of Dresden antiques was acquired by industrialist Dr Franz Oppenheimer (bottom row, second right) and his wife Margarethe (bottom row, first left) during the 1920s and 30s'
Ultimately, the collection was found in Holland by a member of the SS who acquired it for Adolf Hitler in 1941.
To prevent millions of pounds of looted art work from being damaged by Allied bombing raids, the Nazis stored much of it in salt mines across southern Germany and Austria.
Towards the end of the war a group of male and female art experts, museum curators and librarians were assembled from Britain and America to find and recover Hitler's stolen art before it could be destroyed by the Germans.
In 2014 the war film The Monuments Men, starring George Clooney, Bill Murray and Matt Damon was released, telling the story of the work carried out by the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme.
The Jewish couple fled their home in Berlin for the relative safety if Vienna in 1936 as the Nazis began persecuting Jewish people in Germany. They ended up emigrating to the US the day before Austria was annexed by Germany but not before they sold off their fabulous figurines and ornaments for bargain prices to stop them falling into the hands of the Nazis
Many of the 117 pieces of 17th and 18th century Meissen collected by the Oppenheimers have been on display in various Dutch museums for the past 60 years, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Then in 2015 the descendants of the couple took their case to the Dutch Restitutions Committee to claim the collection was rightfully theirs.
In 2019, the committee recommended its return to the family after concluding that the couple 'lost possession of the objects involuntarily due to circumstances directly related to the Nazi regime'.
Now their descendants have decided to sell the porcelain at auctioneers Sotheby's.
