Christie’s has decided to cancel the auction of the last lots of Austrian billionaire Heidi Horten’s jewelry collection following the controversy linked to her husband’s relations with Nazi Germany. In an email sent to AFP on Friday, Christie’s said it had “taken the decision not to proceed with further sales of property from the estate of Heidi Horten”, confirming information from the New York Times.
More than 700 jewels are part of the Horten collection, most of the lots of which were sold in May, for a total amount of 202 million dollars. The last batches were to be sold in November.
But, explains Christie’s, “the sale of Heidi Horten’s jewelery collection has been the subject of intense attention, and the reactions to it have touched us deeply, as well as many others, and we will continue to think about it”. Just before the sale in May, Christie’s had explained several times why it had chosen to agree to disperse this impressive set of jewels. To respond to its detractors, the prestigious auction house had argued that the proceeds of the sale would be entirely donated to philanthropic works.
In addition, “Christie’s will make a significant contribution” from the proceeds of the sale to Jewish institutions and Holocaust education, “of vital importance”, assured Rahul Kadakia, auctioneer and international director for jewelry at the auction house. But that hasn’t stopped criticism, including from the American Jewish Committee. The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (Crif) had deemed the sale indecent.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, turned down a donation from the auction house, and other organizations did the same, according to the New York Times, due to the origin of the husband’s fortune by Heidi Horten. He owned one of the largest department store chains in Germany. In 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, he took over the textile company Alsberg, whose Jewish owners had fled, before taking over several other stores that had belonged to Jews before the war. Helmut Horten was later accused of profiting from the “Aryanization” of Jewish property (spoliation measures aimed at transferring ownership of businesses owned by people of Jewish descent).
