Christie's Sale of Heiress' Jewels Stirs Criticism

Christie’s is auctioning a staggering 700 pieces of jewelry from the collection of the late Heidi Horten, an Austrian heiress whose German husband built a retail empire starting in the 1930s—in part from department stores and other assets sold by desperate Jews as they fled Nazi Germany. The AP reports the auction house says the sale from "one of the greatest jewelry collections" is expected to reap some $150 million. Proceeds are to benefit her Vienna art museum, welfare for children, and medical research. Christie’s—as criticism of the auction grew—said it planned to chip in some of its profits from the sale to Holocaust education.

The sale has already begun online, but also takes place in-person in two parts on Wednesday and Friday at a ritzy Geneva hotel. There’s a record-setting ruby ring that Heidi Horten bought for $30 million in 2015. A dazzling diamond necklace could fetch $15 million or more. And the auction house says the sale features more Bulgari jewels than ever assembled for a single auction.But the auction has been steeped in controversy: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based Jewish human rights group, “demanded” that Christie’s withdraw the sale, insisting that billions in riches that were amassed by Heidi Horten’s husband—Helmut Horten—were the “sum of profits from Nazi ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish department stores."

Helmut Horten's story was complicated, said Peter Hoeres, a historian at the University of Würzburg, in Germany. He was commissioned by Heidi Horten to write an extensive study looking into her husband's business empire. The report lays out the creeping, and eventually overbearing, squeeze put on Jewish-owned businesses. Tens of thousands of Jewish-owned retail stores were “aryanized”—values were depressed by boycott measures, propaganda attacks, and other pressures from the authorities in the 1930s. Earlier this month, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for the withdrawal of the auction, saying Horten helped build his business empire by buying "at a cut price" the department store where he worked in 1933 from its Jewish owners, Strauss and Lauter, who fled to the US. (More Christie's stories.)