Emerging Details Give Heirs Who Thought Works Were Lost Long-Awaited Evidence
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Martha Hinrichsen got a call last week she thought she’d never receive: Within a vast trove of recovered wartime art, German authorities had found a drawing records show belonged to her Jewish grandfather.
Now the 65-year-old retired music publisher is one of many heirs of Holocaust victims who are digging through yellowed files and painful family histories to research potential claims to the cache of Nazi-confiscated art.
“Who would ever think I’d need to go back through all this?” Ms. Hinrichsen said of the onionskin invoices and letters that make up 75 trunkloads of family archives she keeps in a storage locker two miles from her home in Southbury, Conn.
Since 1945, she said her family had worked steadily to successfully reclaim their ornate, three-story home in Leipzig as well as their music-publishing business, which were confiscated by the Nazis during the war from her Jewish grandfather, Henri Hinrichsen. But the case of his still-missing art had grown cold until a friend told her she had read about the lost drawing, by 19th-century German artist Carl Spitzweg.
As details have emerged in the past week about the roughly 1,400-piece collection found in a Munich apartment, descendants of collectors and ordinary citizens who lost art during World War II were stunned to hear that pieces they thought were forever gone still existed. Some, who have been fighting for decades to reclaim art lost to the Nazis, now have the concrete evidence that they’ve been waiting for.