Adolf Jakob Bensinger

The widely ramified Bensinger family originated in the village of Bodersweier, which is now a district of Kehl in the immediate vicinity of Strasbourg. In the 18th century, the sovereigns, the Counts of Hanau-Lichtenberg in Buchsweiler, now Bouxwiller, pursued a comparatively liberal policy towards the Jews. As "Schutzjuden", they were tolerated on payment of "protection money". 

The first known ancestor with the name Bensinger was Auscher Bensinger (1763-1840), a "cow and sack trader". When he died, the parts of the county on the right bank of the Rhine, including Bodersweier, had passed to the state of Baden. He was Adolf Bensinger's great-grandfather. His son Friedrich Bensinger (1809-1866) traded in building materials such as trass (a component of mortar), hydraulic lime, coal tar and lime in Bodersweier. At times he was the head of the Jewish community in Bodersweier. Around 1850, he moved with his second wife Elisabetha (1805-1856) and their children to Mannheim, where he settled down. Two of the children, Auguste and Joseph, were to found important entrepreneurial families there.

 Joseph Bensinger (Joseph Friedrich Julius Bensinger, 1841-1891) was the grandson of Auscher Bensinger and the father of Adolf Bensinger. He later took the first names Julius and his father's name Friedrich. He gave up the name Joseph. In 1865, he married Berta Bensheimer (1844-1926), the daughter of the Mannheim bookseller and publisher Jakob Bensheimer (1807-1863). In 1866, Adolf Bensinger was born as the first-born.

The birth entry for Adolf Bensinger reads: "In the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six on the eighth of March at noon five o'clock, Adolf Jakob, the legitimate son of the local citizen and merchant Joseph called Julius Bensinger and Bertha, née Bensheimer, was born at home and circumcised on the fifteenth of the same month." (Landsarchiv Baden-Württemberg, http://www.landesarchiv-bw.de/plink/?f=4-1229199-1, Bilder 138/139)

Adolf Bensinger's birthplace had the address M 2, 17. The house, which had been in the family since the 1850s, was a baroque corner house near the palace. It was replaced in 1901 by the Wilhelminian style house that still exists today.

Adolf's father's sister and brother-in-law, Aunt Auguste and Uncle Moritz Sterner, had lived in the neighboring house at M 2, 16 since the 1870s. In 1884, they were the founders of the "Moritz Sterner Porzellan Manufaktur Mannheim", which produced porcelain tableware for hotels as well as toilet bowls and washbasins. In 1885, the address book also lists the Bensinger family in the neighboring house M 2, 17, where the uncle and aunt had previously lived for a time. 

The grandmother Lore Bensheimer, the widow of the important publisher and bookseller Jakob Bensheimer, lived not far away in M 1, 1. Adolf grew up in this bourgeois and sheltered environment. 

It can be assumed that Adolf attended the elementary school in L 1. From 1870, children of all denominations and religions were taught together in the simultaneous school in Mannheim. The former Catholic elementary school in the former "nunnery" in L 1 served as a community school. The school records are silent about attendance at a secondary school. Adolf's younger brother Karl attended the "Vereinigte Großherzogliche Lyzeum" in A 4.

Even after the establishment of the factory in Neckarau, the family lived in M 2, 16 and M 2, 17 until their mother's death in 1926.

&nbspIt is not known when and under what circumstances Adolf Bensinger met his wife Luise, who was eleven years his junior. The marriage took place on March 14, 1899. Luise's parents were Emil (Elias, born 1832 in Stebbach - 1896 in Mannheim) and Anna Kahn (1843 in Fußgönheim - 1900 in Mannheim), her two brothers were Richard Michael and Adolf F. Kahn. 

It can be assumed that the marriage took place in Mannheim's main synagogue at F 2, 13. Like the majority of the well-heeled Jewish residents of Oststadt, the Bensingers probably belonged to the religious-liberal section of the community. Its members tended to attend the main synagogue rather than the orthodox Klaus Synagogue. The sources are silent on the religious beliefs of the Bensinger couple.

After Adolf Bensinger married Luise and shortly before moving into the newly built villa in Oststadt, the couple lived in a rented house at Akademiestr. 8 in the Jungbusch district from 1900-1901.

In the village of Neckarau near Mannheim, his father Friedrich Julius Bensinger founded the "Rheinische Hartgummi-Waaren-Fabrik" together with Viktor and Alfred Lenel and the Hohenemser banking house in 1873. It had been producing soft rubber since 1884 and celluloid since 1886. 

In 1888, at the age of 22, Adolf Bensinger became the eldest son of the company founder and joined the management board of the company, which had been known as the "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik" since 1885. After the death of his father, the second eldest son Carl Bensinger (1869-1936) also became a member of the company board in April 1893. 

In the beginning, umbrella and cane handles were produced, as well as combs and toiletries. In 1896, the first waterproof "bathing doll" made of celluloid was produced. The company's breakthrough came with the production of dolls. They became world-famous under the name Schildkröt. 

The company patented the turtle as a trademark in 1899. The company logo was intended to symbolize the new industrial material, which was as robust as a tortoise shell. Celluloid was unbreakable, washable and colorfast. Up to this point, high-quality dolls with porcelain heads had been produced, which, as fragile luxury goods, were hardly suitable for children's hands. Now the new material made it possible to mass-produce natural-looking children's dolls.

The Schildkröt dolls became an international export hit and carried the name of Mannheim all over the world. The inexpensive doll heads, limbs and even the celluloid table tennis balls became a successful model in Europe and overseas. In the period before the First World War, "Schildkröt" had over 6,000 employees and was one of the largest employers in the region. 

In 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression, Bensinger sold his shares in "Schildkröt". The "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik" was transferred to the IG Farben Group. The factory "Wasserdichte Wäsche Lenel, Bensinger & Cie.", on the other hand, which had emerged from the "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik" in 1886, remained in the possession of the founding families. Kommerzienrat Adolf Bensinger was one of the main shareholders of the underwear factory until the end of the 1930s, alongside his brother Carl and his widow Lissi and Richard Lenel. ,

Gummistraße no longer exists today. All that remains of the factory is the water tower, two magnificent halls and the remaining buildings. The halls are used for congresses and conferences. The elegant, 43 m high tower, built in 1905 according to the plans of architect Leopold Stober, was the landmark of "Schildkröt" and later of the "High-Tech Park", which was built on the former company site in 1993. Today, the tower marks the "Alte Schildkrötfabrik" cultural site.

Today, collector dolls and play dolls are produced by Schildkröt in Rauenstein/Thuringia as replicas in limited editions.

Adolf Bensinger chose Mannheim's Oststadt district as the residence for his wife Ida Luise and himself. The upper middle-class neighborhood was still in the early stages of development.

The prestigious villa built for the Bensinger couple at Werderplatz 12 was one of the most luxurious in Mannheim. It was built in an outstanding location on Werderplatz, which was still vacant at the time, according to plans by architects Heinrich Joseph Kayser and Karl Großheim (Berlin/Düsseldorf) as a monumental building with a stone façade in Baroque style. The plot of over 3000 square meters extended as far as Viktoriastrasse and included a private tennis court. In 1906, Bensinger, like other residents, objected in vain to the construction of the monumental Christuskirche (1907-1911) on his doorstep.

The living rooms were furnished with Art Nouveau furniture from the Mainz court furniture factory A. Bembé and the Mannheim court furniture factory L. J. Peter and offered sufficient space for the works of art that Adolf Bensinger acquired. The first art purchases had already been made before the turn of the century, but the actual collection was formed in the 1910s and 1920s.

In his collecting activities, Bensinger concentrated on German and French Realist and Impressionist painting. These included works by Jean-Baptist Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Rosa Bonheur as well as works by Max Liebermann, Adolph von Menzel, Fritz von Uhde, Wilhelm Trübner and Hans Thoma. Post-impressionist artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler and Giovanni Segantini completed Bensinger's collection. An old master from the 17th century, an oil painting of two falcons with a cockerel and hens by the Dutchman Melchior d'Hondecoeter, seems to have been an exception to Bensinger's collecting interests. 

The paintings decorated his villa with care. On the first floor, Ferdinand Hodler's "Woodcutter", Vincent van Gogh's "Street of Graves in Arles" and Hans Thomas's "Bathing Boys" and "The Storyteller" hung in the master bedroom. The "green room" was adorned with Fritz von Uhde's "Annunciation" and "Christ Preaching", Max Liebermann's "On the Beach" and Hans Thomas' "Holy Family" as well as "Apollo and Marsyas" and Adolph von Menzel's "Head of a Bearded Man". The music room contained both a Steinweg and a Bechstein grand piano, music cabinets and seating. On the walls hung a "Landscape" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the "Hay Harvest" by Giovanni Segantini and various drawings. The dining room was dominated by the monumental Melchior d' Hondecoeter, two works by Rosa Bonheur, "Geißbock" and "Löwe" and, as was appropriate at the time, a portrait of Bismarck. Adolf Schreyer's "Brennender Posthof", Heinrich Zügel's "Kühe", Hans Thomas' "Buchenwald", Fritz Boehle's "Kartoffelernte", a "Pferdekopf" by Rosa Bonheur and "Clowns" by Honoré Daumier hung in the stairwell and hallway. A walk through the house was like a visit to an art museum. 

Adolf Bensinger was in a lively exchange with the Mannheim Kunsthalle. Director Fritz Wichert (1878-1951) advised Bensinger on his purchases and the collector willingly made his works available on loan. In 1916/17 alone, Bensinger lent the Kunsthalle and the Kunstverein 14 paintings and two drawings from private collections in Mannheim for the exhibition.

In 1929, Adolf Bensinger had sold his shares in the turtle factory. However, the factory "Wasserdichte Wäsche Lenel, Bensinger & Cie.", which had emerged from the "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik" in 1886, was still owned by the founding families. Bensinger remained one of the main shareholders alongside his brother Carl and his widow Lissi and Richard Lenel until the end of the 1930s. 

The National Socialists' rise to power coincided with a series of strokes of fate for Adolf Bensinger. The loss of his wife Luise, who died in 1934 after a long illness, was followed by the death of his brother Carl in 1936. He was closely associated with his wife Lissie (Alice) and their three children. 

In 1938, he lost the shares in the company Lenel, Bensinger & Co. co-founded by his father as a result of "Aryanization". The National Socialist state and the Westfälisch-Anhaltinische Sprengstoff Actien-Gesellschaft as well as Carl Scheu, the director of the "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik", which had no longer been owned by the family since 1929, profited from the "de-Jewification" of the company. The Aryanization agreement was concluded on 21 December 1938.

Adolf Bensinger changed his will on 17 March 1939. He had actually intended to leave his art collection to his brother's children and his deceased wife's relatives. In the meantime, it was forbidden for Jews to freely sell works of art worth more than 1,000 RM. He therefore appointed those four grandnieces and grandnephews who did not have a Jewish father. According to the Nazi racial laws, they were considered "half-breeds of the first degree" and the 73-year-old, who was suffering from heart disease, hoped to be able to pass on his collection within the family. Bensinger wanted to use all the means at his disposal to prevent his collection from being broken up after his death. He appointed his sister-in-law Lissie Bensinger as executor of his will. 

The German authorities began to covet the art collection while he was still alive. On June 5, 1939, the Baden Foreign Exchange Office in Karlsruhe asked him to draw up a list of his paintings. The list contained 26 paintings and drawings as well as the Old Meissen porcelain group "The Arts". Bensinger sent it to the Chief Finance President in Karlsruhe on June 15, 1939. 

The director of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Kurt Martin (1899-1975), soon paid a visit to Adolf Bensinger's villa in Mannheim to view the works. He reported the matter to the relevant tax authorities and demanded the confiscation of the collection and the "seizure" of several works in the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. 

The foreign currency office now made Bensinger "obliged not to dispose of the paintings and works of art in your possession in any way until further instructions have been received". Adolf Bensinger died on June 28, 1939, the day the seizure order was delivered. The fateful letter lay open on his desk.

After Bensinger's death, Kurt Martin visited the executors, Bensinger's sister-in-law Lissie and the retired bank director Siegfried Plato (1888-1944 in Auschwitz), who was a friend of the family. Citing verbal agreements with the deceased, Martin insisted on receiving seven works from the estate without payment: two works by Thoma, two by Menzel, one by Corot, one by Renoir and one by Daumier. As the will provided no information about these gifts and there was no official instruction, he was refused.

Kurt Martin insisted on the grounds that "a Jew [may] not dispose of his art possessions by will either". However, he was unable to get the pieces he demanded handed over to the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. 

The situation took a turn for the worse on February 10, 1940, when the command of the Mannheim-Sandhofen airport area confiscated the villa for the Luftwaffe. The house was to be vacated by the 24th of the month, forcing the administrator of the estate, Plato, to commission the auction house Fritz Nagel to hold an auction. Nagel had recommended himself to the NSDAP district leadership as a specialized "appraiser of cultural property for emigrating Jews". On February 22, Bensinger's collection went under the hammer, not in Nagel's art shop in O 5, 14, but directly in the villa. 

The auction catalog announced an "estate auction", but the true reason for the auction could be guessed from the name "Kommerzienrat Adolf Israel Bensinger". The inventory of the Bensinger villa comprised 140 items and had an estimated value of RM 194,680. The auction catalog listed 62 of these items. The paintings alone were valued at a total of almost 90,000 Reichsmarks. The catalog also listed porcelain and bronzes, Persian carpets and valuable furniture. The final auction proceeds of 133,430.10 RM went into the blocked account set up for the estate. 

The current whereabouts of only a few of the items sold are known. The Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt, for example, owns Fritz Uhde's "Christus als Lehrer". The director of the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle, Kurt Martin, came away empty-handed. Although he had been particularly eager to acquire selected paintings, the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe did not purchase any from this auction. 

Decades later, historian Monika Tatzkoff researched on behalf of the Bensinger heirs that two grandnieces, who were actually named as heirs in the will, had to buy several paintings, their own inheritance, at auction for 45,600 RM. But they too were robbed of their possessions by the National Socialists.

Annemarie, Irmgard (born 1930) and Gabriele Conzen (born 1927), Bensinger's niece and great-nieces, were able to save their lives. The family lived in Berlin in the neighborhood of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945), the head of the "Abwehr", the Wehrmacht's military intelligence service. His behavior was ambivalent, as he was also active in the resistance against National Socialism. He made it possible for Annemarie, Irmgard and Gabriele to flee to Switzerland on one condition: they had to hand over all their possessions to the Abwehr Office of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, including six paintings from their great-uncle's villa in Mannheim. They set foot on Swiss soil on September 30, 1942. 

Adolf Bensinger's sister-in-law, his mother and grandmother Lissie Bensinger, was deported to Gurs on October 22, 1940 and murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. The villa on Werderplatz was destroyed during the Second World War.

After the end of the war, Adolf Bensinger's niece Annemarie Conzen and her daughters Irmgard and Gabrile Conzen filed applications for restitution with the Berlin restitution authorities. This also included their inheritance and the paintings from their uncle's and great-uncle's collection that they had bought at auction. Fritz Nagel, whose auction house had meanwhile moved to Stuttgart, hardly remembered what he called the "voluntary auction" (Tatzkow 2014, p. 277). The director of the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, Kurt Martin, stated in 1947 that Bensinger had refused to hand over the collection to his Kunsthalle and was therefore himself to blame for the destruction of his collection. In 1962, a general settlement was reached with the Conzens. Annemarie Conzen died in Buenos Aires in 1979. 

In 1998, over 40 countries agreed on common principles for the restitution of artworks in Washington. In Germany, the federal, state and local governments expressly endorsed the Washington Principles. The Coordination Office for the Loss of Cultural Property, which was established in Magdeburg in 1994, maintains the "Lost Art Database" with search and find reports in order to implement the Washington Principles. As a result of this development, the heirs also resumed the search for the art collection of their ancestor Adolf Bensinger in 2000. They were able to identify a painting that had been forcibly handed over to the High Command of the Wehrmacht in 1942. The "Head of a Bearded Man" by Adolf Menzel was offered at Christie's in London in 1997. The monumental painting "Potato Harvest" by Fritz Boehle, which once adorned the entrance area of the Bensinger Villa, was given to the Frankfurter Sparkasse in 1972. In both cases, the owners and Bensinger's heirs found a "just and fair solution" in line with the Washington Declaration. 

The Segantini Museum in St. Moritz is in possession of Giovanni Segantini's "Hay Harvest". Bensinger himself bequeathed it to the municipal administration of St. Moritz in 1939 when he was forced to change his will. The viewpoint there is that the bequest was based on the free will of the donor.

The "Bathing Youths" by Hans Thoma was entered into the Magdeburg Lost Art Database by the Federal Republic of Germany, which owned the painting, and has since been returned to Bensinger's heirs.

Van Gogh's "Arles Grave Road" was acquired by the Nazi art dealer Hans Wendland from the Wehrmacht High Command. However, he sold it to Paris, from where it ended up with an art collector from Basel. In 1949, he reached an agreement with Annemarie Conzen. Today, the painting is privately owned. 

Fritz von Uhde's "Christ Preaching" was also one of the paintings that Bensinger's grandnieces bought at auction in 1940, but then had to be handed over to the Wehrmacht High Command. It ended up in the collection of the Berlin estate agent and Nazi art buyer Conrad Doebbeke, from whose estate it was auctioned off to the Georg Schäfer art collection in Schweinfurt in 1958. In 2005, it was suspected of being "looted art". The heirs are not known to have reached an amicable agreement with the owner.

The majority of the paintings remained lost.

As an entrepreneur, Adolf Bensinger felt committed to his city. In 1907, he donated Adolf Hoelzel's 1903 painting "Kirchgang" to the Mannheim municipal collections, followed a year later by the donation of Rudolf Gönner's painting "Kartoffelernte" (Potato Harvest), which was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

In 1908, he donated a tuberculosis museum, spurred on by his own lung disease. The exhibition was shown in several cities as a "traveling museum for popular education". An article in the "Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt" of December 23, 1909 praised it: "Mannheim. The continued donations for general purposes show what a lively interest there is among us Jews for the general public. These days, for example, a tuberculosis museum was opened in neighboring Frankenthal, which was donated by Mr. Adolf Bensinger, co-owner of the Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik..." 

In gratitude for his generous donations and "humane attitude", the Grand Duke of Hesse awarded him the "Order of Merit of Philipp the Magnanimous" in 1909, the Grand Duke of Baden appointed him a Councillor of Commerce in 1910 and granted him permission to accept and wear the "Royal Prussian Order of the Red Eagle" in 1911.

Not even a street sign in the city today commemorates Adolf Bensinger, who managed the turtle factory for over 40 years, was one of the largest employers in Mannheim and made Mannheim's name known throughout the world. Because the factory was partly located in the Brühl district and provided many Brühl citizens with jobs and social benefits, the neighboring municipality of Brühl honored him as early as 1910 by renaming its school street Adolf-Bensinger-Straße. With the exception of the years 1933-1945, when it was renamed Schulstraße again.

Adolf Bensinger was buried in the family grave at the Jewish cemetery in Mannheim, where his parents and his wife Luise, who died in 1934, were already buried. The imposing black granite grave is located on the right-hand side of the surrounding wall in a row with numerous graves of Jewish families of honor from the Wilhelminian era. The Bensinger family grave is located on the wall at the level of field B 1.