Anna Caspari was a German art dealer. As a Jew, she suffered under the repression of the Nazi regime and was forced to close her gallery in Munich in 1939. Her attempts to emigrate failed.

On November 20, 1941, Anna Caspari was deported from Munich to Wehrmacht-occupied Lithuania and murdered in Kaunas.

Alfred Flechtheim grew up in Münster in Westphalia, where his father ran a successful grain wholesale business. Due to difficulties at school, he was sent to a Swiss boarding school. At the turn of the century, he joined his parents' business and worked in the grain trade in Odessa, London and Paris. In the French capital, he became acquainted with international art dealers and the elite of European painting in the "Café du Dôme".

Adolph Moritz List, born in the Russian oblast of Voronezh as the son of a German-Jewish sugar manufacturer, grew up in Leipzig. After finishing school and training in agriculture, he studied agricultural sciences and chemistry at the university there. He obtained his doctorate and ran the world's first saccharin factory in Magdeburg together with the Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg (1850 - 1910). Having become wealthy, Adolph Moritz List began to build up a collection of European decorative arts from the 13th to the 18th century.

The entrepreneur Georg Mecklenburg made a considerable fortune with a diamond black dyeing factory for coloring socks and yarns. The social advancement of him and his wife Margarethe can be seen in the status of their changing residences - from the apartment on the factory premises (which always remained) to a prestigious city villa. Together with Margarethe, Georg Mecklenburg built up an impressive collection of contemporary art over many years. This also benefited the "Kunsthütte Chemnitz", an association of local artists and art lovers founded in 1860.