Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste

Adolf Bensinger was born on March 8, 1866 as the first child of an upper middle-class Jewish family in Mannheim. After the early death of his father, he joined the board of the "Rheinische Gummi- und Celluloidfabrik", which he co-founded, at the age of 22. The globally successful company and the company "Wasserdichte Wäsche Lenel, Bensinger & Cie" enabled him to build up a considerable fortune.

Ra Rosa Schapire grew up in Brody, the "most Jewish city" in the Habsburg Empire, and after moving to the metropolis of Hamburg at the age of 19, she developed into a militant feminist who also positioned herself against the bourgeois women's movement. She studied art history and was one of the first women in Germany to gain a doctorate in this subject. In the expressionist art scene before the First World War, she found access to many artists (later also to female artists), to whom she arranged exhibitions.

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.

Hermine Wollheim, the daughter of the Berlin coal baron Caesar Wollheim, grew up in wealthy circumstances with her two sisters. She amassed a collection of porcelain from various manufacturers, which soon became the most important of its kind in Europe and outside of museums. Together with her husband Otto Feist, she also collected works by Joshua Reynolds, one of the most important English painters of the 18th century. She also collected paintings by Jean-Baptiste Francois Pater, Reinhold Lepsius, Joseph Highmore, Franz Seraph Lenbach and pictures by Francisco de Goya.

The industrial magnate Richard Lenel was firmly anchored in Mannheim society and, like his father and grandfather, was president of the Mannheim Chamber of Commerce. Forced to emigrate during the Nazi era, he returned to his hometown in 1949 and was made an honorary citizen.

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Parents: Victor Lenel (1838-1917), Sara Helene Michaelis (1844-1917)

2 siblings: Walter (1868-1937), Klara (1872-1932)

Wife: Emilia (Milly) Maas (Berlin 1880 - Mannheim 1959), marriage 1900