Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste

Raised in Dessau as the son of a doctor for the poor and an active representative of the emerging Reform Judaism, Eduard Arnhold was apprenticed at the age of 14 to Caesar Wollheim, another Jewish coal merchant in Berlin. Arnhold was granted power of attorney at the age of 21. Eduard Arnhold developed the company he took over into one of the leading energy suppliers in the German Empire and promoted new transportation routes and the airship travel of Count Zeppelin.

Helene Hecht was a salonnière and patron of the arts who maintained close contacts with musicians and visual artists. Johannes Brahms and Franz von Lenbach frequented her house in Mannheim. She had to sell parts of her art collection during the Nazi era due to persecution and take out a mortgage on her villa. Like most Jews from Baden, she was sent to the concentration camp in Gurs, France. After her arrest on October 22, 1940, Helene Hecht died during her deportation there.

_________________

Clara Kahn was born in Kuppenheim in Baden. She and her husband Salomon Sigmann ran a lingerie and bridal outfitting business in Pforzheim. 

Her husband died in 1933 and the business was liquidated a year later. Clara Sigmann moved to Mannheim with her daughter and granddaughter. 

Ernst Polaczek was an Austrian art historian. Coming from a Jewish family of factory owners in Bohemia, his love was for the former German city of Strasbourg, where he was a university professor and museum director. After the First World War, he had to leave the city, which had then become French, and only returned to the Alsace region in 1933 from Görlitz, where he had become unemployed due to his Jewish origins. He lived with his second wife in Freiburg, where he had to sell part of his art collection.

Sally (Salomon, also Saly, later Henri) Falk was born in Heilbronn on March 22, 1888. The family moved to Mannheim in 1899, founded a company to recycle cotton waste and took part in the economic upswing of the industrial city. Sally Falk used the considerable fortune he had acquired up until the First World War to purchase works of art and support artists, primarily the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. In 1921, he laid the foundation for the sculpture collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim with a donation.