Dr Oetker, a family-owned German manufacturer of baking products, muesli and frozen pizza, says it will return a painting by Hans Thoma in the company art collection to the heirs of Hedwig Ullmann, a Jewish art collector who fled Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The painting, Springtime in the Mountains, was one of a series of four panels by Thoma depicting the four seasons that graced the walls of the Ullmann family’s Frankfurt villa. Hedwig Ullmann was forced to sell it before leaving the country in 1938.
Ullmann’s heirs did not know what had happened to the painting until Dr Oetker informed them that they wished to return it “for moral reasons.” The company announced last year that it had assigned a provenance researcher to investigate the art collection in 2015, after publishing a study about the firm’s history during the Third Reich.
“This is an outstanding example of a private company doing the right thing regarding Nazi-looted art and sets a standard of best practice in this field,” says David Rowland, the New York-based lawyer representing the Ullmann heirs.
Rudolf-August Oetker bought the painting at a public auction in 1954. The Oetker corporate collection includes several hundred paintings, silver and porcelain, much of it acquired in the 1950s. The company has identified three further works in the collection that it suspects were lost due to Nazi persecution and is in discussion with the heirs.
