Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 7415035, member: 110350&quot;][USER=96898]@Orielensis[/USER], thanks so much for your summary of the article you found. (Much to my regret, my German reading skills aren&#039;t adequate for articles -- only for genealogical research (names, dates, places, relationships, etc.) -- so there isn&#039;t much point sending me the pages you found).</p><p><br /></p><p>It certainly makes sense that Kress was previously connected to the Helbing firm through printing its catalogs. Otherwise, it seemed odd that a printer would want to enter the numismatic field. Perhaps that&#039;s how he acquired his initial expertise. I&#039;m glad to know there&#039;s no evidence he was a Nazi party member, but of course it&#039;s true that he &quot;seized an opportunity to financially profit from the persecution of his Jewish fellow citizens.&quot; I am sorry, but not surprised, to learn of Heinrich Hirsch&#039;s fate.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the way, according to the tables at <a href="http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm#tables" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm#tables" rel="nofollow">http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm#tables</a>, 34,400 RM in 1938 was the equivalent of $13,815 1938 US dollars. (There are so many different ways of translating that sum into 2021 US dollars that I won&#039;t attempt to do so.) It does sound like rather a low total, even for 1938, for such an old and well-established numismatic firm. For comparison purposes, my mother grew up in Berlin in a middle-class (but by no means wealthy) household. My grandfather was a social worker and an officer of the Jewish Gemeinde (Community) of Berlin, heading the migrant welfare and passport office. Here is a page from his 1938 tax return that I was able to obtain from the Berlin archives, showing that his &quot;Gesamtbetrag der einkünfte&quot; (Total amount of income) for that year was 7,527 RM (I&#039;m not sure how much of that was salary and how much was other income). Of course, when my grandparents had finally obtained their US visas and were finally able to emigrate via Lisbon, leaving Berlin on 27 May 1941, &gt; 90% of their assets were confiscated under the guise of an emigration tax, even more than usual because they were ordered to leave the country on 24-hours notice. But the point is that a sales price for Helbing&#039;s assets that was less than five times my grandfather&#039;s income in 1938 was obviously low, perhaps so much so as to be essentially confiscatory.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1288529[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>The bottom line, though, is that I agree with [USER=83845]@Curtisimo[/USER] and [USER=110226]@robinjojo[/USER] that it&#039;s not the coin&#039;s fault. Who knows what nefarious characters have owned some of our coins over the last couple of thousand years! The only difference with this one is that we happen to be able to trace its recent history. (The downside of provenance research, I suppose.) More pertinently, though, as I noted before, it&#039;s extraordinarily unlikely that my specific coin, sold by Kress in 1960, was part of the Helbing (Hirsch) inventory sold in 1938. If it were, would I still have bought it? Given my specific family background, I&#039;m not entirely sure I would have. One has to draw one&#039;s personal lines somewhere.</p><p><br /></p><p>Separately, a question for [USER=83845]@Curtisimo[/USER]: do you remember where you found the restitution files you mention? I&#039;m curious, because they&#039;re almost never available online. The ones I have for my mother and grandparents in Berlin came from the Berlin Landesarchiv, and the ones I have for my maternal grandmother and her family in Baden come from the Freiburg archive.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in