A treasure trove of loot plundered by the Nazis for Hitler’s personal collection is set to hit the auction block at Sotheby’s.
The 117 pieces of 18th-century Meissen porcelain which form the Oppenheimer collection are currently racking up big advance bids online.
The crown jewel — a 1727 mantel clock case — already has a top bid of $140,000. Other items of note include a pair of baluster vases from around the same time stamped with the mark of Polish King Augustus II, and a 1731 tea set which once belonged to Venice’s noble Morosini family.
The Meissen porcelain collection are “museum quality pieces,” Dr. Lori Verderame, a museum curator and professional art appraiser, told The Post, saying she expected the items to sell collectively for well over $2 million.
“Some of the works come out of great historic royal collections and they’re marked as such,” she said. “These are not run-of-the-mill pieces.”
The modern history of the collection has also contributed to its value. The porcelain was first collected by Dr. Franz Oppenheimer, a wealthy German-Jewish industrialist, and his wife Margarethe during the 1920s and ’30s. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, the family was forced to flee their grand home in Berlin for Vienna, Austria, in 1936. As the war spread, the family ultimately immigrated to the United States in 1938 and lived the rest of their lives on the Upper East Side.
The porcelain, however, didn’t come with them. The Oppenheimers were forced to part with it sometime before their escape from Austria. It was ultimately scooped up by a Nazi officer in Holland for Hitler’s own collection. It was destined for his Führermuseum, a gargantuan vanity project in Linz, Austria, which was never realized,
After the war it was found by the famed Allied “Monuments Men” and spent the next several decades in The Netherlands, with many pieces exhibited at the country’s Rijksmuseum.
In 2019, the Dutch Government said the haul had to be returned to Oppenheimer descendants, who “involuntarily lost possession due to circumstances directly related to the Nazi regime.” The descendants who are now selling the treasures have elected to remain anonymous, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman told The Post
The final live auction will take place at the Sotheby’s salesroom at 10 a.m. Tuesday. Prospective buyers will also be able to place bids online by telephone or through the auctioneer’s app.