Фриц Маннгеймер: Банкир, коллекционер және құпия өлімнің тарихы

Fritz Mannheimer (19 September 1890 – 9 August 1939) was a German born and, from 1936, Dutch banker and art collector who was the director of the Amsterdam branch of the Berlin based investment bank Mendelssohn & Co. that was for some time the main supporter of the Dutch capital market. Known as the "King of Flying Capital", he was one of the main organisers of credit for post war Germany. His international financial work brought him recognition, such as being awarded Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. His collection was bought by Hitler in 1941, but it was returned to the Netherlands after the war.

Born into a Jewish family in Stuttgart, Württemberg, he was a son of Max Mannheimer, a wine merchant, and his wife, Lili Sara Fränkel. He attended the University of Heidelberg where he obtained a Doctor of Law and became a Dutch citizen in 1936.

On 9 August 1939, two months after his wedding, Mannheimer reportedly was in his Amsterdam office when he received a phone call from an unidentified party, left the office, boarded a train for France, and joined his wife at their house, where he died the same day. Contemporary observers quickly speculated on the manner of death, with many newspapers suggesting suicide; but Mannheimer's health had always been precarious, due, in part, to his excessive weight. In addition to the heart attack suffered on his wedding day, he reportedly nearly died after suffering another, while travelling in Egypt, in 1937. Shortly before his death, Mannheimer, who stood tall, was described as being "half his normal weight" of
Whatever the actual cause of death, The New York Times was just one of many leading world newspapers which reported that Mannheimer's demise took place under "circumstances attended by a measure of mystery." The day after his death, Mendelssohn & Co. in Amsterdam announced that it was insolvent and that Mannheimer's collections, which were valued at more than 13 million guilders (approximately $100,000,000 today), had been largely funded on unlimited bank credit. Housed at his homes in the Netherlands and France, Mannheimer's art (which included works by Chardin, Fragonard, Watteau, and Rubens, at least one fake Vermeer, gold reliquary busts, tapestries, Meissen porcelain, and Judaica including a naturalistic circa 1800 Hanukkah lamp known as the "Oak Tree Menorah"), and his collection of 18th century furniture (much of it acquired for him by the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe and the Paris decorator Stéphane Boudin) were seized by the bank. As a history of Mendelssohn & Co. states, "the Amsterdam branch had to suspend its activities due to false speculations on the part of its director."

The entire Mendelssohn firm was forcibly liquidated by the Nazis later that same year—its assets were transferred to Deutsche Bank—and much of Mannheimer's art was purchased by Adolf Hitler in 1941, after the German invasion of the Netherlands. Other works from the collections were stored in England and Vichy, France, by Mannheimer's widow until the end of the war. The lion's share of Mannheimer's collection was acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1952, when it was repatriated from Germany; the museum was forced to sell half of the collection by the order of the Dutch Ministry of Finance. Coincidentally, Mannheimer's Amsterdam residence now is used for some of the Rijksmuseum's offices. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns one of the masterpieces of Mannheimer's collection, "Young Man Blowing Bubbles" (a. k. a. "Soap Bubbles"), a circa 1734 painting by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin; it was sold in 1949 to the museum by Wildenstein & Co., the art dealers, who had acquired the painting after it was repatriated to France in 1946.