Kurt Herrmann

Denazification proceedings resulted in no punishment, and he lived as an expatriate in Vaduz with access to considerable wealth from his Swiss bank accounts.

After the fall of the East German regime, his heirs sought to recover the properties but their legal claims were denied.

He was then employed as a construction manager in the Leipzig municipal building administration until July 1912 when he set up shop as a self-employed architect.

In 1911, Meyer also had founded the Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke (DFW) aircraft manufacturing company in Lindenthal, a suburb of Leipzig.

[1] After the end of the First World War, the terms of the Treaty of Versailles banned a German air force and many aircraft factories went out of business.

He regularly made generous monetary gifts in amounts up to 50,000 ℛℳ to Göring, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

[2] During the war years, Herrmann often traveled to the occupied countries of France and The Netherlands on Reichsmarshall Goring's behalf to obtain jewels and other treasures and artworks at less than market value.

In 1942, his German Goldsmiths' Art Workshops was allowed to purchase, at below market value, jewels that had been looted by the Nazis from the Rothschild family collection in France.

[2] In the closing days of the war in Europe, Herrmann left Leipzig and traveled via Austria to Liechtenstein, where he arrived on 30 April 1945.

The authorities in the Soviet occupation zone sentenced him to death in absentia as a war criminal and his assets there were expropriated in 1948.

The heiress then filed a lawsuit against the city, which alleged that Kurt Herrmann had been a citizen of Liechtenstein since 1931 and, as such, his assets were protected from expropriation.