Martin Schlaff

[1] In 1976, he took over the financial company Robert Placzek AG in Vienna, founded by his father, Chaim Schlaff, and partners.

[2] In his first years he continued trading with several Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, mainly Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, thereafter also with East Germany.

According to a Bundestag commission report from 1998, Martin Schlaff and Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski (KoKo) later-on circumvented the Western embargo when building a hard drive storage factory in Meiningen shortly before the collapse of the GDR.

In 2006, a foundation attributed to Schlaff bought about 6% of the shares of RHI AG, the world's largest supplier of refractory products.

Although a social democrat, he was also on good talking terms with conservative leaders, be it Ariel Sharon in Israel or Wolfgang Schüssel in Austria.

"[2] Germany's Attorney General never found any plausible cause to present a case against Schlaff and therefore in 1998 all criminal investigations were officially terminated.

In April 2002, after four years of litigation in the civil case Germany vs. Martin Schlaff, a Swiss court decided that the German allegations were baseless.

[27] For many decades, Martin Schlaff has been the driving force behind Chai Lifeline, an organization for children battling a deadly disease.

[28] His long lasting relationship with the Chabad movement led to his support for the project Children of Chernobyl, established by Steven Spielberg.

[27] In Vienna, he has been financing the Gan Sara Kindergarten,[27] another Chabad project, as well as the Chaim Schlaff Dining Hall, which offers free meals for up to 150 persons three times a day.

According to the Museum, Schlaff's intention is easy to explain: ″The collector wanted to take the objects off the market and, so to speak, remove them from their originally intended use — to forment and further inflame antisemitism.″[31] In return, the City of Vienna awarded him a medal of honour.

The project was a documentation on mass murderer Heinrich Himmler based on his diaries and letters, unpublished up to this point.

Himmler was one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust, the Porajmo, the murderer of millions of civilians and prisoners of war as part of the Generalplan Ost, and numerous other crimes against humanity.

Martin Schlaff could not attend the funeral of his father in 2010 as the Israeli authorities did not grant him safe conduct; at that time the investigations against the family of Ariel Sharon were in full swing.

[36] According to the news magazine Profil, Schlaff's 2007 divorce from his wife Andrea involved a €200 million settlement, the largest ever reported up to that time.