Michael Berolzheimer

Michael Berolzheimer (born January 22, 1866, in Fürth; died June 5, 1942, in Mount Vernon, New York) was a German entrepreneur, lawyer and art collector.

Berolzheimer collected prints and eventually owned about 600 pieces of graphic art as well as about 800 hand drawings by Dutch, Italian Baroque painters and from the German Romantic period, including an oil sketch of the Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg.

He was obliged to abandon the collection of hand drawings, which had been declared a national cultural asset by Ernst Wengenmayr, an associate of the Munich art dealer Adolf Weinmüller,[5] who specialized in Aryanization.

[9] After the Nazi attacks on Jews on Kristallnacht in November 1938, a special Jewish property levy of 80,000 RM was imposed on the Berolzheimer family.

[10] After the end of the war, Berolzheimer's heirs sought the return of the looted art objects, which began in 1950 with the transfer of a dozen prints, including sheets by Bonaventura Genelli, from the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, followed by returns from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg, but the initiatives petered out with the refusal of the Albertina in Vienna.