Otto Krebs

[1] His business success was due to engineer Joseph Strebel's 1903 discovery of building backward-flow steam boilers (Gegenstromgliederkessel-D.R.P.

He became wealthy enough to start collecting in the 1920s, mainly buying works in Paris, especially from the art dealers Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune.

In 1917 he bought an estate in Holzdorf, a small village to the south of Weimar which he had got to know en route between his main factory in Mannheim and others in Bohemia and German Silesia.

Building a holiday home there, he moved there permanently around 1930, using its reception rooms to house his art collection as well as Gobelins tapestries.

It was occupied by the Soviet Army staff after the Allied victory and the building's collections were taken to Leningrad as war reparations in 1947,[2] but not displayed to the public until 1995.