3. Establishing the Facts
The Committee establishes the following facts on the grounds of the research conducted by the ECR and the RCE.
Abraham Citroen’s family
Abraham Citroen, born in Amsterdam on 14 August 1885, was a Jewish jeweller with a shop at Kalverstraat 1 in Amsterdam. In 1924 he took over the family firm, which had been founded in 1859, from his father. Abraham was the fourth generation of Citroen jewellers.
He was married to the Jewish Chane Ptasznik, who was born in Zabno (Poland) op 21 June 1885. The marriage produced two children: Karel Adolf Citroen born on 12 February 1920 and Thea Citroen born on 10 November 1921.
In 1938, after the death of Abraham’s mother, the Citroen-Ptasznik family moved into the home above the jewellery shop at Kalverstraat 1 (in Amsterdam).
Persecution of Abraham Citroen’s family
During the Second World War Abraham Citroen was affected by the anti-Jewish measures taken by the occupying forces. On 17 June 1941 a German administrator (Verwalter) took over the management of his business.
As a result of the second Liro regulation, he was obliged to surrender valuable possessions at the robber bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. in Sarphatistraat in Amsterdam (hereinafter also referred to as Liro-Sarphatistraat), which had been established by the occupying forces for that purpose. The surviving list of people who had to surrender possessions at Liro-Sarphatistraat includes Abraham Citroen under serial number 1757, with administration number 3025 (also designated as the main account or household effects number [H.R. Number]) and the address Kalverstraat 1 (ground floor).
Abraham and Chane (Anna) Citroen-Ptasznik were arrested by the security service (Sicherheitsdienst) and transferred to Westerbork transit camp. They were deported shortly afterwards to Auschwitz, where they were murdered on or around 31 August 1942.
Their daughter Thea Citroen had already been deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz on 21 July 1942. She was murdered there on 24 July 1942.
The only member of the family to avoid persecution was their son Karel Adolf Citroen, who escaped to Switzerland on 1 December 1941. From there he travelled to the United Kingdom, where he joined the Royal Navy in 1943 as a German-English decoder. He returned from the UK in December 1945. He found that the family home above the shop at Kalverstraat 1 in Amsterdam had been ransacked.
The Plates
The number 3025 was found on the underside of 13 of the 14 Plates, demonstrating that these Plates were among the possessions Abraham Citroen surrendered at Liro-Sarphatistraat, to which – as described above – administration number 3025 was assigned. The number is not visible on one of the Plates (NK 314-B), but it is a pendant of Plate NK 314-A, on which the number has been noted. There is no reason to assume that Plate NK 314-B has a different provenance.
It is not known when Abraham Citroen acquired the Plates. The Applicants submitted a list of valuations concerning objects that had belonged to the estate of Abraham Citroen’s mother, the widow Suzanne Citroen-Fedder, who died in 1937.
The ECR stated the following in the investigation report: ‘Various types of porcelain dishes, plates and vases are referred to on the said list. The descriptions are so brief that individual objects cannot be identified with certainty, but several descriptions could well correspond to the 14 plates from the NK Collection. It is therefore perfectly possible that some or all of the claimed plates originate from the estate of Suzanne Citroen-Fedder described on the list.’
The looting institution Liro-Sarphatistraat liquidated virtually all the goods surrendered to it during the years of occupation. Initially the proceeds were booked to individual accounts. This was changed at the end of 1942, and everything was booked to a summary account. This resulted in the loss of the administrative link between balances and the identity of the original owners of the liquidated goods. Liro-Sarphatistraat was placed under the management of the Dutch government after the liberation. This looting organization had appropriated the name of a bona fide Jewish bank, and therefore the name was changed Liquidation of Sarphatistraat Branch (Liquidatie van Verwaltung Sarphatistraat – LVVS). At the request of government officials, the summary account was unravelled using surviving documentation, and the former accounts of individual rightful claimants were reconstructed. The Applicants submitted an overview of Abraham Citroen’s Liro account that had been reconstructed on the basis of their family archive. This overview states that the equivalent value of 15 Plates was booked on Abraham Citroen’s individual account. Ultimately the officials managing LVVS were able to pay 90% of the surplus balance to the individual accounts of the rightful claimants. This involved payment of a share in the liquidation balance, rather than compensation for the appraised or current value. In their written response to the draft opinion, the Applicants commented that it had not become clear ‘to what extent the rightful claimants in the 1950s were aware of this difference between payment and compensation’. They assume that their father Karel Adolf Citroen ‘no longer considered himself to be the owner [of the heirlooms] from the moment of the payment’.
On 19 May 1951 the Jurisdiction Division of the Council for the Restoration of Rights ruled that the ‘Jewish population group had not lost ownership through the surrender of its possessions’ and that ‘neither the conversion into cash by investment or reinvestment, nor the aggregation of all this into a sum that could no longer be individualized, could yield no title of acquisition of property ownership for the occupier’ but had become ‘the collective property of the dispossessed or their successors’.
After the war, some of the goods liquidated in the Netherlands by Liro-Sarphatistraat during the occupation were found at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne. The Plates were among them. It is known that Lempertz purchased objects on a large scale from Liro-Sarphatistraat during the occupation. There are no indications that Lempertz acquired the Plates through other means, so a purchase at Liro-Sarphatistraat is obvious.
The goods found at Lempertz were seized and probably returned to the Netherlands in July 1948, where they were put under the management of the Netherlands Art Property Foundation (Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit, SNK). Until now the Plates have been part of the NK Collection.
Abraham Citroen and succession
According to a certificate of inheritance issued on 19 February 1954 by Jakob van Hasselt, then a notary in Amsterdam, Karel Adolf Citroen is the sole and exclusive authorized and entitled person to dispose of all that belongs to the estates of his sister Thea Citroen and of his parents Abraham Citroen and Chane Ptasznik.
Karel Adolf Citroen was first married to Ms W.M. Pasma, from which marriage two children were born, namely the Applicants.
That marriage ended upon the death of Mrs W.M. Citroen-Pasma on 10 November 1994, after which Adolf Citroen remarried to CC. No children were born during this second marriage.
The Applicants were excluded by their father as heirs to his estate. As a result of this exclusion the Applicants cannot be regarded as direct legal successors of their father pursuant to the law of succession and indirect legal successors of their grandparents pursuant to the law of succession.
