German company praised for giving work by Hans Thoma back to heirs of Hedwig Ullmann, who was forced to sell it in 1938

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The German food company Dr Oetker, best known for its baking powders, cake mixes and pizzas, has said it will return an artwork to the heirs of the former Jewish owner who was forced to flee Nazi Germany.

The decision to restitute the work, a lithograph by Hans Thoma called Spring in the Mountains (Frühling im Gebirge/Kinderreigen) follows an audit of the company’s art collection which aimed to discover whether any of the works were looted by the Nazis.

The work had been in the possession of Hedwig Ullmann, who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and was forced to sell her art collection. Rudolf-August Oetker, the grandson of the Oetker empire’s founder, bought the work at auction in 1954.



Ullmann’s heirs had no idea what had happened to the artwork until they were contacted by Dr Oetker, who informed them that the company wished to return it for “moral reasons”.

The heirs’ New York-based lawyer, David J Rowland, described the decision as exemplary.

The work is being returned for ‘moral reasons’. Photograph: Dr Oetker

“This is an outstanding example of a private company doing the right thing with regards to Nazi-looted art and sets a standard of best practice in this field,” he said. The decision abides by the international Washington principles – a set of rules which usually only apply to public galleries that govern the return of looted artworks or financial compensation.

Thoma, who was born in the Black Forest in southern Germany in 1839 and died in 1924, started out as a painter of clock faces and built a reputation for his depictions of rural life.

The Oetker collection was largely assembled by Rudolf-August, who died in 2007.

Dr Oetker announced in 2015 that it had commissioned a provenance researcher to investigate the collection on the back of a study it published detailing the company’s history during the Third Reich.

Three other objects in the collection have been identified as possible Nazi-looted artworks. Dr Oetker spokesman Jörg Schillinger told German media that once their provenance was clear, those works would also be returned in the near future.

The company, which has an annual revenue of about £8.9bn and employs more than 30,000 staff, is probably best known for the instant cake mix it started selling in 1891, the year the company was founded.