Art collection David Leder

David Leder and his wife Lea Laura, known as Lola Leder, had been collecting art since the late 1910s and supported artists and art institutions. They lived in Chemnitz, moved to Berlin in the early 1920s, returned to Chemnitz in the mid-1920s and lived in Berlin again from 1928.
From 1933, they were persecuted for being Jews by the National Socialists. David Leder was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 10 November 1938. After his release, the couple emigrated to London in 1939.
On 14 January 1942, Lola and David Leder's moving lifts, which had been stored at Spedition Hamacher (formerly Brasch & Rothenstein) in Berlin, were confiscated by the Gestapo on behalf of the Property Disposal Office of the Chief Finance President of Berlin-Brandenburg as assets in accordance with the 11th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act.
On 23 March 1944, the Hamacher forwarding company delivered the couple's two lifts to a depot of the Property Disposal Office of the Chief Finance President at Thielschufer 10/16.
The ‘Assets Register’ of the Chief Finance President, which is actually an accounting overview of income and outflows from the treasury, shows that it was not until two years after the confiscation - beginning in April 1944 - that the proceeds from the sale were received by the Chief Finance President and that the storage costs and the audit of the Reich Transport Group were paid in February 1945. The sales proceeds totalled 983 Reichsmarks. The purchasers were: ‘G. Sonatria, Charlottenburg, H. Holtzapfel in Lankwitz, Richard Hille, Bismarckstraße 80’. The two lifts belonging to the Leders and other persecuted, expatriated emigrants on what was then Thielschufer, now Fraenkelufer, were stored on the site of (and probably in) the youth synagogue, an annexe to the large synagogue built by architect Alexander Beer, which was still usable after the destruction of 1938.
A film props supplier named Rudolf Sobczyk had taken up residence on the premises next to the Chief Finance President, citing bomb damage on 23/24 November 1943 at his original business location in Chausseestraße as the reason for the choice of location. David and Lola Leder's lift probably arrived there at the same time as the props. Rudolf Sobczyk demonstrably bought items from the belongings of other emigrants at auction; it is possible that items from the Leder lifts also came into his possession.
Two portraits of Lola Leder by Max Liebermann, which David and Lola Leder had loaned to the Berlin Jewish Museum in the 1930s, were returned to Lola Leder after the end of the war.
A portrait by Gustav Schaffer showing David Leder in front of the silhouette of Jerusalem remained in Chemnitz after an exhibition in 1931 for reasons unknown. Unlike other works of art that the Leders donated to the Chemnitz museum or offered for sale, no correspondence is known about this work. The painting was ‘re-inventoried’ in the Chemnitz Art Collections in 1962 as a ‘presumed gift’ from David Leder.