As Germany devolved into chaos at the end of World War II, a rare violin from the famed shop of the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari was plundered from a bank safe in Berlin.
The instrument, crafted in 1709 during the golden age of violin-making, had been deposited there years earlier by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family as Nazi persecution put assets owned by Jews in jeopardy.
For decades after the war, the family searched to no avail for the violin, known as the Mendelssohn, placing ads in magazines and filing reports with the German authorities. The violin, valued at millions of dollars, was presumed lost or destroyed.
Now, the Mendelssohn may have resurfaced. An eagle-eyed cultural property scholar, Carla Shapreau, recently came across photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. She spotted a violin that bore striking similarities to the Mendelssohn, though it has a different name — Stella — and creation date — 1707 instead of 1709.
“My jaw dropped,” said Shapreau, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who had been searching for the instrument for more than 15 years.
Jason Price, the founder of the auction house Tarisio that operates in New York and other cities, agreed with Shapreau’s findings. A Stradivarius violin, dated to 1707 and valued at between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, passed through his auction house in 2000 but did not sell. There were few details about its history at the time, he said. But now, after reviewing photos of that violin in Tarisio’s archive and earlier images of the Mendelssohn, he and other experts are convinced they match.
“They obviously are the same,” Price said. “When you look at the photographs side by side, you see the peculiarities of the wear patterns, the dings, the dents, the scratches. It is the same violin. There’s no question about that, and I don’t think anyone would have a reasonable case at saying they aren’t.”
Jean-Philippe Échard, a curator of stringed instruments at the Musée de la Musique in Paris who has reviewed the images, said the similarities were “striking and in fact, very convincing.”
Échard said it was possible that a contemporary maker could have produced a replica of the Mendelssohn violin with the exact same details. But given that both violins are said to be more than 300 years old, they were almost certainly the same instrument, he said.
“It’s quite impossible to have two old objects that have exactly the same appearance,” he said. “They cannot be the same like that. It’s only one instrument.”
History Often Difficult to Trace
The case of the Mendelssohn Stradivarius highlights the opaque trade for rare instruments, in which details about provenance, or the history of previous ownership, are often not well documented or, in some cases, intentionally obscured. Instruments are sometimes sold and resold for millions of dollars even if they lack a verifiable historical record.
Cultural institutions and instrument dealers have faced pressure in recent years to return looted objects to their original owners. But buyers can find themselves in a difficult position if, unwittingly, they paid large sums in good faith for an object they later discover was looted during the war.
Stradivari, who died in 1737, made more than 1,000 stringed instruments, sometimes in collaboration with his sons, working out of a shop in Cremona, Italy. About 500 of the famed violins are still in circulation today. They retain a mystique in the classical music world, renowned for their lush sound and visual beauty. Some Stradivarius violins once owned by famous virtuosos like Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin have sold in recent years for up to $20 million.
Using sales records, interviews and other data, Shapreau believes she has traced the Mendelssohn to a Japanese violinist who appears to have acquired it around 2005.
The violinist, Eijin Nimura, 54, is a prominent musician who serves as an artist for peace for Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization, and plays concerts to honor victims of natural disasters. He has spoken about his instrument on social media and at the 2018 exhibition in Tokyo, describing it as the Stella. But he has declined to discuss it further with Shapreau, who began reaching out to him last fall.
A lawyer for Nimura restated that position in a recent letter to Shapreau.
“We have no information regarding this, including any factual basis that any of your allegations would have any merit,” the lawyer, Yoshie Tsuruta, of the Peaceful International Law Firm in Tokyo, wrote. “Mr. Nimura is a bona fide purchaser of the instrument for valuable consideration. The instrument belongs to Mr. Nimura.”
Neither the violinist nor his lawyer responded to interview requests from The New York Times. It remains unclear how Nimura acquired his violin, and, like many buyers, he may not have had any reason to question its provenance.
The living members of the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family, spread across Europe and the United States, hope to reach a settlement with Nimura, though they say he has not acknowledged that they have any claim. They had not known of the violin that so closely matches their missing instrument until Shapreau’s discovery last summer of the images from Japan.
David Rosenthal, a family member and the former principal percussionist of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, said he knew that a violin, once played by his grandmother Lilli, had been stolen during the war. He said he remembered the moment when Shapreau reached out to tell the family she thought she had located it.
“My reaction was one of utter disbelief and shock,” he said. “It was hiding in plain sight.”
A Family Treasure
Franz von Mendelssohn, who died in 1935, was a partner at the Mendelssohn Bank in Berlin and also an instrument collector. After the Nazis rose to power, Jews had increasing difficulty getting expensive possessions, such as a precious violin, out of the country. The Stradivarius was in storage at the Mendelssohn Bank in 1938 when the Nazis forced the bank into liquidation. Its assets were largely acquired by Deutsche Bank.
Years later, the violin and other instruments and heirlooms from the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family were moved to a Deutsche Bank safe. But sometime in the spring or summer of 1945, that safe was plundered, according to a 1960 letter from bank officials to the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family. It was a time of chaos in Berlin. Hitler had committed suicide in April 1945, just as the Soviet army advanced into the city. The Soviets took control of the bank, but it is unclear whether the safe may have already been looted.
For decades, the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family searched for the Stradivarius, placing photographs and stolen property notices in international publications, and filing a report with Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior.
A 1958 notice in the Strad, a music magazine, described “the small Mendelssohn Stradivari,” that had been stolen at the time of the occupation and said it had been valued at 80,000 Reichsmark in 1930.
“This violin is an authentic creation of Antonio Stradivari,” the notice said. “It bears an authentic inscription of the year 1709. This violin is remarkably beautiful, in good preservation with excellent tone.”
Stella Appears on the Market
It can be difficult to trace musical instruments lost or stolen in the Nazi era because producing detailed information on provenance is not a common part of the trade. The hunt for such instruments often requires years of sleuthing, a task that only a few researchers, like Shapreau, have taken on. Provenance was similarly not a central concern for the art market for decades after World War II. But starting in the 1990s, the market came to be increasingly focused on the scope of Nazi looting and on investigating the ownership of works that had been in Europe during the Holocaust era.
Shapreau has tracked the history of the violin that she believes to be the Mendelssohn back to 1995, when a Paris luthier, Bernard Sabatier, said he was approached by a Russian violinist looking to sell an instrument he had purchased in 1953 from a German dealer in Moscow. Sabatier would not reveal the violinist’s name to The Times, citing client confidentiality. Sabatier said he brought the violin to the John & Arthur Beare violin dealership in London, where it was inspected and certified to be a Stradivarius.
In 1999, a certificate of authenticity issued by Sabatier said the violin had been made in 1707, two years earlier than the missing Mendelssohn. Sabatier said he could not recall how the violin was dated. Shapreau said she views the difference in date as either a simple misreading of the violin’s aged internal label, which bears its date of creation, or evidence that it had been tampered with after the violin went missing in the 1940s.
Sabatier said the Russian violinist ultimately sold the violin through a Swiss dealer, operating out of Rome, who could not be reached for comment.
By 2000, the instrument had reached Tarisio, the auction house, where a consignor hoped to sell it. The instrument did not sell, but the photographs of it taken then became critical evidence in Shapreau’s effort to show that it was indeed the missing Mendelssohn.
By 2005, the violin that so closely resembles the Mendelssohn was held by Nimura, according to business records Shapreau tracked down. Machold Rare Violins, a leading German dealer, produced a certificate of authenticity that year that listed the Japanese violinist as its owner. Machold, once one of the most successful violin sellers in the world, collapsed as a business in 2010 and its former owner could not be reached for comment.
The 2005 statement of provenance for the violin on the dealership’s letterhead referred to the instrument as the Stella and said it had long been “in the possession of a noble family which has been living in Holland since the times of the French Revolution.”
The German dealership’s document attributed the Dutch provenance to Sabatier, but he told The Times that he did not write the statement.
A Match in Japan
Shapreau oversees the Lost Music Project, which traces instruments, manuscripts, books and other cultural objects looted, confiscated and displaced in Nazi-era Germany. Created in 2007, the project has published books and articles examining looting in the Nazi era, fraud in the modern instrument trade and the use of databases in recovering stolen instruments.
Shapreau has a background in violin-making and her searches rely on clues provided in letters, photos, business, legal and government records.
“It requires a nimbleness on a lot of levels,” she said. “It’s very daunting.”
Shapreau said that last summer, when she came across images of the Stella violin from the 2018 Stradivarius exhibition at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Tokyo, she had no doubt she was looking at the missing Mendelssohn.
“I was aghast because it had been renamed, re-dated and was in private ownership,” she said.
Violin experts interviewed by The Times said that, until the statement of provenance from 2005, they had not been aware of any Strad known by the name “Stella.” A catalog of more than 800 Stradivarius instruments, including some that have gone missing, released last fall by Beares Publishing contains separate entries for the Mendelssohn and for the Stella based on the information available to researchers.
As evident in his public postings, Nimura has not hidden his ownership of the instrument, which he also refers to as the Stella. Beyond exhibiting it in 2018, he has called attention to his Strad in his official biography and on social media.
In one post, Nimura spoke of visiting Cremona, the birthplace of Antonio Stradivari, with the violin in 2017, writing that the instrument must have felt “deeply moved as she returned to her birthplace.”
“I will continue to play this instrument in the hope that this Strad will become a new legend,” he wrote on Facebook.
Rosenthal, the representative for the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family, began reaching out to Nimura last fall.
“It has now been clearly established that this violin is currently in your hands, and that a completely fictitious provenance has been invented for it,” Rosenthal wrote in an email to Nimura. “The true identity of the so-called ‘Stella’ will be impossible to keep secret.”
Nimura’s lawyer, Tsuruta, has described the ongoing inquiries by Rosenthal and Shapreau as harassment. She wrote in a March letter that Shapreau and Rosenthal should “cease and desist from any further action, conduct or behavior.”
“You are interfering with and causing tremendous distress and anguish to Mr. Nimura and his rights and well-being,” Tsuruta wrote. “You are threatening Mr. Nimura to do what he has no obligation to do.”
Price, the founder of the Tarisio auction house, estimates that the Mendelssohn violin has a value as high as $5 million. But Rosenthal said the violin was more than a material loss.
“My mother was a pianist,” he said. “My uncle was a pianist. My grandmother was a musician who loved to play this violin. My grandfather was a conductor.”
“The fact that it has been discovered after all this time really shakes us up,” he continued. “The violin is part of us. Music is part and parcel of our family. We just want a resolution.”
Léontine Gallois contributed reporting from Paris, and Kiuko Notoya from Tokyo.
Javier C. Hernández is a Times reporter who covers classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond.
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