It was in 2009, when Anthony Easton’s father, Peter, had just passed away.When Anthony began dealing with a tricky testamentary affair, he found a brown box in his father’s old apartment in Limington Town, Hampshire.
Inside the box were brand new German banknotes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life-and a birth certificate.
Peter Rodrik Easton, who was proud of his “English character” (and was a Catholic) and was actually born and raised in pre-war Germany, named Peter Hans Rudolf Esner, was a descendant of one of Berlin’s richest Jewish families.
Although Anthony grew up aware of his father's origins, the items in the box illuminated a past he knew almost nothing about. The discoveries will lead him on a decade-long quest to reveal a family destroyed by the Holocaust, a lost wealth worth billions of pounds, and looted art and property heritage under Nazi rule.
The black-and-white photographs depict Peter’s early life, far from his son’s simple growing environment in London—a driver-driving Mercedes, a crowd of households, and stairs carved with beautiful angel patterns.
Even worse, in one of the photos, 12-year-old Peter Eisner was smiling with his friends with a Nazi flag floating in the distance.
"I felt like a hand reaching out from the past," Anthony said.
He said his father was a quiet and serious man, although occasionally he would suddenly become angry. He avoids talking about his childhood and always keeps his mouth shut to questions about his slight German accent.
"There are some clues that he's really different from everyone else, and there's a haze over his world," Anthony said.
The next big clue about Anthony's family history comes from a piece of art.
He asked a fluent German-speaking friend to help her investigate a company called “Hahn’sche Werke” whose reference was scattered in documents inside the suitcase. After searching online, she sent Anthony a picture of a painting depicting the interior of a large steel factory that seemed to belong to the company.
The melted metal glows brightly on the conveyor belt, illuminating the faces of busy and focused workers. This is an image of industrial power and strength, from an era when Germany is accelerating towards decades of devastating war.
This 1910 painting by artist Hans Baruscheck is titled The Rolling Mill. It was once owned by Heinrich Eisner, and most likely commissioned by him. Heinrich helped build the Hahn'sche Werke steel business into one of the most technologically advanced and massive companies in Central Europe. The documents in the suitcase show that this is Anthony's great-grandfather.
Further research revealed that at the turn of the twentieth century, Heinrich was one of Germany’s richest businessmen – the equivalent of a modern billionaire.
His company produces pipe steel, with factories in Germany, Poland and Russia.
Heinrich and his wife Olga own several properties in and around Berlin, including an impressive six-story building in central Berlin with marble floors and off-white facades.
A photograph from the early 1900s shows a man with a slightly rounded belly and a straight white beard. Heinrich was wearing a black suit, and Olga sat next to him, wearing a crystal crown.
When Heinrich died in 1918, he left the shares of the company and his personal wealth to his son Rudolf, who had just returned from the battlefield of World War I.
The war was a human disaster, but the Han’sche Werke flourished during that period, satisfying the German military’s demand for steel. Rudolf and his family also managed to survive the post-war economic and political turmoil that plagued their country.
Within a few years, however, all will be lost.
Change of everything.
In the notes found by Anthony in his suitcase, Peter recalls the conversations he had unintentionally heard between his parents, as well as the theft of private speech about the Nazi threat. Adolf Hitler and his supporters were blaming the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First War and the subsequent economic distress.
Rudolf Eisner believed that if his company became indispensable to the Nazi regime, he would be safe. For a time, it seemed to work, but as anti-Semitic laws became more extreme and the abuse they witnessed around them worsened, he began to rethink it.
In March 1938, the government began to defeat the Han’sche Werke, which, under great pressure from the authorities, sold the Jewish-owned company to the industrial group Mannesman, whose chief executive, William Zangan, was a Nazi supporter.
"It is almost impossible to quantify the wealth that was plundered and the value of those assets today," said David DeJong, author of "Nazi Billionaire", which traces the plunder of Jewish businesses under the Third Reich.
In 2000, Manesman was acquired by Vodafone for more than £100 billion, the largest commercial acquisition ever recorded at the time, and at least part of the industrial assets included in the transaction once belonged to the Esna commercial empire.
The dismantling of the Hahn’sche Werke and the arrest of members of the company made the Esner family realize that they needed to flee.But by 1937, any Jew attempting to leave Germany was forced to pay the state 92 percent of any property they owned—a series of taxes called “imperial escape taxes.”
The Asner family faces the loss of their remaining wealth.
transactions
At the height of the crisis, a man named Martin Hattig begins to appear in the life of the Essner family, who, according to records in the Berlin archives, was an economist and tax consultant.
Throughout the 1930s, his name repeatedly appeared in the autograph book of guests at Eisner's country house, thanking them for their generous hospitality.
Mr. Hattig, a non-Jew, seemed to offer the family a solution to the situation where the Nazis were about to confiscate their assets. They signed a transfer to him of a key part of their personal wealth—mostly the many properties they owned and their internal objects—to keep it free from legal influence against the Jews.
Anthony believes that his grandparents assumed at the time that Hartig would one day give them the assets back.
They were wrong. Instead, he permanently transferred Eisner's assets to his own name.
The three experts concluded that the transaction was evidence of “forced sale” — a term widely used to describe the deprivation of Jewish assets under Nazi rule.
Despite losing the wealth accumulated over generations, Anthony's grandparents and father managed to flee Germany in 1938.The train tickets, luggage labels and hotel pamphlets stored in Peter's suitcase allowed Anthony to trace their journey.
The family went first to Czechoslovakia and then to Poland, leading the Nazis, and eventually boarded one of the last ships to England in July 1939.
They lost billions of dollars of wealth, but they were the most fortunate members of the Esner family. Most of their relatives were captured and died in concentration camps. Rudolf himself died in 1945, and he was detained by the British on the Isle of Man for most of the war—like many other German refugees.
Anthony's next step was to find out the wealth of the Eisner family and the aftermath of Martin Hartig.
He hired experienced investigator Yana Slavova to find out exactly what was stolen, how it changed hands, and where it is today.
Within weeks, Ana discovered a large number of documents about his relatives, including details of their possessions and items.
She was able to trace the painting that Anthony discovered at the beginning of her journey, the Platinum Steel Factory, which is housed in the Brocken Museum in Berlin.
Early attempts to recover the artwork had problems with evidence. Can Anthony prove that its sale was related to Nazi persecution? How does he know that it hasn't gone through multiple legal changes of hands before finally making it into the museum?
Mansion 48
When Anthony Easton's mysterious and estranged father dies, he finds a suitcase full of mysterious clues. This triggers a decade-long quest to uncover the truth about his family's dark history, leading him to Mansion 48.
A breakthrough came when Yana discovered correspondence between the museum and an art dealer at the time.
The art dealer sold the painting from a former family home in Essen, which was taken over by Martin Hartig in 1938.Hartig spent the rest of his life there, carefully repairing the building after it was damaged during the fall of Berlin and eventually dying naturally in 1965.
After Hattig died, the property passed to his daughter, who is now over 80 years old. She donated the house to her children in 2014 and moved to a country cottage where she arranged a meeting with Anthony and Anna.
The old woman prepared tea and cakes for them, and they ate and chatted in the living room, where hung a portrait of her father-a man with thick-rimmed glasses, greased hair, emaciated face and a black suit. This portrait was painted in 1945, just after the end of World War II.
The story told by Martin Hartig's daughter is quite different from what Anthony and Yana expected.
She told them that her father had been opposed to the Nazis and helped save the Esner family (she described them as great friends) to keep them from the Holocaust. She said he helped persuade them to leave and urged the family: "You can't stay here. go to England, go to London."
Her father also told her that he helped them remove the paintings from the frame and hide them in the clothes, thus smuggling them out of Germany.
When asked about the property her family took over from the Eisner family in 1938, she said these were legal purchases.
“My father legally bought two houses,” she said, “all must be very compliant.”
Other members of the family are more inclined to accept the possibility that their ancestors may have exploited the Eisner family.
Vincent, great-grandson of Martin Hartig, is in his 20s and training as a carpenter.
He acknowledges that he feels that his present home—the place where Anthony’s grandparents once lived—may have a glorious past.
"I mean I certainly wondered at some point-we live as a family in this wonderful place, how did it come about," he said. "I also asked myself, what was the situation at that time?"
After learning about what happened to Anthony's Jewish family, Vincent said he believed the Eisner family had few options when transferring the property to his great-grandfather.
Anthony was unable to file a restitution lawsuit over his grandparents'property.
His grandmother, Rudolf’s widow, had attempted to reclaim the property in the 1950s, but gave up after Hatig challenged the law.
However, there is still hope for the artwork taken from the Asner family to recover what was lost.
Earlier this year, the Brohan Museum in Berlin informed Anthony of its intention to return the Rolling Mill painting to the descendants of Heinrich Eisner. The museum declined an interview with the BBC because the relevant procedure is still ongoing.
Another painting was returned to Antony from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, while a third claim for an Austrian work of art remains unresolved.
Among the evidence uncovered by Anthony's investigation was a list compiled by the Gestapo detailing specific crafts and paintings confiscated from his relatives. His family is likely to find and recover more assets in the future.
“When it comes to returns, I’ve always said it’s not about things, money and property, but about people,” Anthony says.
"The whole process turned them into real people, people who had real lives."
This awareness has now been passed on to a new generation. The name Esna may have disappeared when Peter sailed to Britain in 1939, but it has now been revived. Anthony's nephew, Cassie, was born in August 2024, and the middle name is taken as Esna.
Anthony said he was deeply moved by his niece's decision to commemorate their long-lost family.
"You know, that name will stay with Kassian as long as he's around," he said. "People say, 'That's a funny middle name-what's the story?'"
(original title : How an old suitcase revealed a hidden family fortune, lost under Nazi rule)