29th November 1937
Heinrich Köhler

Heinrich Köhler

Source: heinrich-koehler.de

It was Wednesday 23 April 1913, at 2-30 pm: the festive hall of the House of Artists on the Bellevuestrasse in Berlin fills with people. Both the participants and the curious want to see the sensation of the day - the first general stamp auction in Germany.

This first auction was an extraordinary success for Heinrich Koehler and the auction house that he founded. An important centre of world philately had come into being - and the company flourished in the years that followed.

The most famous collectors of the time, Philippe la Renotière von Ferrary, Baron Rothschild and Fabergé, the celebrated court jeweller of the Russian Tsars, visit the firm in Berlin. Many other important collectors become Koehler's close personal friends: Gaston Nehrlich, Lichtenstein, Weinberger and Oberländer. King George V, and King Carol II of Romania are illustrious guests and customers of the Heinrich Koehler auction house. And not without reason - most of the large collections of the day were auctioned by Heinrich Koehler.

Heinrich Koehler achieved worldwide recognition and was a member of important international organisations, also the Expert Committee of the Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL). He was also invited to sign the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in England - being the second German, after Munk, to achieve this honour.

The seizure of power by National Socialism meant an enormous drop in the activities of Heinrich Koehler - from now on the international public largely stayed away.

Nevertheless, he was able to hold important auctions before the outbreak of war and also in the early years of the world war - but it was no longer his time. His death on 22nd August 1945 was a huge loss for German and international philately. When he died, he and the philatelic world could look back on 116 auctions containing countless superb items.

With the death of Heinrich Koehler an era of philately and philatelic auctions came to an end - though one would hardly like to mention this against the background of world events which overshadowed the evening of his life.

Heinrich Koehler's widow Anna, supported a little later by her daughter Henriette Grosse-Heinrich Koehler, nevertheless took over the tasks - in some respects difficult tasks - associated with their inheritance and decided to continue the Heinrich Koehler auction house.

Berlin was destroyed. In 1948 the principal building at Friedrichstrasse 166 was requisitioned. Anna Koehler moved the company's headquarters to Wiesbaden, where there were family connections.

Eventually, on 19th May 1949 they were finally able to hold the 124th Heinrich Koehler auction, the first at the Nassauer Hof in Wiesbaden. In doing so they began a new era for the auction house, continuing of a tradition whereby Germany stood for values very different from those which the country had embodied from 1933 to 1945.

Further reference:

As the son of the opera singer Bernhard Köhler and his wife Ida, he grew up first in Darmstadt and later in Leipzig from 1883 to 1892. He attended school in Leipzig and was a member of the Thomanerchor. He later attended a high school in Cologne until around 1896. In 1897 he began an apprenticeship with the Cologne stamp dealer August Wilhelm Drahn.

After completing his apprenticeship, Köhler went on a trip to Nicaragua with his cousin Josef Rener. After returning in April 1901, he worked as a stamp dealer in Cologne for three years.

With Gérard Gilbert he founded the company Gilbert & Köhler in Paris at the end of 1903. On 7th October 1904, Köhler married Anna Rener. They had two children together: daughter Renée, born on 26th November 1907, and another daughter named Henriette, born on 17th October 1909, both in Paris. In the 1920s, Köhler had a relationship with his secretary Lina Bereiter. This also resulted in a daughter.

Gilbert & Köhler began auctions in 1908. They held 40 auctions until the beginning of 1913, then they separated. Heinrich Köhler started anew in Berlin and held his first auction there on 13th April 1913 and founded the Heinrich Köhler stamp auction house.

By the end of the Second World War there would be a total of 116.

Famous collectors of their time, such as Philipp von Ferrary , Baron Rothschild and House of Fabergé Agathon Fabergé, the court jeweler of the Russian Tsar, visited him in Berlin. Other well-known collectors became his friends, such as Gaston Nehrlich, Alfred Lichtenstein, Consul Weinberger and Oberländer. King George V, Carol II of Romania , and Simon Wiesenthal, were guests and customers of the Heinrich Köhler auction house.

Köhler dealt intensively with counterfeits and counterfeiters. In 1925 he opened an official testing center after years of issuing reports on stamps purchased from his company. In 1925/1926 he managed to convict Rudolf Siegel, a well-known Berlin auctioneer, of distributing and producing counterfeits. In 1926 he developed a 'test stamp system'.

In the 1930s he was a member of the associations' supervisory board.

Köhler's company was the official auctioneer of IPOSTA Berlin in 1930. He had also worked as a sworn expert for the Berlin Courts (Regional Courts I, II and III) and as a publicly appointed expert for the IHK Berlin. Köhler owned a large collection of forgeries, in which the forgeries of Goegg-Mercier, Hirschburger, Fournier's predecessor and successor, and many 'Ferrarities', but also Fouré forgeries, were documented. The well-known inspector Fritz Starauschek, who later became head of the senior inspection office in the GDR, was among his employees.

Heinrich Köhler had been a juror since the 1920s, adjudicating in Paris, Monaco 1928, Berlin – IPOSTA 1930, WIPA 1933, OSTROPA 1935).

During the Third Reich he tried to stay out of politics. His daughter Renée had married a Jewish-Russian emigrant. The last time he saw her was at PEXIP in Paris. Köhler's business at Friedrichstrasse 166, which was badly damaged before the end of the war, was run by his wife Anna after his death, together with their younger daughter Henriette and their son-in-law Hans Schmidt, from 1948 onwards.

Source: Wikipedia

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