Herbert Max Magnus Gutmann (1879-1942) was born in Dresden, Germany. Until 1931, he was a member of the board of Dresdner Bank, which his father Eugen (1840-1925) had co-founded. Herbert M. Gutmann followed in his father’s footsteps: at the age of 17, he began training as a banker and in 1903 became deputy director of the London branch of Dresdner Bank. In 1906, Eugen and Herbert M. Gutmann founded Deutsche Orientbank AG in Constantinople, now Istanbul.

In 1910, Herbert M. Gutmann was appointed to the Board of Management of Dresdner Bank AG, where he was primarily responsible for international business. The Dresdner Bank named him as its representative on over thirty advisory boards of both German and foreign companies. As an art connoisseur he was collecting objects from the Rococo period, Islamic Art, East Asian objects and porcelain.

The Gutmann family also had a financial interest in Dresdner Bank; Herbert M. Gutmann’s brother Fritz (1886-1944) was the limited partner of the bank in Amsterdam.  Both Herbert M. Gutmann’s father Eugen and his siblings were interested in art and built up their own collections. Eugen Gutmann’s “silver collection” of Renaissance vessels, snuffboxes and porcelain was kept by his children even after his death in 1925. His brothers Fritz and Max Gutmann collected Impressionist works of art as well as Renaissance paintings and antique glassware.

Herbert M. Gutmann presented the collected objects in his Berlin apartment, which was located in the Blücher-Palais on Pariser Platz until 1931, before it burned down, and then in the new apartment in Budapester Straße, and in his house in Potsdam, which was called Herbertshof.

Dresdner Bank got into difficulties as a result of the banking crisis in the late summer of 1931. Herbert M. Gutmann took responsibility for this by resigning from the Board of Management, partly because the Reich government made the bank’s support dependent on this. After a certain period of time, he was to join the Supervisory Board of Dresdner Bank, on which his brother Fritz also sat. However, he continued to work at Deutsche Orientbank and kept his office in the Dresdner Bank building on Behrensstrasse in Berlin.

The history of Dresdner Bank was investigated in a multi-year research project by the Hannah Arendt Institute, the results of which were published in 2006 and 2007. The archive material, which became accessible for the first time in the course of this research project, provided a wealth of information on Herbert M. Gutmann’s situation after 1931, which can only be presented here in brief. After his resignation as a member of the Board of Management of Dresdner Bank, Herbert M. Gutmann continued to hold positions on more than 30 supervisory boards of German and foreign companies. He also held several supervisory board mandates as a representative of Dresdner Bank. in 1933, Herbert M. Gutmann was persecuted as a political opponent and as a Jew. He was initially stripped of his seats on supervisory boards and was no longer allowed to use his office at Dresdner Bank. From 1933, Herbert M. Gutmann was also forced to sell shares in companies such as the credit agency W. Schimmelpfeng GmbH at the request of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, life for Gutmann and his family changed forever. Their Jewish origins and his political activity during the days of the democratic Weimar Republic brought him to the attention of the Nazis. As the Dresdner Bank was under Reich’s control, the Nazis exerted influence on the management of the bank as early as March 1933. The Dresdner Bank went to claim that Gutmann also owed them thousands of Reichmarks in unsubstantiated debts.

For this reasons, he was forced to auction his art collection at the auction house Paul Graupe in Berlin and sell other property as well.

Among the property were securities, stocks, bonds and shares of companies as the Berlinische Bodengesellschaft AG  and Bayerische Motorenwerke AG.