Franz Koenigs lost his drawings to a bank five weeks before the German invasion; Hitler bought 528 and the Dutch state has refused his heirs four times

Franz Koenigs, a German-born banker, co-founded Rhodius Koenigs in Amsterdam in 1920 and became Dutch in February 1939. In 1935 his collection held 2,145 drawings and 47 paintings, on loan to Museum Boymans in Rotterdam. He had pledged it to the Jewish-owned bank Lisser & Rosenkranz under loans from 1931 and 1935. On 2 April 1940 the bank went into liquidation and the loan fell due. On 9 April the Rotterdam businessman D.G. van Beuningen bought the drawings and 12 paintings for 1 million guilders. Germany invaded on 10 May. In December 1940 van Beuningen sold about 528 drawings to Hans Posse, Hitler's agent for the Linz museum, for 1.4 million guilders. On 6 May 1941 Koenigs fell between a moving train and the platform at Cologne station and died. In 1945 Soviet forces took the Linz drawings. Ukraine returned 139 drawings and 3 etchings to the Netherlands on 9 July 2004. The family says 309 remain in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow^†. His granddaughter Christine Koenigs claimed the works. Her uncle asked the committee to reject her. The Restitutions Committee advised rejection in 2003, 2013 and 2014. It found Koenigs was not persecuted and lost the collection for business reasons before the invasion. On 7 July 2025 the minister refused to reopen the cases. In 2026 the Kyiv drawings stay in the Dutch national collection and the Moscow drawings stay in Russia.