Bismarck's banker Gerson von Bleichröder left a fortune to his sons; his son's painting went to Göring, and Bavaria returned it in 2017 and bought it back the same day

Gerson Bleichröder was born in Berlin in 1822 and ran the private bank his father Samuel had founded. He became known as Bismarck's banker. In 1872 he was ennobled, as Gerson von Bleichröder. He died in Berlin on 19 February 1893 and left his sons a working bank. His son James (1859 to 1937), a lawyer and reserve cavalry captain who fought for Germany in the First World War, was among the richest men in Prussia and collected art. Under the Nazis he was persecuted because his ancestors were Jewish. Several members of the family died in the Holocaust and lost all they owned. James died in 1937. Months later his painting The Raising of Lazarus, by a South German master of about 1530, appeared at auction. It passed through a Munich bookshop to Hermann Göring. After the war it was taken into trust administration, and in 1961 it was handed to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which kept it in storage for 40 years. The museum published the Göring provenance in 2004 and listed the painting on the Lost Art database in 2006. A representative of the heirs came forward in 2011, and the heirs filed a claim in 2015. On 21 July 2017 the painting was returned to James von Bleichröder's heirs. Under a settlement with undisclosed financial terms, the museum bought it back at once. It was to hang in Aschaffenburg's Johannisburg Castle beside a plaque naming the family.