Bernhard Wolfgang Hellmann was the eldest son of Paul Hellmann and Irene Hellmann-Redlich, who played an important part in the cultural life of Austria in the 1920s and 1930s. As the owner of a textiles factory, Paul Hellmann was one of the financiers of the Salzburger Festspiele; he and his wife also supported numerous artists and institutions such as the Wiener Werkstätte. In her memoirs Remembering my good friends the British politician Mary Agnes Hamilton writes about them: 'Irene gathered to her everything that was most interesting in the artistic life of the most artistic city in Europe; among their intimate friends were Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, Friedrich Schorr, Ignaz Friedmann, Richard Beer Hofmann, Egon Wellesz, Jacob Wassermann.' Their house in Vienna, and more notably still their country house in Alt-Aussee near Salzburg, were meeting-places for all kinds of artists. This role is reflected in the correspondence between Hofmannsthal and Irene Hellmann, which has been preserved by the German Schiller Society.
Bernhard Hellmann was destined for a career in textiles. With this in mind, he worked first in England and later in Rotterdam, where he married the daughter of a Jewish Russian and a woman from Groningen. Bernhard Hellmann’s great passion was for biology. His boyhood friend Konrad Lorenz (Nobel prizewinner for biology) referred to him in this connection as a genius manqué. In the first few years of the war, he earned a living by making wooden jewellery. Then he went into hiding. At the beginning of 1943 he was picked up and transported to Westerbork. Just one week later he was transported to Sobibor, where he was gassed on arrival. His wife and only child survived the war.
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This person is mentioned in a CABR document of the Dutch Nationaal Archief. The CABR contains detailed information concerning this person’s arrest, inv. nr CABR 66887