Le Mur Rose
Le Mur Rose (full title: Paysage, le mur rose, Landscape, the Pink Wall), is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1898.
It was bought in Paris at the sale of La Peau de l'Ours on 2 March 1914 by Jewish entrepreneur Harry Fuld, who founded Frankfurt, Germany based H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG, which made telephones. After Fuld died on a business trip to Switzerland in 1932, his art collection passed to his son, Harry Fuld, Jr.
After the ascent of the Nazi party to power, Fuld fled to safety in Switzerland in 1937, packing the collection into crates. But the collection never left Germany and, after confiscation by the SS, it somehow became the property of SS officer Kurt Gerstein. A pre-war expert in decontamination techniques, Gerstein was assigned to the Hygiene Institute of the SS, becoming responsible for delivering Zyklon B poison used in the final solution gas chambers, including Auschwitz concentration camp.