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By:
BBC
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Translated by: Flutura Gashi-Mehmeti
- 28 October 2025 07:30
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In notes found by Antony in the suitcase, Peter recalled overheard conversations between his parents and whispered stories about Nazi threats. Jews were being blamed by Adolf Hitler and his supporters for Germany's defeat in World War I and the economic suffering that followed.
It all started with a suitcase hidden under a bed.
It was 2009 and Antony Easton's father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony began to work on the messy work of his will, he came across a small brown leather bag in his father's old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington.
Inside were clean German banknotes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life, and a birth certificate.
Peter Roderick Easton, who boasted of his “Englishness,” was in fact born and raised in pre-war Germany. His name was Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin.
Despite the allusions to his father's origins, the contents of the suitcase illuminated a past Antony knew almost nothing about. The discoveries led him on a ten-year trail, uncovering a family devastated by the Holocaust, a missing fortune worth billions of pounds, and a legacy of artwork and property stolen under Nazi rule.
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The black-and-white photographs gave a glimpse of Peter's early life, a far cry from his son's modest upbringing in London. They showed a chauffeured Mercedes, villas with servants, staircases carved with angel ornaments.
Sadly, one photo showed 12-year-old Peter Eisner smiling with friends, with a Nazi flag waving in the distance.
"I felt like it was a hand reaching out from the past," says Antony.
He says his father was a calm and serious man, though prone to outbursts of anger. He avoided talking about his childhood and always deflected questions about his slight German accent.
"There were signs that he wasn't really like other people... There was a darkness around his world," says Antony.
A great asset
The next big clue about Antony's family history came from a piece of art.
Enlisting the help of a friend who spoke fluent German, he asked her to research a company called “Hahn'sche Werke,” references to which were scattered among the documents in the suitcase. After searching the Internet, she sent Antony a photo of a painting depicting the interior of a large steel factory that was apparently owned by the business.
Molten metal shimmers on a conveyor belt, illuminating the faces of busy, attentive workers. It's an image of industrial might, from an era when Germany was heading for decades of devastating war.
The 1910 painting, by artist Hans Baluschek, was called Eisenwlzwerk (Iron Rolling Mill). It had been owned and likely commissioned by Heinrich Eisner, who had helped build the Hahn'sche Werke steel business into one of the most high-tech and widespread companies in central Europe. Documents in the suitcase indicated that this was Antony's great-grandfather.
Further research revealed that, at the beginning of the 20th century, Heinrich was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Germany - the equivalent of a modern multibillionaire.
His company produced tubular steel, with factories spread across Germany, Poland and Russia.
Heinrich and his wife, Olga, owned several properties in and around Berlin, including an impressive six-story property in the city center with marble floors and a white facade.
A photograph from the early 1900s shows a man with a slightly rounded belly and a straight white mustache. Heinrich was wearing a black suit and Olga sat next to him, crowned with a crystal crown. When he died in 1918, Heinrich left shares in his company and his personal fortune to his son Rudolf, who had recently returned from fighting in World War I.
The war had been a human catastrophe, but the Hahn'sche Werke had flourished during that period, meeting the German army's demand for steel. Rudolf and his family also successfully navigated the economic and political chaos that plagued their country after the fighting.
However, within a few years, everything would be lost.
Everything changes.
In notes found by Antony in the suitcase, Peter recalled overheard conversations between his parents and whispered stories about Nazi threats. Jews were being blamed by Adolf Hitler and his supporters for Germany's defeat in World War I and the economic suffering that followed.
Rudolf Eisner believed he would be safe if he made his company invaluable to the Nazi regime. For a while, this seemed to work, but as the anti-Jewish laws became more and more extreme and the abuse they saw around them worsened, he began to reconsider everything.
In March 1938, the government was pursuing “Hahn'sche Werke.” Under great pressure from the authorities, the Jewish-owned company was sold at a very low price to Mannesmann, an industrial conglomerate whose CEO, Wilhelm Zangen, was a Nazi supporter.
"It is almost impossible to determine the amount of wealth stolen and how much these assets are worth today," says David de Jong, author of the book "Nazi Billionaires," which retraces the footsteps of the looting of Jewish businesses under the Third Reich.
In 2000, Mannesmann was acquired by Vodafone in a deal worth more than £100 billion - the largest commercial takeover on record at the time. Some of the industrial assets included in that sale would have once been part of Eisner's business empire.
The dissolution of Hahn'sche Werke and the arrest of company members made the Eisners realize they had to flee. But by 1937, any Jew trying to leave Germany was forced to surrender 92% of everything they owned to the state - paying a slew of taxes known as the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or Reich Flight Tax.
The Eisners faced the loss of what was left of their fortune.
Agreement
At the height of this crisis, a man named Martin Hartig, an economist and tax advisor - according to records in the Berlin archives - began to occupy an important place in the Eisners' lives.
During the 1930s, his name had repeatedly appeared in the guest book at the Eisners' rural estate, thanking them for their generous hospitality.
Hartig, who was not Jewish, appears to have offered the family a solution to the impending confiscation of their assets by the Nazis. They gave him the main elements of their personal wealth - mainly the many properties they owned and their contents, thus protecting them from laws targeting Jews.
Antony believes his grandparents assumed that Hartig would one day return the assets to them.
They were wrong. Instead, he permanently transferred Eisner's assets into his own name.
The BBC has found copies of the original sale documents in Germany's federal archives and shared them with three independent experts. All three concluded that the deal was evidence of a "forced sale" - a term widely used to describe the expropriation of Jewish assets under the Nazis.
Despite losing the wealth they had built up over generations, Antony's grandparents and father managed to escape Germany in 1938. Train tickets, baggage claims, and hotel brochures stored in Peter's suitcase enabled Antony to retrace their journey.
The family went to Czechoslovakia and then to Poland, before catching one of the last ships bound for England in July 1939.
They had lost the equivalent of billions of dollars, but were among the luckiest members of the Eisner family. Most of their relatives were rounded up and killed in concentration camps. Rudolf himself died in 1945 after spending most of the war, like many other German refugees, interned by the British on the Isle of Man.
Meeting with the Hartigs
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The next step for Antony was to find out what had happened to the Eisner family fortune and Martin Hartig.
He hired an experienced investigator, Yana Slavova, to find out exactly what was stolen and where it was today.
Within weeks, Yana had uncovered a wealth of documents about his relatives, including details of their properties and possessions.
She managed to track down the painting that Antony had discovered at the beginning of his journey. “Eisenwalzwerk” was in the collection of the Brohan Museum in Berlin.
A major breakthrough came when Yana discovered correspondence between the museum and an art dealer at the time of the sale.
The art dealer had sold the painting from one of the former Eisner family homes - a property taken over by Martin Hartig in 1938. Hartig lived the rest of his life there, carefully restoring the building after damage during the fall of Berlin, before dying of natural causes in 1965.
After Hartig's death, the property passed to his daughter, who is now in her 80s. She had gifted the house to her children in 2014 and moved to a country cottage, where she had arranged to meet Antony and Yana.
The old lady made them tea and cakes, which they ate in the living room under a portrait of her father - a man with thick-rimmed glasses and greasy hair, gaunt in the face and dressed in a black suit. It was painted in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II.
Martin Hartig's daughter had a very different story than what Antony and Yana expected.
She told them that her father had always been against the Nazis and had helped save the Eisners, whom she described as good friends, from the Holocaust. She said he helped convince them to leave, telling the family: “You can’t stay here. Go to Great Britain, to London.”
Her father had also told her that he had helped smuggle paintings out of Germany by taking them out of their frames and hiding them among clothes.
When asked about the properties her family took from the Eisners in 1938, she said they were all legal purchases.
"My father bought two houses, legally," she said.
Early attempts to recover the artwork ran into evidentiary problems. Could Antony prove that its sale was linked to Nazi persecution? How did he know that it hadn't changed hands several times legitimately before ending up in the museum?
Other family members were more open to the possibility that their ancestor might have exploited the Eisner family.
Vincent, Martin Hartig's great-grandson, is in his 20s and is training to become a carpenter.
He admitted that he felt that his house, where Antony's grandparents once lived, may have had an unpleasant past.
"I mean, of course I was curious at some point about how it came about that we as a family live in this beautiful place," he said. "I also asked myself, what were the circumstances like?"
After discovering what happened to Antony's Jewish family, Vincent said he thought the Eisner family had little choice when they passed their property on to his great-grandfather.
"It's not about the money"
Antony has no option to file a lawsuit for damages for his grandparents' property.
His grandmother, Hildegard - Rudolf's widow, tried to reclaim it in the 1950s, but backed down after a legal challenge from Hartig. The statute of limitations for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution to claim property in the former West Germany has also now passed.
However, for the artworks taken from the Eisner family, there is still hope to recover what has been lost.
Earlier this year, the Brohan Museum in Berlin informed Antony that it intended to return the painting "Eisenwalzwerk" to the descendants of Henrich Eisner. The museum declined an interview with the BBC while the process is still ongoing.
Another painting has been returned to Antony by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and a third request for an artwork in Austria also remains under discussion.
Among the evidence that Antony's investigation has uncovered is a list made by the Gestapo, detailing specific objects and paintings that were seized from his relatives. There is a possibility that his family will find and recover more assets in the future.
"I've always said about reparations, it's not about objects, money and property, it's about people," says Antony.
By researching his family's past, he has gained detailed knowledge of who his father and grandparents once were.
"This whole process has transformed them into real people who had real lives."
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This knowledge has now been passed down to a new generation. The Eisner name may have died out when Peter sailed for Britain in 1939, but it now lives on again. Anton's great-grandson Caspian, born in August 2024, took on the middle name Eisner.
Antony says he was deeply touched by his niece's decision to honor their long-lost family.
