By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 20, 2007

Eric Weinmann, who escaped Nazi Germany as a young man and became a lawyer with the Small Business Administration and a major benefactor of Washington arts groups, died Aug. 19 of sepsis at his home in Washington. He was 94.

In recent years, Mr. Weinmann became enmeshed in a case of international art intrigue when a painting that had belonged to his family before World War II turned up at Yale University. He ultimately regained temporary custody of the painting, a landscape by 19th-century French master Gustave Courbet, when it became evident that the canvas had been stolen after his family had been forced out of its home in Berlin.

Mr. Weinmann was born in the Czech region of Bohemia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and grew up in a prewar world of culture and privilege. He moved in his teens to Berlin and had embarked on a career in banking when his secular Jewish family had to flee its home in 1938.

He found his way to Washington in the early 1940s and used a talent for languages -- he was fluent in German, English, French and Spanish -- to land a job with the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Hardly a cloak-and-dagger spy, he spent most of World War II in Washington, his family said, reading German newspapers for hints of military actions.

After managing his family's business interests for several years, Mr. Weinmann graduated from law school at Columbia University in 1957 and took a job with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1963, he joined the Small Business Administration, where he worked as deputy general counsel until he retired in 1992 at age 79.

Throughout his life, Mr. Weinmann devoted much of his attention to cultural matters. In Berlin, he studied with German photographer Lotte Jacobi and became skilled with a camera. (He later donated a collection of Jacobi's photographs to the University of New Hampshire.)

Pursuing a lifelong interest in Shakespeare, Mr. Weinmann became a member of the board of governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library and endowed posts for a librarian and conservator. In all, he contributed millions of dollars to Washington cultural institutions, including the Folger, the Phillips Collection, Arena Stage and the Kennedy Center.

His favorite Shakespeare play was "Hamlet," which he saw in theaters around the world -- including many productions at local high schools.

Mr. Weinmann was born July 29, 1913, in what is now the Czech city of Teplice, where his grandfather and father were wealthy industrialists. Mr. Weinmann's first language was German, and he had private tutors in English and French.

In his teens, he moved to Berlin, where his family lived in a villa with 14 bedrooms and five servants. After graduating from a business college, Mr. Weinmann worked in the Paris office of the Lazard Brothers bank before returning to Berlin in 1937.

When his father died unexpectedly, Nazi pressure intensified, and the Weinmanns fled to London in 1938, taking little more than what they could fit in suitcases.

"My family's entire assets -- the house we lived in and everything, shareholdings and whatnot -- were all confiscated by the Nazis," Mr. Weinmann said in a 2001 interview with the Associated Press.

He held banking jobs in London, New York and Buenos Aires before joining the Office of Strategic Services. In 1947, Mr. Weinmann received a master's degree in political science from Columbia University. In addition to his Columbia law degree, he received a master's degree in law from Georgetown University in 1961.

Mr. Weinmann's first marriage, to Camilla Marvin Weinmann, ended in divorce. Mary de Limur Weinmann, whom he married in 1974, survives him. Other survivors include two children from his first marriage, Dr. Gail Greenwood Weinmann of Chevy Chase and Edward Weinmann of Bolinas, Calif.; and a granddaughter.

In 2000, a Washington friend of Mr. Weinmann's, Cameron LaClair, was at the Yale University Art Gallery when he stopped in front of Courbet's "Le Grand Pont" (The Big Bridge) -- the very painting that had once hung in the Weinmann family home.

When the Weinmanns fled Berlin, the Courbet came into the possession of a onetime Nazi storm trooper named Herbert Schaefer. After becoming a lawyer, Schaefer represented German armament firms during World War II.

The painting hung in a Hamburg museum for 20 years before Schaefer regained ownership in 1968. In 1981, he sent it and other artworks to Yale as a long-term loan.

Two decades later, the tainted provenance of art looted by Nazis had become a touchy issue for museums, and Mr. Weinmann hired lawyers to investigate how his mother's Courbet got to Yale.

Reached in Spain by the Boston Globe in 2001, the 90-year-old Schaefer remained unrepentant. Questions about how he acquired the painting, he said, were aimed at showing him "as a bad German, and a Nazi up against a poor Jew who has lost his painting."

In October 2001, Yale reached a compromise. Both Schaefer and Mr. Weinmann withdrew claims of ownership, and in return Mr. Weinmann could have possession of the Courbet painting for 10 years.

"I agreed to that because I am 88 years old," Mr. Weinmann said at the time.

Mr. Weinmann hung the painting in his living room, where it remains.