Notes:

'The case of an alleged 1719 Stradivari, taken from the Universität der Künste Berlin, the successor entity to the Hochschule für Musik, is more complex. The university reported the wartime loss of the violin, which is said to have been bequeathed to the school on 27 March 1943 by Dr Maria Alois Lautenschlager. During World War II, violinist and professor Gustav Havemann, then living near Berlin, took custody of the violin for safekeeping. But he found himself in the Russian zone at the end of the war, and turned the Stradivari over to two Russian officers.

The Russian National Collection of Musical Instruments in Moscow has in its possession a 1719 Stradivari violin (inventory number 462) with an accession date of 1946, which appears to be a possible match with the missing ‘Lautenschlager’ Stradivari. Russian virtuoso David Oistrakh borrowed this instrument for a concert tour in 1949. He made a stop in Budapest during the tour and Hungarian violin maker Laszlo Remenyi was able to take detailed photographs of the violin, the only know images of it to date. They can be seen in a 1949 article on the instrument by Ernest N. Doring in Violins and Violinists.'

The Stolen Instruments of the Third Reich, Carla Shapreau, The Strad, December, 2009, London