When Felix Schlessinger married Hedwig Feuchtwanger in 1911, his uncle Leo Hamburger made him a partner in the firm. Max Schlessinger (later Mark Salton) was only a few months old when the First World War broke out at the end of July 1914. Felix Schlessinger was required to take part in the war as a soldier from the first to the last day: He was deployed on the Western Front in the hell of Verdun, and was awarded the Iron Cross. He suffered severe wounds and survived only by a miracle. 

After the First World War, Felix Schlessinger returned to Frankfurt/Main to work again in the company of his uncle Leo Hamburger. As a result of the severe inflation of 1923 the company began to decline, and Felix Schlessinger ventured a new start in Berlin in 1928. Max Schlessinger was at that time 14 years old and his younger brother Paul (born 11 January 1918) was ten years old. Max attended the Werner Siemens Realgymnasium secondary school, while his father Felix worked successfully in Berlin-Charlottenburg at Bismarckstraße 97/98. 

From 1929 to 1935, the gifted numismatist Felix Schlessinger conducted twelve auctions in Berlin (see Künker Auction 357, p. 423 ff). The Jewish population in Germany suffered increasingly repressive measures from 1933 onwards, and as a result the Schlessinger family emigrated to the Netherlands in 1936 in order to continue working in the coin trade. 

Thus a new start was made in Amsterdam at Prinsengracht 101, and two more auctions were held. However, the occupation of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht in May 1940 dramatically worsened the Schlessingers’ situation; their warehouse and library were confiscated. Felix Schlessinger and his wife Hedwig spent two years in the concentration camps Westerbork and Theresienstadt before they were deported on the last train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on 23 October 1944, where they were murdered on 25 October 1944. Their sons Max and Paul were able to flee from the Nazis. Paul went to Israel, and Max Schlessinger, after a long odyssey as a refugee through Europe, began a new life in New York in 1946 under the name Mark Salton. He began his career as a banker in the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, one of the largest banks in New York at the time. 

Mark Salton completed evening studies at New York University, graduating with a Master’s degree in International Banking. He soon became a member of the management team at his bank. 

The passion for numismatics had driven Mark Salton throughout his life. He eventually bought back most of his father’s library, which had been unlawfully confiscated in Amsterdam, from antiquarians.

He always told me with pride that with his salary as a bank director he could afford to buy large coin collections in the 1950s and 1960s, in both the USA and Europe, but especially in his new home New York City. Mark Salton pursued a double strategy in doing so: On the one hand, he wanted to build up his own collection for himself and his wife, which he inventoried in detail and numbered. On the other hand, there were also many pieces that he sold because they did not meet his high standards. 

Also impressive are the little notes, written on a typewriter, which he enclosed with numerous coins. Provenances, which are so much in the foreground today, hardly played a role for Mark Salton. And if there are references to specific occurrences on his slips of paper, they usually involve pieces from the same series to which he is referring, but not those pieces to which they are attached. 

Sales from a dealership’s own stock played a much bigger role for the coin trade in earlier times than did auctions, as Jacques Schulman told me as late as the mid-1970s. Mark Salton sold as a dealer all the pieces he chose not to integrate into his personal collection, or he consigned them to auctions. 

When we became friends in the late 1980s, Mark also regularly consigned coins to Osnabrück for the Künker auctions. Usually there was one particularly interesting coin and a small number of less interesting pieces accompanying it. When I once called him and tried to explain that I was only interested in the special pieces for our auctions, he told me in his humorous way: “Mr. Künker, you can’t just eat schnitzel, the meal also includes the potatoes.” 

Mark Salton often remembered Germany nostalgically; he especially regretted that he had, as he put it, discarded his good German name Max Schlessinger in the USA and adopted the name Mark Salton. 

Osnabrück, January 2022
Fritz Rudolf Künker

Mark and Lottie Salton’s extremely friendly relationship with the House of Künker led them to also involve Fritz Rudolf Künker in the dissolution of their magnificent life’s work. Dr Ursula Kampmann has put together a history of the Hamburger and Schlessinger families in a work which will be published by the Fritz Rudolf Künker numismatic publishing entity. We thank Ursula Kampmann for this special work, and all others who have contributed to it. On their behalf, we would like to especially thank our colleague Frau Alexandra Elflein-Schwier, who following the death of Mark Salton on 31 December 2005 took care of his wife Lottie in a most touching manner, and made sure that the memory of Lottie’s family the Aronsteins was kept alive. 

At the end of Ursula Kampmann’s work, a post-scriptum notably recorded the following: “It is a great honour for the House of Künker that Lottie and Mark Salton have stipulated in their will that their important numismatic collection should be auctioned jointly in New York and Osnabrück by the American auction house Stack’s Bowers Galleries and by Künker.” 

We pay respectful tribute to the lifetime achievement of these friends, who had lost everything, and are humbly grateful for the trust placed in us. May the auction of the Lottie and Mark Salton collection be another sign of reconciliation. 

Fritz Rudolf Künker, Dr. Andreas Kaiser and Ulrich Künker