Arthur Jacques Goldschmidt was born on June 4, 1882, the son of Dr. jur. Jacques and Johanna Elisabeth Goldschmidt were born in Berlin. He had three siblings.
Arthur Jacques studied and became a Dr. rer. pole. doctorate. The professional information on file is private scholar. He was a great art collector and well known in art circles.
He lived with his brother Eugen Carl Goldschmidt (*1878) in the house at Kleinaustraße 10 (until 1934 Paulstraße 2), which the two brothers and their sister Henriette Karoline (*1887) inherited at the end of the 1920s. Henriette Karoline died of natural causes in 1936, the eldest brother Albert Heinrich (*1877), a merchant, had already died in 1907 at the age of 30.
It can be assumed that Arthur Jacques, as an art-loving person, was the decorator of the residence at Kleinaustraße 10.
The fact that the brothers' villa must have been a true temple of art is clear from the reparation files. The family's descendants - they can only be Henriette's children, as Eugen and Arthur remained unmarried - apparently managed to emigrate to Australia. From there, after the Second World War, they filed a claim for reparation and sued for compensation, not only for the house, but also for securities, forcibly confiscated silver and jewelry, works of art, including pictures by Goya and Carl Blechen, KPM porcelain and valuable tapestries.
The two brothers were probably forcibly expelled from their richly and expensively furnished villa during or shortly after the pogrom night of 1938 and housed in a so-called “Jewish apartment” at Württembergische Str. 36/37.
The Goldschmidt brothers probably only lived in this apartment for four days and were found dead there on November 13, 1938. Life in a plain, narrow room and further gloomy prospects no longer seemed worth living for either of them. Eugen, the chemist, must have known what to do.
Villa Kleinaustraße 10 is now home to the Berlin headquarters of the Bamberg-based housing construction and management company 'Petruswerk'.