Faced with intense pressure, auction house Christie’s has canceled a planned sale of jewels by the late collector Heidi Horten.

Some Jewish circles alleged that Christie’s had tried to withhold information about Horten’s husband, Helmut Horten, who was a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.

The controversy has intensified in recent months, especially after May, when the house held an auction in Geneva to sell 700 jewels and scheduled a second round in November.

However, it was later announced that Christie’s had made the decision not to proceed with any further sales of Horten’s jewellery.

The extraordinary collection belonged to Austrian Heidi Horten, who died last year at the age of 81 with a fortune of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes.

A report published in January 2022 by historians stated that her husband, Helmut Horten, who died in Switzerland in 1987, was a member of the Nazi party before he was expelled and that he was a shop owner who profited from the looting of Jewish property.

The auction broke previous records set by Christie’s for jewels owned by actress Elizabeth Taylor and the ‘Maharajas and Mughal Magnificence’ collection, as Cartier, Bulgari and Harry Winston creations from Horten’s collection sold for 202 million dollars.

Among the organizations that have criticized the auction is the US Holocaust Survivors Foundation, which hailed its cancellation as a major victory for the global Jewish community. The decision sends an important message to all auction houses about the consequences of selling stigmatized goods, David Schechter, the foundation’s president, told Artnet News.