The Vienna Collusion
The Vienna Collusion
$10.25 – $19.10
It starts while they were all incarcerated at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp around 1945. This camp had a small section devoted to making all types of forged documents, like birth certificates, passports, ration cards, paper currency, and a host of other. They printed over 100,000 blank music sheets that were the type used by the famous composers used in their time, of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The von Kleinemann dynasty could trace their lineage back to as early as the mid-1700s. Along the way, one enterprising member of the family started to purchase or steal, and started collecting the original music sheets that were created by some of the greatest composers of their time. At the time, nobody realized that between 75 to 100 years later that the value of these originals had an almost priceless value. Two members of the family decided to test the market and sell a few pages, just to see if there was any interest. There were people from all over the world that showed an interest in having a complete set of an opera, from Mozart, or Bach, or any of the other great composers. Most would settle for even a page. One member from the von Kleinemann family had the ability to create the forgeries. However, he died before they could fully implement the task. One of the men of the group remembered, that Walter Donleavy was a counterfeit genius. He knew him because they were in the same concentration camp in 1945 – he actually developed the special ink and the blank paper they used. There was treachery on both sides of the Atlantic, in trying to get Walter to come to Vienna and create the forgeries. There were executive members of a famous museum and the Director of the company that insured them, as well as several vicious individuals. They were bound and determined to get Walter to do this, even though it would take months to create the forgeries.