Festival exhibition features painting slashed by Hitler’s guards

Central to the collection in the hall at St Andrew the Apostle is an image owned by Marianne Fry, mother of the actor, author and broadcaster Stephen Fry.

Her stepmother, Claire Grabscheid, was a young lawyer in Vienna during the Anschluss, when Hitler’s regime annexed Austria. Her family fled, paying fees to take some of their possessions with them to England.

At the border, guards stabbed the packing case with a bayonet, checking no people were being smuggled out of the country, damaging the painting of a Dutch girl.

Mr Glennie added: “It’s extraordinarily unusual in the sense that many people would have thought it’s a damaged painting and either disposed of the painting because it’s not the greatest work of art ever, but also it might have been something that made them unhappy.

“They don’t celebrate it, but being thinking people they decided the best thing to do was to keep it so that it showed the aggression of the Anschluss.”