Charlotte (Lotte) Kotányi (geb. Altmann)

Charlotte 'Lotte' Altmann was born in Vienna as the legitimate daughter of Benedikt Baruch Altmann, a colonel in the Imperial and Royal Army. Army physician Benedikt Baruch Altmann and his wife Sofia, née Lindenbaum. Lotte Altmann and her family were Jewish. Nothing has survived about Lotte Altmann's childhood and youth.

In 1920, she married the Jew Johann 'Hans' Kotányi, son of the founder of the spice trading company Kotányi - Erste österreichische Paprikamühle, and subsequently became the mother of a son and a daughter. In 1925, Hans Kotányi took over the management of the company from his father, who died in 1928.

On March 12, 1938, Lotte Kotányi witnessed the end of a free and independent Austria with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. The company itself is one of the first in Austria to be aryanized. On March 16, 1938, Hans Kotányi was forced to sell his company to the 'araiser' Georg Kohl, was himself arrested by the Gestapo in his apartment an hour later and deported to the Dachau concentration camp on April 2, 1938 on the so-called 'Prominent Transport'. The situation and prison conditions in Dachau concentration camp were so unbearable for him that he slit his wrists and hanged himself on April 28, 1938.

Lotte Kotányi emigrated to England with her children on August 1, 1939 and settled in London. In London, she witnessed the invasion of Poland by Hitler's Germany and the outbreak of World War II. She was interned on May 27, 1940 and released on March 14, 1941.

Lotte Kotányi was in London in April and May 1945 when Austria was liberated and the Republic was re-established. However, she remained in England and moved to Cambridge. After the barber Georg Kohl was no longer in Vienna in 1945, the former authorized signatory Theodor Rabner took over the company. Although Lotte Kotányi and her son Friedrich Walter only return from England in 1954 and 1955, the company is already restituted in 1948 and from this point onwards operates again as the First Austrian Paprika Mill Johann Kotányi with Lotte, Friedrich Walter and his sister in the limited partnership.

Lotte Kotányi is a limited partner in the family business until her death. She dies in Vienna at the age of 71.