Franz, Duke of Bavaria

He also appoints one of the board members of the Wittelsbach State Foundation for Art and Science, into which the Wittelsbach art treasures acquired before 1800 were brought in in 1923.

His great-grandfather King Ludwig III was the last ruling monarch of Bavaria, being deposed in 1918.

Franz was born in Munich.

During the Second World War, the Wittelsbachs were anti-Nazi.

The former Crown Prince Rupprecht earned Hitler's enmity by opposing the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

The respective head of the House of Wittelsbach appoints the board of directors of the foundation Wittelsbach Compensation Fund, into which most of the possessions from the former Wittelsbach House Property Fund were transferred in 1923, including art treasures and collections (in particular the art collection of King Ludwig I, today mostly in the museums Alte Pinakothek and Neue Pinakothek and in the Glyptothek in Munich), the Secret House Archives (today a department of the Bavarian State Archives) and the former royal palaces of Berg, Hohenschwangau (including the Museum of the Bavarian Kings), Berchtesgaden as well as Grünau hunting lodge.

Franz Bonaventura Adalbert Maria Herzog von Bayern (born 14 July 1933), commonly known by the courtesy title Duke of Bavaria, is the head of the House of Wittelsbach, the former ruling family of the Kingdom of Bavaria.

Franz was born on 14 July 1933 in Munich, as the third child and elder son of Albrecht, Duke of Bavaria, and his first wife, Countess Maria (Marita) Draskovich of Trakostjan, member of the House of Drašković, an old Croatian noble family.

As Maria's family didn't belong to the small circle of reigning or former reigning families, his parents' marriage was initially considered morganatic.

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, he sent his son Albrecht to President Paul von Hindenburg with a protest letter strongly objecting to the appointment of governors at the head of the federal states and thus the de facto abolition of German federalism.

In July 1934, Prince Albrecht emigrated to Hungary with his family.

From 1935 to 1939 the family returned to Bavaria and lived in seclusion in Kreuth, but former crown prince Rupprecht emigrated to Italy in 1939 and his son Albrecht and his family moved back to Budapest, where they stayed in a rented apartment in the Castle Quarter.

They often visited Princess Marita's Hungarian and Croatian relatives in the countryside.

The children received private lessons after a visit to the German school failed after a few weeks because it was dominated by Nazi supporters.

The family initially left Nazi Germany for Hungary but were eventually arrested when Germany invaded the country in 1944.

Franz was 11 at the time.

He spent time in several Nazi concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen, then Flossenbürg and finally Dachau.

After the war, Franz was a student at the University of Munich and became a collector of modern art.

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary, and on 6 October 1944 the entire family, including the 11-year-old Franz, were arrested by the Gestapo.

They were sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps, including Oranienburg, Flossenbürg and Dachau.

As special prisoners, they were allowed to stay together and were locked in separate buildings.

Franz remembers that they only received one slice of bread, often moldy, per person per day as food.

Badly hit by hunger and disease, the family barely survived.

At the end of April 1945, they were liberated by the United States Third Army.

After the war, Franz received his secondary education at the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal.

He then studied business management at the University of Munich and in Zürich.

But, on 18 May 1949, when Franz was 15, his grandfather Crown Prince Rupprecht recognised the marriage of Franz's parents as dynastic, and Franz became a successor to the headship of the house.

The Wittelsbach dynasty were opposed to the Nazi regime in Germany.

With his father and a sister, he took part in the ship tours organized by King Paul of Greece and Queen Frederica in 1954 and 1956, which became known as the "Cruises of the Kings" and were attended by over 100 royals from all over Europe.

Franz developed a passion for modern art and started to collect contemporary German art.

He brought his own important art collection with early works by Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz and Blinky Palermo as well as numerous contemporary German painters such as Jörg Immendorff and Sigmar Polke on permanent loan to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, which he had worked to found for decades, as well as to the Munich State Graphic Collection.

He is chairman of the Association for the Promotion of the Alte Pinakothek, co-founder and deputy chairman of the Munich Gallery Association, member of the board of trustees of the Association of Friends and Supporters of the Glyptothek and the Bavarian state collections of antiquities and honorary president of the Friends of the Egyptian Collection Munich.

He eventually became chairman of the International Council for 16 years and worked closely with the museum's president, Blanchette Rockefeller, in expanding the collection in the 1980s.

Despite his friendship with American artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Dan Flavin, he privately collected mostly contemporary German art: "American art was always one step ahead of my financial possibilities."

Franz succeeded as head of the House of Wittelsbach, and as pretender to the Bavarian throne, on the death of his father in 1996.

He lives at Nymphenburg Palace in Munich and Berg Palace.

In 2003, for his decades of support work, he was the first European to receive the Duncan Phillips Award from the Washington art museum Phillips Collection, which has been awarded to collectors and donors who support museums since 1999.

In 2009, he left his extensive private library of 20th and 21st century art to the Central Institute for Art History in Munich.

Because of his good connections in the New York City art scene, his understanding of art, his international connections as well as his fate during the Nazi era, Franz von Bayern was the first German to be elected to the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art, where numerous Jewish emigrants set the tone.

Only after him were other Germans elected to the advisory committee.