Willi Fels

Willi Fels (17 April 1858 – 29 June 1946) was a New Zealand merchant, collector and philanthropist.

Biography Fels was born in Halle an der Weser, Germany on 17 April 1858 to Heinemann Wilhelm Fels and his wife Kätchen Hallenstein. He was the eldest of the couple's four children. Fels had a keen interest in history and classics, but rather than going to university he became manager of the family's woollen mill near Paderborn.

In 1881 Fels was visited by his uncle, Bendix Hallenstein, and married his cousin Sara, Hallenstein's eldest daughter, in November of the same year. Willi and Sara had three daughters Helene, Emily and Kate; and one son Harold who was killed in World War I.

Hallenstein had become prominent in the New Zealand city of Dunedin as a merchant in the years immediately following the 1862 Otago gold rush, and in 1888 the Fels moved to Dunedin to join Hallenstein's family business, Hallenstein Brothers. Fels eventually became managing director of this firm and the connected Drapery and General Importing Company. ), and many classical artefacts and historical literature. Fels established the first fund for the purchasing ethnological collections at the Otago Museum, which subsequently named the Fels Wing of the museum in his honour in 1930. Total additions to the museum's collection by Fels, either during his lifetime or through his will, totalled over 70,000 pieces and funds of some £25,000. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, for services to ethnology in New Zealand, in the 1936 New Year Honours. He died at his residence in Dunedin in 1946 and his ashes were interred at the Southern Cemetery in a plot with Bendix Hallenstein.

Fels' family were prominent in the arts and culture of southern New Zealand for many years, his cousins, the De Beers (including Esmond Samuel de Beer), and grandson Charles Brasch also making a permanent mark on the country's cultural life.