Nazi plunder

Nazi plunder
German soldiers of the Hermann Göring Division posing in front of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome in 1944 with a picture taken from the Biblioteca del Museo Nazionale di Napoli before the Allied forces' arrival in the cityCarlo III di Borbone che visita il papa Benedetto XIV nella coffee-house del Quirinale a Roma by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (Museo di Capodimonte inv. Q 205)

Nazi plunder refers to art theft and other items stolen as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Third Reich by agents acting on behalf of the ruling Nazi Party of Germany. Plundering occurred from 1933 until the end of World War II, particularly by military units known as the Kunstschutz, although most plunder was acquired during the war. In addition to lucre, such as silver and currency, cultural items of great significance were stolen, including paintings, ceramics, books, and religious treasures. Although many of these items were recovered by the Allies immediately following the war, many more are still missing. Currently, there is an international effort underway to identify Nazi plunder that still remains unaccounted for, with the aim of ultimately returning the items to the families of their rightful owners.

Contents

Systematic Nazi looting

Adolf Hitler was an unsuccessful artist who was denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Nonetheless, he thought of himself as a connoisseur of the arts and, when he became Chancellor of Germany, enforced his aesthetic ideal on the nation. The type of art that was favoured among Hitler and the Nazi party were classical portraits and landscapes by Old Masters, particularly those of Germanic origin. Modern art that did not match this was dubbed degenerate art by the Third Reich.

Nazi looting organizations

Seal of the "Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg", used from 1941 to 1944 to mark seized documents by the german occupation troops

While the Nazis were in power, they plundered cultural property from every territory they occupied. This was conducted in a systematic manner with organizations specifically created to determine which public and private collections were most valuable to the Nazi Regime. Some of the objects were earmarked for Hitler's never realized Führermuseum, some objects went to other high ranking officials such as Hermann Göring, while other objects were traded to fund Nazi activities.

In 1940, an organization known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete (The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories), or ERR, was formed, headed for Alfred Rosenberg by Gerhard Utikal. The first operating unit, the western branch for France, Belgium and the Netherlands, called the Dienststelle Westen, was located in Paris. The chief of this Dienststelle was Kurt von Behr. Its original purpose was to collect Jewish and Freemasonic books and documents, either for destruction, or for removal to Germany for further "study". However, late in 1940, Hermann Göring, who in fact controlled the ERR, issued an order that effectively changed the mission of the ERR, mandating it to seize "Jewish" art collections and other objects. The war loot had to be collected in a central place in Paris, the Museum Jeu de Paume. At this collection point worked art historians and other personnel who inventoried the loot before sending it to Germany. Göring also commanded that the loot would first be divided between Hitler and himself. For this reason, from the end of 1940 to the end of 1942 he traveled twenty times to Paris. In the Museum Jeu de Paume, art dealer Bruno Lohse staged 20 expositions of the newly looted art objects, especially for Göring, from which Göring selected at least 594 pieces for his own collection.[1] Göring made Lohse his liaison-officer and installed him in the ERR in March 1941 as the deputy leader of this unit. Items which Hitler and Göring did not want were made available to other Nazi leaders. Under Rosenberg and Göring's leadership, the ERR seized 21,903 art objects from German-occupied countries.[2] Other Nazi looting organizations included the Dienststelle Mühlmann, which Göring also controlled and operated primarily in the Netherlands, Belgium, and a Sonderkommando Kuensberg connected to the minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, which operated first in France, then in Russia and North Africa.

Hitler later ordered that all confiscated works of art were to be made directly available to him. Art collections from prominent Jewish families, including the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs and the Goudstikkers and the Schloss Family were targeted because of their significant value. By the end of the war, the Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of cultural objects.

In Western Europe, with the advancing German troops, were elements of the ‘von Ribbentrop Battalion’, named after Joachim von Ribbentrop. These men were responsible for entering private and institutional libraries in the occupied countries and removing any materials of interest to the Germans, especially items of scientific, technical or other informational value.[3]

Soviet Union

To investigate and estimate Nazi plunder in the USSR during 1941 through 1945, the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices was formed on 2 November 1942. During the Great Patriotic War and afterwards, until 1991, the Commission collected materials on Nazi crimes in the USSR, including incidents of plunder. Immediately following the war, the Commission outlined damage in detail to sixty-four of the most valuable Soviet museums, out of 427 damaged ones. In the Russian SFSR, 173 museums were found to have been plundered by the Nazis, with looted items numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

After the dissolution of the USSR, the Government of the Russian Federation formed the State Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Valuables to replace the Soviet Commission. Experts from this Russian institution originally consulted the work of the Soviet Commission, yet continue to catalogue artworks lost during the war museum by museum. As of 2008, lost artworks of 14 museums and the libraries of Voronezh Oblast, Kursk Oblast, Pskov Oblast, Rostov Oblast, Smolensk Oblast, Northern Caucasus, Gatchina, Peterhof Palace, Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), Novgorod and Novgorod Oblast, as well as the bodies of the Russian State Archives and CPSU Archives, were catalogued in 15 volumes, all of which were made available online. They contain detailed information on 1,148,908 items of lost artworks. The total number of lost items is unknown so far, because cataloguing work for other damaged Russian museums is ongoing.[4]

Alfred Rosenberg commanded the so-called Einsatzstab Reichleiter Rosenberg [ERR] für die Besetzten Gebiete, which was responsible for collecting art, books, and cultural objects from invaded countries, and also transferred their captured library collections back to Berlin during the retreat from Russia. “In their search for ‘research materials’ ERR teams and the Wehrmacht visited 375 archival institutions, 402 museums, 531 institutes, and 957 libraries in Eastern Europe alone”.[5] The ERR also operated in the early days of the blitzkrieg of the Low Countries. This caused some confusion about authority, priority, and the chain of command among the German Army, the von Rippentropp Battalion and the Gestapo, and as a result of personal looting among the Army officers and troops. These ERR teams were, however, very effective. One account estimates that from the Soviet Union alone: “one hundred thousand geographical maps were taken on ideological grounds, for academic research, as means for political, geographical and economic information on Soviet cities and regions, or as collector’s items”.[5]

Poland

Looted picture of Aleksander Gierymski "Jewish woman with oranges"- 26 November 2010, was found on art auction in Buxtehude near Hamburg in Germany

After the occupation of Poland by German forces in September 1939, the Nazi regime and especially the Russians in eastern Poland (which resulted in the massacre of Katyn) attempted to exterminate its upper classes as well as its culture.[6] Thousands of art objects were looted, as the Nazis systematically carried out a plan of looting prepared even before the start of hostilities. 25 museums and many other facilities were destroyed.[7] The total cost of Nazi theft and destruction of Polish art is estimated at 20 billion dollars, or an estimated 43% of Polish cultural heritage; over 516,000 individual art pieces were looted, including 2,800 paintings by European painters; 11,000 paintings by Polish painters; 1,400 sculptures; 75,000 manuscripts; 25,000 maps; 90,000 books, including over 20,000 printed before 1800; and hundreds of thousands of other items of artistic and historical value. Germany still has much Polish material looted during World War II. For decades there have been mostly futile negotiations between Poland and Germany concerning the return of the looted property.[8]

The Führermuseum

Main article: Führermuseum

After Hitler became Chancellor, he made plans to transform his home city of Linz, Austria into the Third Reich’s capital city for the arts. Hitler hired architects to work from his own designs to build several galleries and museums, which would collectively be known as the Führermuseum. Hitler wanted to fill his museum with the greatest art treasures in the world, and believed that most of the world’s finest art belonged to Germany after having been looted during the Napoleonic and First World wars.

The Hermann Göring Collection

The Hermann Göring Collection, a personal collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was another large collection including confiscated property, consisted of approximately 50 percent of works of art confiscated from the enemies of the Reich.[9] Assembled in large measure by art dealer Bruno Lohse, Göring's adviser and ERR representative in Paris, in 1945 the collection included over 2,000 individual pieces including more than 300 paintings. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 2 states that Göring never crudely looted, instead he always managed "to find a way of giving at least the appearance of honesty, by a token payment or promise thereof to the confiscation authorities. Although he and his agents never had an official connection with the German confiscation organizations, they nevertheless used them to the fullest extent possible."[9]

Nazi storage of looted objects

Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) inspects stolen artwork in a salt mine in Merkers, accompanied by Omar Bradley (left) and George S. Patton (center)

The Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of objects from occupied nations and stored them in several key locations, such as Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Nazi headquarters in Munich. However, as the Allied forces gained advantage in the war and bombed Germany's cities and historic institutions, Germany "began storing the artworks in salt mines and caves for protection from Allied bombing raids. These mines and caves offered the appropriate humidity and temperature conditions for artworks."[10]

Post war recovery effort

Although most of the stolen artworks and antiques were documented, found or recovered "by the victorious Allied armies ... principally hidden away in salt mines, tunnels, and secluded castles",[11] many artworks have never been returned to their rightful owners. Art dealers, galleries and museums world-wide have been compelled to research their collection's provenance in order to investigate claims that some of the work was acquired after it had been stolen from its original owners.[12] Already in 1985, years before American museums recognized the issue and before the international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims, European countries released inventory lists of works of art, coins and medals "that were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis during World War II, and announced the details of a process for returning the works to their owners and rightful heirs."[13] In 1998 an Austrian advisory panel recommended the return of 6,292 objets d'art to their legal owners (most of whom are Jews), under the terms of a 1998 restitution law.[14]

Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man was looted by the Germans from the Czartoryski Museum in 1939. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

Pieces of art looted by the Nazis can still be found in Russian/Soviet[15] and American institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed a list of 393 paintings that have gaps in their provenance during the Nazi Era, the Art Institute of Chicago has posted a listing of more than 500 works "for which links in the chain of ownership for the years 1933-1945 are still unclear or not yet fully determined.", the San Diego Museum of Art[16] and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art[17] provide lists on the internet to determine if art items within their collection were stolen by the Nazis.

Stuart Eizenstat, the undersecretary of state and head of the U.S. delegation sponsoring the 1998 International conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims in Washington conference stated that "From now on, ... the sale, purchase, exchange and display of art from this period will be addressed with greater sensitivity and a higher international standard of responsibility."[18]

After the conference Association of Art Museum Directors developed guidelines which require museums to review the provenance or history of their collections, focusing especially on art looted by the Nazis.[19] The National Gallery of Art in Washington identified more than 400 European paintings with gaps in their provenance during World War II era.[19] One particular piece of art, "Still Life with Fruit and Game" by the 16th century Flemish painter Frans Snyders, was sold by Karl Haberstock, whom the World Jewish Congress describes as "one of the most notorious Nazi art dealers."[19] In 2000 the New York City's Museum of Modern Art still told Congress that "[they] are not aware of a single Nazi-tainted work of art in our collection, of the more than 100,000 [they] hold".[19]

However, restitution efforts initiated by German politicians have not been free of controversy either. As the German law for restitution applies to "cultural assets lost as a result of Nazi persecution, "which includes paintings that Jews who emigrated from Germany sold to support themselves,[20] pretty much any trade involving Jews in that era is affected, and the benefit of the doubt is given to claimants. German leftist politicians Klaus Wowereit (SPD, mayor of Berlin) and Thomas Flierl (Linkspartei) were sued in 2006 for overly willing to give away the 1913 painting Berliner Straßenszene of expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner which was in Berlin's Brücke Museum. On display in Cologne in 1937, it had been sold for 3,000 Reichsmark by a Jewish family residing in Switzerland to a German collector. This sum is considered by experts to have been well over the market price.[21] The museum, which obtained the painting in 1980 after several ownership changes, could not prove that the family actually received the money. It was restituted[22] to the heiress of the former owners, and she had it auctioned off for $38.1 Million.[23]

The Allies created special commissions, such as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization to help protect famous European monuments from destruction, and after the war, to travel to once-Nazi-occupied territories to find Nazi art repositories. In 1944 and 1945 one of the greatest challenges for the "Monuments Men" was to keep Allied forces from plundering and "taking artworks and sending them home to friends and family"; When "off-limits" warning signs failed to protect the artworks the "Monuments Men" started to mark the storage places with white tape, which was used by Allied troops as a warning sign for unexploded mines.[10] They recovered thousands of objects that were pillaged by the Nazis.

The allies found these plundered artworks in over 1,050 repositories in Germany and Austria at the end of World War II. In summer 1945, Capt. Walter Farmer became the collecting point's first director. The first shipment of artworks arriving at Wiesbaden Collection Point included cases of antiquities, Egyptian art, Islamic artifacts, and paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The collecting point also received materials from the Reichsbank and Nazi-looted, Polish, liturgical collections. At its height, Wiesbaden stored, identified, and restituted approximately 700,000 individual objects including paintings and sculptures, mainly to keep them away from the Soviet Army and wartime reparations.[24]

The Allies collected the plundered artworks and stored them in a Central Collection Point in Munich until they could be returned. The identifiable works of art were returned to the countries from which they were taken, and the governments of each nation would then return the objects to the proper owners. When the Munich collection point was closed, the owners of many of the objects had not been found. Nations were also unable to find all of the owners or to verify that they were dead.

Effects of Nazi looting today

Approximately 20% of the art in Europe was looted by the Nazis, and there are well over 100,000 items that have not been returned to their rightful owners.[25] The majority of what is still missing includes everyday objects such as china, crystal or silver.

Some objects of great cultural significance remain missing, though no one knows how many.[citation needed] This is a major issue for the art market, since legitimate organizations do not want to deal in objects with unclear ownership titles.[citation needed] Since the mid 1990s, after several books, magazines, and newspapers began exposing the subject to the general public, many dealers, auction houses and museums have grown more careful about checking the provenance of objects that are available for purchase in case they are looted.[citation needed] Some museums in the United States and elsewhere have agreed to check the provenance of works in their collections with the implied promise that suspect works would be returned to rightful owners if the evidence so dictates.[citation needed] But the process is time-consuming and slow, and very few disputed works have been found in public collections.[citation needed]

In the last two decades, information has become more accessible due to political and economic changes as well as advances in technology. Privacy laws in some countries have expired so records that were once difficult to obtain are now open to the public. Information from former Soviet countries that was previously unobtainable is now available, and many organisations have posted information online, making it widely accessible.[citation needed]

The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a not-for-profit educational and research organization, has helped provide information leading to restitution.[citation needed]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art As Politics in the Third Reich, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p. 190.
  2. ^ Walker, Andrew (2006). Nazi War Trials. United Kingdom: Pocket Essentials. p. 141. ISBN 1-903047-50-1. 
  3. ^ Hadden, R.L. (2008). "The Heringen Collection of the US Geological Survey Library, Reston, Virginia". Earth Sciences History: Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society. 27, no. 2: 247. http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA496551. 
  4. ^ (Russian) Online Catalogue of Lost Artworks, Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography of the Russian Federation
  5. ^ a b Hadden, R.L. 2008. "The Heringen Collection of the US Geological Survey Library, Reston, Virginia". Earth Sciences History: Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society. 27, no. 2: 248-249.
  6. ^ Olsak-Glass, Judith (January 1999). "Review of Piotrowski's Poland's Holocaust". Sarmatian Review. http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/199/glass.html. Retrieved 2008-01-24. 
  7. ^ (Polish) Rewindykacja dóbr kultury at Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  8. ^ (Polish) Rosjanie oddają skradzione dzieła sztuki, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2007-10-14
  9. ^ a b Rothfeld, Anne. "Nazi Looted Art". The Holocaust Records Preservation Project, Part 1, Fall 2002, Vol. 34, No. 3. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/nazi-looted-art-1.html. 
  10. ^ a b Rothfeld, Anne. "Nazi Looted Art". The Holocaust Records Preservation Project, Part 2. Fall 2002, Vol. 34, No. 3. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/nazi-looted-art-2.html?template=print. 
  11. ^ "Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 4. Twenty-Second Day. December 18, 1945, Morning Session". yale.edu. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/12-18-45.htm. 
  12. ^ "Jewish Heirs Want Their Art Back". Spiegel Online International. November 8, 2006. http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,447136,00.html. 
  13. ^ Douglas C McGill. Austria Sets Up System to Yield Nazi-Held Art. New York Times. December 3, 1985
  14. ^ "Austria prepares restitution of Nazi art loot". The Jerusalem Post. September 9, 1998. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-17085369.html. 
  15. ^ Honan, William H. Soviets Reported to Hide Looted Art. New York Times. March 30, 1991, Section 1, Page 9, Column 4, 887 words
  16. ^ San Diego Museum of Art
  17. ^ Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  18. ^ "Guidelines set for returning Nazi-looted art. Conference calls for 'just and fair solution'". CNN. December 3, 1998. http://web.archive.org/web/20070203102251/http://www8.cnn.com/US/9812/03/holocaust.conference/. 
  19. ^ a b c d "Manhattan museum plans to issue Holocaust looted-art study". CNN. March 2, 2000. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/STYLE/arts/03/02/holocaust.art.reut/. 
  20. ^ Der Spiegel
  21. ^ Trotz Strafanzeige: Kirchner-Gemälde wird versteigert. Der Spiegel. November 7, 2006. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,446999,00.html. 
  22. ^ Entartete Kunst: Kirchner-Gemälde wieder in Privatbesitz.
  23. ^ Christie's Auction raises ghosts painting confiscated by the Nazis sold for $38.1 Million. Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,447475,00.html. 
  24. ^ h-net.org
  25. ^ Bradsher, Greg (November 1997). "Documenting Nazi Plunder of European Art". The National Archives of the United States. http://www.archives.gov/research/holocaust/records-and-research/documenting-nazi-plunder-of-european-art.html. 

Further reading

  • Feliciano, Hector. The Lost Museum, Harper Collins, New York, 1997
  • Hadden, R.L. 2008. "The Heringen Collection of the US Geological Survey Library, Reston, Virginia". Earth Sciences History : Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society. 27, no. 2: pages 242-265.
  • Harclerode, Peter and Pittaway, Brendan. The Lost Masters: WWII and the Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses, Orion Books Ltd, London, 1999
  • Löhr, Hanns Christian: Das Braune Haus der Kunst: Hitler und der Sonderauftrag Linz, Akademie-Verlag, 2005 ISBN 3-05-004156-0
  • Nicholas, Lynn. The Rape of Europa, Macmillan, London, 1994
  • Petropolis, Jonathan. Art as Politics in the Third Reich, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996
  • Petropolis, Jonathan. The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, Penguin Press, London, 2000
  • Roxan, David and Wanstall, Ken. The Jackdaw of Linz; the Story of Hitler's Art Thefts. London, Cassell, 1964.
  • Schwarz, Birgit: Hitler's Museum. Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz, Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 2004 ISBN 3-205-77054-4
  • OSS Report: Activity of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in France, 15 August 1945
  • Aly, Götz: Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Metropolitan Books. January, 2007 ISBN 0-8050-7926-2, ISBN 978-0-8050-7926-5
  • Nancy Yeide: Beyond Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection. Laurel Publishing. 2009. ISBN 978-0-9774349-1-6 (Foreword by Robert M. Edsel)
  • Robert M. Edsel (Contributions by Brett Witter): Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. Center Street. 2009. ISBN 978-1-59995-149-2

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