Lifting the veil

by Marc Masurovsky

Since the plundered art blog was first launched in 2011, it has published a number of articles on the objects labeled as “unbekannt” (unknown origin) which were stored and processed at the Jeu de Paume Museum in central Paris. From fall 1940 to August 1944, the Jeu de Paume served as a transit station for tens of thousands of objects of all kinds confiscated and stolen from residences and businesses inhabited and managed by Jewish individuals principally in Paris and its outlying areas. Objects belonging to Jews were subjected to systematic State-sanctioned theft or plunder as of late June 1940, barely two weeks after the Germans defeated France and occupied Paris.

The first phase of thefts targeting Jews and opponents of the Nazis in German-occupied Paris mobilized a plethora of security and police agencies as well as French collaborators in the police, the criminal underworld and the art world as of summer 1940. First it was the German Embassy that took control of the cultural plunder of Jewish collections helped by specialized hybrid units known as Geheime Feld Polizei (GFP) units. Then from late September 1940 to July 1944, Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Goering sidelined Ambassador Abetz and his boss Joachim von Ribbentrop to take charge of the systematic plunder targeting thousands of residences, businesses, banks, brokerage houses, storerooms, religious establishments, libraries, and other facilities which contained assets of interest to the Nazis.

Three vast rooms were set aside at the Louvre Museum as well as the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries Gardens in central Paris. These facilities served as permanent storerooms where plundered objects could be examined, catalogued, sorted, inventoried, compared, carded, crated, shipped to various parts of the German Reich or sold on the local Parisian art market.

From fall 1940 to winter 1941, Nazi officials associated with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) oversaw break-ins and seizures on an industrial scale but failed to record the names and addresses of their victims, perhaps because they relied heavily on local thugs in their pay to conduct many of the thefts during this chaotic period. More than 5000 stolen objects were thus not properly recorded, their provenances left murky until today. In February-March 1941, a new team took over the daily functions in the Paris region connected with the plunder of Jewish collections. The post-theft handling of Jewish-owned objects thus became more coherent and rational and gradually resembled a well-organized criminal operation benefiting Nazi officials, German cultural institutions and the international art market.

The 5000 or so undocumented objects stolen before Spring 1941 received the label of “unknown” or “unbekannt” or “UNB” to denote ignorance of the identity of the objects’ owners. Decades later, attempts are being made to reconnect those unknown objects with their actual owners. A decade-long effort analyzing detailed inventories and crossing them with spotty police and law enforcement records and comparing them with postwar restitution files submitted by the victims of the thefts, has made it possible to cobble together a tentative list of despoiled owners once known as “unknown.” Keep in mind that half of the objects labeled “UNB” were paintings, works on paper and sculptures, while the other half consisted of furniture. On a final note, the working sample from which the raw information was extracted consists of close to 700 individual postwar restitution files, the B323 series at Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, and captured German documents at the National Archives in College Park, MD (USA).

Here it is:

Hans Arnhold
Alexandre Ball
Roger Bernheim
Jules Blum
Marcel Blum
Mme. Robert Braun
Mme. Deutsch de la Meurthe
Raymond Dreyfus
Diane Esmond
Mme. J. Feuchtwanger
Salomon Flavian
Jules Fribourg
Michel Georges-Michel
Maurice Hamburger
Louis Louis-Dreyfus
Emmerich Kalman
Alphonse Kann
Antoinette Léonino
Moïse Levi de Benzion
Auguste-Michel Levy
Veuve Lucien Levy
Tony-Georges Levy
M. Levy-Clarence
Mme. Levy-Hermannos
Charles Mayer
Michel Mayer
Roger Meyer
Erwin Rosenthal
Robert de Rothschild
Walter Strauss
Me. André Weyl
Mme. Jean Zay
Mme. de Zuylen de Nyevelt

ERR Database

For more details about the above victims of Nazi plunder in German-occupied France during the early phase of the Nazi repression between 1940-1941, please consult the Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume: Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg at www.errproject.org.

Instructions on how to find UNB objects at www.errproject.org.

Click on Jeu de Paume database. You can then click either on “Advanced Search” and then browse the various names of owners, or you can click on “Browse” and search for the name of the owner under “Art Owner”. Or you can click on the "UNB" tag after you click on "Advanced Search." This will allow you to get an idea of the types of objects that the ERR’s units removed from the owner’s residences, bank vaults, storage spaces, warehouses, galleries or other facilities harboring their assets.

Primary Sources

Archives

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B323 series, Koblenz (Germany)

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et de l’Europe (AMAE), La Courneuve (France).

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD (USA)

Archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC.

Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (France).


Related blog pieces in plundered art (2011-2025)

ERR Database-UNB section [unbekannt/unknown owners]

A work of art is not a work of art

The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris, Part One

The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris, Part Two

A Recapitulation of Jeu de Paume articles (2011-2025)

Restitution vs. Washington Principles

by Marc Masurovsky

How have the Wahington Principles on Nazi-confiscated Art of December 1998 reshaped the landscape of restitution of art objects suspected of having been illegally displaced and looted between 1933 and 1945?

The purpose of the Washington Principles has not been to promote actual restitution—the physical return of a looted and displaced art object to its rightful owners and their descendants. It is to provide a framework by which art museums (and by extension the art market) may find solutions to ownership disputes over these contested objects and help them settle or dismiss claims filed against them by the purported rightful owners. The key to the Washington Principles lies in the expression “just and fair solutions” coined by Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, then an Under Secretary for Economic, Agricultural and Business Affairs, and currently the chair of the Washington, DC-based US Holocaust Museum’s Memorial Council. That expression is enshrined in Washington Principle #8.


8. If the pre-War owners of art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted, or their heirs, can be identified, steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution, recognizing this may vary according to the facts and circumstances surrounding a specific case.

When repeated daily for 28 years, the expression “seeking just and fair solutions” becomes embedded in the human psyche (much like a bad summer beach song that you can’t shake off). This expression constitutes in effect the substrate of a current possessor’s playbook with which to resolve ownership disputes submitted by purported rightful owners of contested art works and objects. The goal is to seek a reasonable solution where, one hopes, all parties will be more or less satisfied by the outcome.

The reality is a bit starker: like in a boxing match or a sports competition, only one person remains standing, regardless of what anyone tells you. There is nothing kumbaya about negotiating for the recovery of a looted art object. It sucks. More often than not, the process, the envisioned collegial dialogue with the possessing entity generally turns into a legal slug fest that can stretch on for years if not decades where appeals to moral and ethical norms fall by the wayside and the holder hides behind well-heeled legal defenses. When the just and fair solutions are invoked as a guide to resolving the dispute, you know that the claimant may not recover the physical ownership of the contested object but instead will have to accept a financial settlement that extinguishes the claim. In some sense, the just and fair solutions behave like a glorified fire extinguisher directly pointed at the claimant’s quest for justice (restitution).

If I sound derisive about the Washington Principles, it is precisely because they were never designed to help claimants, the victims of the act of plunder. They were framed to provide a shield behind which current holders could fend off claimants’ assaults on their beloved collections.

Still, let’s try to be positive.

Do the Principles actually help in any way in the recovery process? The results are mixed. Since the decision to restitute rests ultimately in the hands of the current possessor, lest it is ordered by a court to hand over the object, claimants must appeal to the possessors’ moral and ethical sense of justice and plead for it to “do the right thing.” A classic domination/ submission scenario where the cards are invariably stacked against the claimant who is forced to play the role of a submissive and solicitous creature.

Nevertheless, the Principles have decidedly left their imprint “with the passage of time” on the behavior of certain museums and auction houses. Assuredly, this evolution represents genuine progress. It has not led to a one-for-one relationship between claim and restitution. Instead, it has helped convince governments and cultural institutions to accept a dialogue with claimants and to pave the way for negotiations towards a settlement of the restitution claim.

Restitution lawyers routinely invoke the Principles as they seek restitution on behalf of their clients. Likewise, current holders’ lawyers invoke the principles to establish their right to maintain their ownership of the contested object. The temptation for some restitution lawyers to secure a settlement is always there instead of aspiring to an actual restitution which may trigger an extended tussle with the current possessor. An easy way out? Lengthy legal battles are very costly and most claimants cannot afford them.

The Washington Principles are “soft”. They are guidelines to be interpreted as one sees fit. A growing number of current holders nowadays realize that these Principles are here to stay (28 years later) and that they have become part of the landscape. They also are keenly aware that the keywords “just and fair” are not synonymous with “restitution” but instead signal that they can find an equitable outcome that is acceptable to their interests. Ultimately, the “just and fair” approach swings in favor of a current possessor not surrendering an object to the claimant. The Washington Principles have achieved their aim.

Claimants, on the other hand, have to make their peace with the fact that the laws of supply and demand combined with the absence of effective government regulations override the impact of genocide on decisions affecting the ownership of works and objects of art. If they wish to prevail against a current possessor, they must seek unconventional approaches and adopt unorthodox strategies that fall outside the established framework of a restitution negotiation. Claimants’ rights have a greater chance of success outside “the box” rather than inside “the box.”

Justice in the face of genocide continues to be elusive, performative and symbolic. In that sense, the Washington Principles are “performative.”

The Ides of March

by Marc Masurovsky

Julius Caesar

If we succumb to folklore, bad things are supposed to happen on 15 March, the day that Emperor Julius  Caesar succumbed to 23 stab wounds at the Curia de Pompeyo in Rome in 44 BC. The culprits were for the most part Roman senators in open rebellion with Caesar. Brutus administered the fatal blow which produced the timeless retort from a dying Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” (loosely translated as “you too, Brutus?).

Fast forward several millenia.

I picked 15 March as a random, yet symbolic, date as a pretext to take a (micro?) historical look at what unfolded on that day during and after the Nazi era. The following selection is mostly centered on France with snippets on Czechoslovakia and Belgium.

15 March 1939

France’s abandonment of the Sudetenland to the Third Reich gave the Nazis a green light to invade and occupy Czechoslovakia.

60,000 Spanish Republican refugees—children, women, soldiers and militiamen—fled to France to escape from Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s counteroffensive at the close of the Spanish Civil War. They were placed in several “concentration camps” established by the French authorities at Rivesaltes and Barcarès near Perpignan.

15 March 1941

Jean Seligmann, Jewish art dealer and collector, son and heir of the famous antiquarian Jacques Seligmann, underwent a second day of interrogation at the hands of agents of Gruppe 603 of the Geheime Feld Polizei (GFP) who had arrested him the day before on grounds of acts of sabotage for the Allies and financing Allied propaganda efforts. Dr. Karl Epting, an eminent figure in Franco-German intellectual collaboration during the war, also accused Seligmann of acquiring works of art from suspected Spanish “Red [Communist]” agents and colluding with the British and the Americans. Labeled a “terrorist,” Seligmann was executed by a German firing squad in mid-December 1941 at Mont-Valérien.

On the same day, a train with 25 cars lumbered from Paris to an imposing castle in Bavaria, Neuschwanstein, the main depot used by the ERR to store and inventory confiscated Jewish-owned art objects from Western Europe. The objects on the train were from the following owners: Rothschild family, Seligmann, Alphonse Kann, Halphen, Weil-Picard, Wildenstein and David-Weill. The Nazis had hastily packed the train and failed to register and inventory its contents before departure. A special team from the Paris ERR headed to the Bavarian castle for the sole purpose of inventorying the train’s contents.

While the loot train made its way to Bavaria, a Jewish art dealer, Paul Graupe, reached New York where he registered as a political refugee. He had to abandon many of his precious cultural belongings in a warehouse in Paris where they were later confiscated by German agents.

During a brief visit in Paris, Marshal Hermann Goering, who had a first right of refusal on all confiscated Jewish-owned collections, selected a number of objects for his private enjoyment which belonged to James and Alexandrine de Rothschild.

The ERR in Paris gave Josef Angerer, one of Hermann Goering’s agents in France during WWII, a wooden statuette of a seated woman which came from a crate numbered 686 that had been stored at the German Embassy in Paris and been transferred to the Jeu de Paume in late Fall 1940.

15 March 1942

Charles Laville, deputy secretary of the anti-Jewish “Institut d’Etudes des Questions Juives”, sold a vast quantity of photographs that were the property of Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. He sold 4500 photos to Mr. Borelly, the owner of a journal called “L’Atalanque” for 10,000 francs and 1200 photos to a Parisian art dealer, Louise Leiris who managed the interests of Daniel Kahnweiler.

Rose Valland, curator and spy extraordinaire stationed at the Jeu de Paume, noted in her journals that the personnel of the Jeu de Paume were working overtime to make room for additional shipments of confiscated objects to the museum. Little did she know that these measures presaged the onset of the so-called “M-Aktion or Möbel Aktion”, a sweeping wholesale gutting of the contents of Jewish residences in the Paris region which lasted until June 1944. The overseer of this massive cleansing operation was SS Colonel Kurt von Behr, of the ERR in Paris.

The administration of the French concentration camp at Rivesaltes mobilized labor battalions comprised exclusively of Jewish male prisoners. They were referred to as “Palestinian groups.”

15 March 1943

The mass deportation of the Jews of Saloniki (Greece) began. The city council and the church authorities conspired to eliminate a fourth of the city's population--the Jewish community--concentrated in the Baron Hirsch section of the city close to the rail yards and seize the Jews' property and valuables. Only 1 in 10 Jewish residents of Saloniki returned home from the horrors of Auschwitz.

15 March 1945

The French Assembly passed a law declaring claimants responsible for presenting all material evidence in support of a claim of forced transfer of their property (duress) so that some form of indemnification could be provided to them in lieu of restitution. This law did not extend to financial instruments sold on the Paris stock market (Bourse). [Caffery to State, March 21, 1945, no. 1342, Secret, RG 84, Paris Embassy Confidential Files, 1945, Box 4, NARA.]

The Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS in Paris launched an investigation into the wartime activities of Michel Skolnikoff who had acted as the main go-between for the Germans to corner the French and Monegascan hotel market through a network of agencies that cloaked the identity of the beneficial owner behind the purchases of these hotel properties, namely Skolnikoff. The previous day, Allied representatives had met at the US Embassy in Paris and decided to place Skolnikoff on the British “Black List” and the US “Proclaimed List.” Skolnikoff had already fled to Spain where he resided at the Hotel Palace in Madrid. [From Saint, BB/036 [London] to Saint/BD001 [Lisbon], Subject : Michel Skolnikoff, Secret, 11 April 1945, RG 226, Entry 109, Box 14, NARA.]

15 March 1961

Mr. Rossignol, an advisor to the ORE, a Belgian agency responsible for war reparations and economic relief, ordered Louis Cahen, the chief curator of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, to take custody of objects from Congo and Angola which Allied officials had repatriated from Germany after 1945. These objects had a total market value of 15000 francs. Cahen objected because the provenance of these objects was suspicious. Rossignol insisted that he serve as their “custodian until further notice.”


Selected sources:

Czechoslovakia

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/march-15/nazis-take-czechoslovakia

Dr. Karl Epting

https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/en/vierteljahrshefte/vfz-archive/issue-index/2023/issue-july-2023

Charles Laville

Index cards on art looting suspects, RG239 E34 b1 NARA, available on fold3.com.

Mr. Rossignol

A. Rossignol, ORE to L. Cahen, Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, 6 September 1961, AR 2/AGR 2-Dépôt Joseph Cuvelier, 020/510, Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium.

Jean Seligmann

Erste bericht, Kommissariat 1, GFP 603, 15 mars 1941, B323/287, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-art-dealer-lantiquaire-by-francois.html

Acronyms:

ERR: Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg

ORE: Office de Récupération Economique

Archives:

Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany

fold3.com

NARA: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

Photo credits:

Julius Caesar, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Gurlitt painting with a twist

Hildebrand Gurlitt

"Landscape" by J. B. Huet

by Marc Masurovsky

During the German occupation of France, Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956) was one of the most prolific German art purchasing agents working for the Third Reich. In May 1944, on one of his many shopping sprees to acquire works of art in Paris for his Nazi overseers and for himself, he purchased a painting by Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745-1811) titled Landscape with stream and bridge (« Paysage avec ruisseau et pont »).

The seller was Theo Hermsen (1905-1944), an expert at facilitating the exportation of works of art from France to the Reich. He shipped the painting to Munich for it to join Hitler’s Linz Museum project (#3691).

Theo Hermsen

The Huet painting was stored at the Führerbau, on Arcisstrasse, Hitler’s administrative offices in Munich, together with over a thousand other works of art acquired licitly or illicitly for Hitler’s pet museum project. The Führerbau was Linz’ antechamber.

In late April 1945, more than a thousand paintings disappeared from the Führerbau. The theft happened in the brief interregnum between Nazi rule and US military occupation—72 hours give or take a couple. After Nazis vacated most of Munich, in that brief spate which transformed the Führerbau and its cultural riches into a no man’s land, swarms of local Munich residents broke into the unguarded facility searching for food and booze, but instead they found heaps of paintings and carted them off through all available exits, narrow or large, in record time, vanishing into nearby neighborhoods or what was left of them after repeated Allied air raids. The few paintings still at the Führerbau when the Americans liberated Munich on 30 April-1 May 1945 were stolen under the very noses of the American liberators. It was the largest recorded theft in Munich history. To this day, most of the paintings remain at large.

The Führerbau, Munich

The Huet painting journeyed through Munich’s criminal underworld of petty thieves and black marketeers. One of the Führerbau thieves, Karl Boser, who lived on Fürtenstrasse, made off with at least seven paintings and some furniture. He crammed them into a wheelbarrow and set off towards his building. Frau Kiermayer (or Kiermeyer) who lived on his street offered to help him push the wheelbarrow. Boser was grateful for her assistance and to reward her for her kind gesture, he gave her two of the paintings that he had stolen from the Führerbau. One of them was the Huet painting. Mrs. Kiermayer sold one painting to a local Munich art dealer and gave her niece the Huet painting as a wedding present since her niece had become a “GI bride” when she married Maurice E. O’Neill (or O’Neal). The newly married O’Neill couple moved to Rodeo, a small town north of Oakland, California, and lived in a neighborhood called Bayo Vista.

It was not until 1948 that, quite by chance, American investigators unraveled the story behind the Huet painting.

The break in the case came in the fall of 1948 when a former baker, Joseph Schwertl, one of the Führerbau thieves who also lived on Fürtenstrasse, admitted to American investigators that Frau Kirmeier (Kiermayer), a woman living in his building block, had offered him two paintings. Schwertl declined her offer which then led her to get rid of the two paintings, including the Huet that she gave to her niece as a wedding present.

When questioned, Frau Kirmeier [Kiermayer] confirmed that her neighbor, Karl Boser, had stolen the paintings from the Fũhrerbau and that he had given her two of the ones he stole, exchanging the rest of his loot for 15000 cigarettes on the Munich black market. After finding out that Mrs. Kiermayer had given the painting to her niece, the MFA&A section in Munich sent several letters to the O’Neill [O’Neal] couple on 27 October 1948 alerting them that they had exported a stolen painting to the United States in contravention of numerous laws. The US government therefore had the right to confiscate it and send it back to Germany. Receiving no answer, they contacted Walter Horn, a former MFA&A colleague and investigator, who was teaching art at the University of California and asked him for his assistance.

Walter W. Horn

Horn contacted officers from the Oakland (California)-based 62nd Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (CID) who quickly ascertained the location of the painting and had it removed from the O’Neill residence in order to send it back to Germany. Under the Four-Power agreement, the country from which the painting had been removed was its next destination. That country, in turn, was responsible for finding the rightful owner and restitute the painting thereto. Oftentimes, that did not happen. Since the painting had been purchased in and removed from France, the American authorities were bound to repatriate it to France. The painting reached Munich on 8 August 1949 and it was shipped to France on 27 October 1949.

Sources:

Edgar Breitenbach to Intelligence Department Files, OMGBavaria, MFA&A Section, 26 October 1948, RG260 M 1946 Roll 151 NARA

Edgar Breitenbach to Intelligence Department Files, 4 November 1948, RG 260 M 1946 Roll 151 NARA

Stefan A. Munsing, Chief, MFA&A Section, to Inspector General, Munich Military Post, 9 May 1949, RG 260 M 1946 Roll 151 NARA

MCCP card (verso)

MCCP card (recto)

Photo credits:

Photo of Huet painting courtesy of www.dhm.de

Photo of Hildebrand Gurlitt courtesy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildebrand_Gurlitt

Photo of Theo Hermsen courtesy of  https://agorha.inha.fr/ark:/54721/c1e95c1c-86ad-4cee-b790-e6cdf39a1cc5
Photo of Walter W. Horn courtesy of https://www.monumentsmenandwomenfnd.org/monuments-men-and-women/walter-horn?srsltid=AfmBOopeYzRl4QdqzotvboMIiZ4R2f4RTILZoPxBIJxETbTADftIPYIV

Photo of the Führerbau courtesy of https://www.hitler-archive.com/index.php?t=F%C3%BChrerbau

Cast of characters

France, 1944

Theo Hermsen (1905-1944)
Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895-1956)

Munich, 1945-1948

Karl Boser
Frau Kiermayer (or Kiermeyer)
Joseph Schwertl

Rodeo, California (1948-1949)

Mrs. Kiermayer’s niece
Maurice E. O’Neill (or O’Neal)
Walter W. Horn (1908-1995)

Locations:

Paris, France
Munich, Germany
    Führerbau (Arcisstrasse)
    Fürtenstrasse

Rodeo, California, USA
    Bayo Vista neighborhood