Nazi looted property in the United States in the 1930s

by Marc Masurovsky

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933. The subsequent Nazi era lasted until May 9, 1945, when the National Socialist Third Reich signed an unconditional surrender to the combined Allied military forces which brought an end to a six-year global military conflict known as the Second World War (1939-1945).

In the winter of 1933, there were at least 400 American companies and businesses operating inside Nazi Germany, most of which were subsidiaries of American-based corporations. There were also American-based banks and financial firms as well as businesses displaying, buying and selling art objects. For Americans, Hitler’s coming to power was but a hiccup, for otherwise it was business as usual. For the Jews of Germany and for American Jews, Hitler’s arrival was cause for concern and rightly so.

America’s borders remained open as well as Germany’s. Therefore trade relations between the US and Germany were maintained even if the political checkerboard had changed radically and Germany’s priorities were rooted in a deeply racialist, white supremacist and antisemitic ideology.

The first expropriations of Jewish property began several months after the Nazis took power. The first forced sales accompanied these expropriations in the form of auctions taking place across Germany. Items sold included everything that one could find in a Jewish household, including art objects, precious metals like gold and silver, furniture and decorative objects.

Tourists continued to flock into Germany, despite the economic depression that was engulfing the US, but those who had deeper pockets than the average working person could still afford to “have a good time” in Germany. Tourists usually bring back souvenirs so it’s no surprise if some of the more enterprising ones attended auctions where Jewish property was being sold willy-nilly.

Art collections were being sold under duress. Their owners were persecuted for being Jewish, deprived of an income and therefore forced to sell their belongings in order to fund their exit from Nazi Germany. Their property was dispersed among the local population but it was also acquired by foreign visitors who had a special interest in the art objects and the decorative pieces offered for sale. This illegal outflow of Jewish property reverberated inevitably into the countries of origin of these foreign buyers who returned home with their acquisitions.

As a growing number of Jewish collectors and dealers were being forced out of their professions and obliged to sell their inventories, gallerists and dealers in neighboring countries and the United States saw their demise as a business opportunity for them to acquire at depressed prices items of value which could then be resold for a hefty profit in due course.

Likewise, German art dealers, collectors, museum curators and art historians who had established productive relationships with their counterparts in the US crossed the Atlantic in search of good deals, especially Old Master paintings, on behalf of their wealthy clients. The lines were continually blurred between American and German art world personalities owing to their symbiotic business and scholarly relationships. The same can be said about American university professors and researchers who continued to exchange data and research with their German colleagues and even fostered exchange programs that saw American students and professors spending time on German university campuses after Hitler’s rise to power.

As the years progressed and the ensuing repression intensified against Jews in Germany, an exponential mass of high-value tangible assets changed hands from Jewish to non-Jewish ownership through a pseudo-legal process known as “Aryanization,” a direct result of anti-Jewish laws being enforced to the letter by Nazi administrators. Corporate boards were purged of their Jewish members, while business continued to flow between American subsidiaries, their German clients and the Nazi State. Profit before people. A well-known adage that witnessed a perverse application in the antisemitic German world.

By the late 1930s, Germany had brazenly announced its true colors: territorial expansion and elimination of Jews from all walks of life. Genocide was around the corner. Faced with an appeasement-oriented world that wanted to keep Hitler at bay without antagonizing him, Nazi Germany took it as an invitation and absorbed its neighbor, Austria, in an “Anschluss” in early March 1938, followed a year later by a so-called “police action” against Czechoslovakia which resulted in the disappearance of that country and its replacement with a "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." Similarly, Austria became Germany’s new province of Ostmark.

If one surveys the New York auction world as of the mid-1930s, one is likely to read about objects coming out of privately-owned Jewish collections which were subjected to seizure and forced sales. German dealers and collectors, specializing mostly in 20th century art, emigrated to the United States bringing with them parts of their inventories which, if scrutinized properly, would have revealed the presence of objects acquired from Jewish collectors and artists who were subjected to duress and forced to sell, or that they had acquired at “Jew auctions.” These objects in turn were displayed in New York galleries and other American cities with few questions asked about provenance. We call it willful ignorance.

Lastly, American businessmen were accustomed to travel to European art fairs and pick up merchandise for their businesses back home and they would sign trade agreements with local European partners including German ones. The Leipzig trade fair, for instance, was flagged by the US Treasury Department as an international event which was suspected of offering for sale expropriated Jewish household goods, including textiles (rugs and wall hangings). This is just one of many instances of how easy it was for foreign businessmen to acquire property displaced from Jewish owners without their consent.

Jewelry was the easiest commodity to move from one border to the next due to its small size. As Jewish jewelers and precious stone brokers were put out of business, their inventories were cast wide on the market and often ended up across the ocean. Although extremely difficult to trace back to original owners, these luxury items were dispersed in urban centers along the East Coast of the US.

In summary, art, decorative objects, jewelry and textiles were some of the many categories of objects which made their way to the United States in the 1930s, unbeknownst to the buyers who had no idea that they had once belonged to a Jewish owner suffering under the Nazi yoke and forced to sell them in order to stay alive. But for how long?

TD 51072

by Marc Masurovsky

Treasury Directive TD 51072 was passed on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission was charged with reviewing the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approving or refusing their release under a license issued by Treasury.

The directive applied to any art object that had changed hands since March 12, 1938, two days after the absorption of Austria into the German Reich, known as the Anschluss. In other words, any art object subjected to “internal plunder” from 1933 to 1938, was exempted de facto from the Directive.

Further exemptions to the TD weakened its impact upon enactment.  For instance, objects imported from the United Kingdom and its dominions were exempted from TD 51072. Also, objects coming in from so-called neutral or non-belligerent countries were exempted from inspection at the US Border. However, importers were still required to file two separate forms, a TFE-1 (license to import) and FFC-168 (questionnaire) [FFC-Foreign Funds Control was the main investigative arm of the Treasury and the predecessor to the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the US Department of Treasury]. These forms were designed to shed light on the origin of the objects and the circumstances of their acquisition prior to their entry into the US.

The loophole created by the “artistic, historic or scholarly” value of the object meant that cultural objects viewed as “ordinary” might be allowed in without further ado. What the US authorities together with the museum professionals of the Roberts Commission did not realize is that the vast majority of art objects looted by the Axis fell under that category of “ordinariness.”

The impact of TD 51072 on cultural imports into the US was limited owing to these many exemptions. Also, the Roberts Commission worked hard to dilute its impact and eventually lobbied the Treasury to have the directive revoked on grounds that there was no evidence of loot entering the US. A note here: the Roberts commission would not have known how to identify a looted cultural or artistic object if if it was staring at them, as there were no exhaustive listings of what had been looted by the Axis at the time the Directive was enacted. The Roberts Commission succeeded in getting the TD 51072 revoked and, feeling that its work was done, voted itself out of existence in July 1946, confident that business as usual should resume post haste.

Business as usual

by Marc Masurovsky

The twenty-year old discussion about Nazi looted art and restitution tends to skirt a fundamental point: how was it able to happen? And most importantly, how were its fruits internationalized and monetized on a global scale?

In the interwar years, many paths led to New York, the emerging global center of attraction for artists, bankers, industrialists and intellectuals, including those who were anxious to start a new life away from the Nazi madding crowd.

If one looks at art as a business, then one can understand that the rise to power of Hitler on January 30, 1933, did not put an abrupt end to business relations between Germans and their counterparts outside the nascent Third Reich. In fact, it was business as usual. Many scholars have already covered this ground, but have been shy to point out that the Nazi plan against its perceived enemies, especially the Jewish community of the Reich and ultimately of continental Europe, was grounded in economic motivations as much as it was rooted in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes and myths of alleged Jewish evil and malfeasance towards civil society and its institutions, even going as far as accusing Jews of holding the Zeitgeist of the nation hostage to their supposed base needs.

That said, the art world continued to function as before January 1933, except for the inevitable casualties of business under the Nazis, who enforced interdictions against artists and intellectuals and their supporters in the cultural and financial spheres. The attack against so-called degenerate art, objectionable forms of expression, forced the disgorgement of thousands of works and objects onto the private art market, followed by the purging of such banned pieces from German state museums and their sale inside and outside the Reich. The international community responded with its checkbook and began acquiring at bargain basement prices, works which had not been so easily available during the Weimar period.

The Nazis understood the financial power of art as a pendant to their attack on Kultur which eventually extended across Europe.

Let’s take a look at the economic infrastructure through which art flows—companies, banks, middlemen—because art is also an investment. Dealers and collectors alike are intrinsically connected to the financial and commercial interests of a nation, as well as its civil servants who rationalize and organize policy to enable economic growth, trade and financial investments both inside the Reich and abroad. Germany is a net exporting country as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty, forced to rely on foreign subsidiaries to generate markets so as to ensure its survival. The interwar era of global cartels brought financiers and industrialists of all major countries together at the table, as well as institutions such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), whose members were instrumental in reshaping the financial map of the world, and helping to seal the fate of countries like Czechoslovakia. Should it come as no surprise that art travels with these businessmen, becomes a source of investment, serves as collateral, money is borrowed to acquire art as much as assets are leveraged to ensure transactions which have nothing to do with art.

In sum, the domestic plunder of German citizens and their art collections finds natural outlets in and through networks of affiliation long ago established and strengthened across the international corporate community. The appeal of specific styles by conservative elites—from antiquities to medieval and old masters all the way to the 18thand early 19thcenturies—act as a pump for art dealers with ready access to those works being funneled into the market by desperate people seeking quick cash to subsist and/or to fund emergency trips into exile and to safe havens.

The evidence is compelling that, from the first forced sales of summer 1933 in Berlin, buyers were in attendance from neighboring countries and far-flung ones—Great Britain and even the United States. The incidental business tourists who happened to find themselves in Nazi Germany with some disposable cash frequented auction houses where Jewish-owned property was being sold. These items in turn were repatriated back to their native countries to be included into their places of business and residence.

Hence, from the mid-1930s, looted cultural property is flowing outward following long-established networks of trade and kinship ties between foreign clients and their German dealers and middlemen.

The same scenario is repeated even more brutally following the March 1938 Anschluss of Austria with American investment banks like Goldman Sachs advising its clients to buy up devalued property ensnared in Aryanization procedures. Let’s not be naïve, as there are hundreds of Allied companies operating subsidiaries in the Greater German Reich with which they are not yet at war. Normal business relations continue unimpeded, these subsidiaries allow their boards to be aryanized by transferring out their Jewish cadres in order to appease the New Order.

These accommodations with authoritarian governments began long before Hitler came to power. Indeed, since 1922, Benito Mussolini ruled Italy with an iron fist, which appealed to many foreign businessmen who preferred to have some sense of order that would maintain social peace in their Italian subsidiaries. Moreover, European and American dealers traveled to and from Italy every year throughout the 1920s and 1930s to conduct business, exchange or acquire works of art, organize and borrow exhibits for display in their homelands. Hence, Fascism and later on Nazism did not create moral and ethical qualms for Europeans and American citizens as they pursued business opportunities with authoritarian, racist, racialist governments.

So, when we discuss how on earth did objects looted during the early years of the Third Reich ever manage to enter Western European and American collections, one should not look too far and too deep for an answer to that question. The same reasoning applied to the sale and exchange of other commodities. For instance, the Leipzig Trade fair attracted American buyers up until the late 1930s, even though trade associations in the United States expressed some concerns over the probity of maintaining commercial relations with companies in the Reich that discriminated against their Jewish employees and which had absorbed Jewish businesses through aryanizations, selling the aryanized property to foreign buyers.

Also, the international gold trade had been mired in some controversy after the Anschluss and the invasion of Czechoslovakia with the blessings of France and Great Britain, the gold reserves of both countries having been absorbed by the Reich, and their contents used on international markets to acquire badly needed foreign currencies. The US Treasury became aware of these movements of gold but were unable to prevent those bars from entering the US gold reserves on account of a fundamentalist approach to the international gold market. Nothing should be done to disrupt the inflow and outflow of gold because the dollar’s value was pegged to a fixed value of gold. Hence, any political disruption of the international gold matket rooted in discrimination against gold provided by the Reich as collateral to purchase foreign currencies was prohibited, unless the US wanted to destabilize the dollar’s value and therefore endanger the economic recovery of the US in the years following the Great Depression.

The international art trade mirrored closely the way in which international business relations were conducted between the future Allied and Axis countries. Provenance of goods and services was never held to account as a prerequisite for conducting business. Hence, the desire to question the origin of the goods and services was rarely raised and even when it was, could not be invoked as a reason not to conduct business with a German or Italian entity or individual. One would have to wait for a state of war to exist between the US, Great Britain and the Axis powers to restrict trade relations, including the international movement of art objects.

But, as we all know, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Oprah and Adele II

by Marc Masurovsky

Warning:

This is an opinion piece and you—the reader—are always free to disagree with what you are about to read. Perhaps, after having spent two decades in the trenches of the art restitution movement, if there ever was such a thing,  my glasses have become tinted. Still, the inability and/or unwillingness of art market players, whether they be gallerists, auctioneers, private collectors, buyers, and brokers alike to be more forthcoming about publicizing the history of the objects with which they come into contact, remains to this day perplexing, in defiance of any reasonable argumentation, save for the old yarn that there is no law that compels one to disclose a full provenance for an art object, regardless of its origin.

In 1912, Gustav Klimt, the renowned master of the Austrian Secessionist movement, painted several portraits of a delicate, frail, wan, Jewish woman named Adele Bloch Bauer, the heiress to a sizeable fortune amassed by her husband, Ferdinand Bloch Bauer, one of the leading Jewish bankers of Vienna. Adele Bloch Bauer died in 1925.

The National Socialist German Reich absorbed Austria in an “Anschluss” in March 1938, a geopolitical act which served overnight as a suspended death sentence for the several hundred thousand Jews living in Austria at that time. The Nazification of Austria led to a systematic campaign of persecution targeting Austria’s Jewish community, punctuated by mass arrests, torture, evictions, expropriations, outright plunder of Jewish assets and later on, deportations, slave labor and extermination.

Those who could escape sought refuge in other parts of Europe and in the Americas; they managed to save themselves at great risk. Those who did not faced certain death. When the Holocaust and the Second World War ended in May 1945, three fourths of Austria’s Jews had been massacred and all of their property confiscated, either absorbed by non-Jews in Austria or dissipated, as art and other fungible assets, through domestic and international market outlets. Postwar efforts to recover expropriated property proved mostly futile for surviving Jewish family members. The Bloch Bauer paintings remained where they had been sequestered with the able assistance of pro-Nazi Austrian and German art historians and museum officials—in a Viennese museum. They hung on the walls of the Belvedere Museum for all to view and became associated with the rebirth of Austria, drawing tourists to Vienna from around the world. Gustav Klimt’s star rose until he earned a posthumous recognition as a world-class artist much like his younger colleague, Egon Schiele.

Decades later, Maria Altmann, a niece of the Bloch Bauer family who resided in California, filed a restitution claim to recover her family’s cultural property, including the two portraits of her aunt, Adele Bloch Bauer, commissioned from Gustav Klimt.

Her lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, fought a lengthy and protracted battle for her claim to even be heard in an American court. Her case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where Mr. Schoenberg prevailed in his bid to sue the current possessor of the paintings, the Republic of Austria, in an American court. In the end, the Austrian government was compelled to restitute five Klimt works to Maria Altmann. By 2005, the commercial value of the paintings had accrued to more than 300 million dollars, a staggering sum of money by anyone’s standards.

Once restituted, Ms. Altmann sold the paintings in November 2006 through the Christie’s auction house in New York. An anonymous buyer aggressively pursued by telephone the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” starting at 74 million dollars and pressing upwards until 87 million dollars capped the anonymous bidder’s quest to acquire Adele II.

In 2014, Adele II was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it hung on the 5th floor.

The global art dealer, Larry Gagosian, spotted the painting.

One of his clients, a wealthy Chinese investor, offered 100 million dollars for the Klimt masterpiece. The anonymous owner countered with 150 million dollars. as an acceptable sales price.

The deal was consummated, thus doubling Adele II’s value in ten years. News of the transaction revealed that the anonymous buyer in 2006 was none other than Oprah Winfrey, global talk show maven, personality and role model.  Oprah Winfrey’s desire for anonymity is consistent with standard practices in the art world whereby it is considered to be no one’s business who buys what from whom. Unfortunately, such built-in opacity, disguised as a respectful quest for privacy, casts a lasting cloak of mystery over most art transactions which produces a shield that enables trafficking in illicitly acquired objects and trading in objects whose provenance is highly questionable.

Every private buyer, in an unregulated market such as the art market, has the right to treat his/her acquisitions of art, even high-priced art, as he/she sees fit.  Nevertheless, it would have been a historical moment had Ms. Winfrey announced that she had acquired the Bloch Bauer portrait in 2006.  Perhaps I am making the wrong assumption here, whereby the history of the painting moved her and fueled her quest to acquire this Klimt masterpiece, regardless of the cost. It may be that she merely viewed  "Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II" as a beautiful art object for which she was determined to spend as much money as it took to make it hers and to profit from its resale a decade later in an astute business transaction involving a Chinese buyer. It could very well be that the painting’s history was not the motivating factor in her decision to acquire Adele II. However harsh that may sound, it is a real possibility. Her silence in this matter makes it difficult to weigh in on either side of this conundrum.

Looted works of art, regardless of their value, function as perennial esthetic symbols of and silent witnesses to a painful history tainted by genocide which engulfed millions of lives over a twelve-year period; the tragic destinies of the victims are forever intertwined with and embodied in these objects.

When these looted objects are traded on the international marketplace, sometimes for substantial sums of money, the sale itself becomes the event and supplants the history of the object, thus stripping it of its painful past. The plundered object loses its context, much like an antique piece illegally removed from its matrix. The sale works like an anesthetic; it deadens history, it whitewashes like cleanser the oftentimes twisted and tragic context through which the object evolved before reaching us.

It makes me wonder: why should I care so much about the history of these objects which, oftentimes, are reduced to---objects without a past, adornments, some more extraordinary than others?

Why teach history? Why share knowledge? why the urge to contextualize works and objects of art, to restore their history, their stories?

Will the Chinese buyer who has spent 150 million dollars to own the “Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II” even care about the history of this object? Will it remind him, however remotely, of the millions of art objects which suffered a similar, if not worse fate, as they were plundered by Japanese Imperial forces on the Chinese mainland between 1931 and 1946? Does any of this matter?

A teachable moment has once again vanished like sand flowing between one’s fingers, sacrificed on the altar of money.

Rest assured, however, that 87 million dollars, 150 million dollars, do not, cannot and will not erase the taint of persecution and genocide from these looted objects. 

Ever.

So What Was on Hitler's Mind as an Art-Plunderer?

by Ori Z Soltes

For many readers of this blog, these observations may not be new, but for others they may provide food for thought. Those with historical awareness recognize that the Nazis more often than not didn't invent new ideas; they adopted old ones and innovated as they adapted them to their needs. 

Thus, for instance, at least as far back as the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, in which the 67th through the 70th canons dealt with the Jews, the idea was promoted in Christendom, and well-followed in parts of the realm, that Jews be rendered readily distinguishable from their good Christian neighbors by special clothing, or special marks--a yellow circle, for instance--on t heir clothing. Thus the eventual ubiquity that Jews across Nazi-controlled Europe wear yellow six-pointed stars was innovative in its details but not in its fundamental conception.

And the French created the first camps into which those guilty of no crime but who somehow should not be allowed to run around freely might be concentrated in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Too many Spaniards coming over the Pyrenees in 1938-9 (the infamous Retirada) made the prevailing French government uncomfortable and a mechanism that was, as it were, extra-legal had to be created to assuage that discomfort. The Nazis not only created a much wider system of concentration camps, but further enhanced the idea by designating some of them as slave-labor camps--and others as extermination camps.

And so with the issue of Nazi plunder, of cultural and other property--but particularly of cultural property--the historical precedents were many and some of the underlying reasons very familiar, but the shape of the plundering process was, again, innovative.

Lucius Mummius

One might begin by asking about those underlying reasons. Plundering the art of one's defeated enemies is one way of showing one's military and political success over them. But when Lucius Mummius, the Roman general--the first art plunderer whom we can identify by name--returned from his military success in subduing the Greeks at Corinth in 146 BCE, he carted piles of Greek statues back to Rome. The fourth-century CE Roman historian, Eutropius, informs us, with an amused tone, that Lucius took out an insurance policy on his plunder, and that the contract stipulated that, should any of the sculptures be damaged in transit, the company would supply the general with compensatory pieces equal in weight to those that were damaged.  
If Eutropius' amusement derives from his recognition that Lucius was an ignorant boor who had no concept of the intrinsic value of art, we might recognize that the purpose of acquiring his horde was precisely to show his friends and neighbors back home that he was not a boor, or a destructive savage, but a cultured man, who, while successful at his business of fighting and killing, appreciated the fine things wrought by human mind and hand.

Eutropius

We may see this intention emulated down through the centuries, arriving at an exalted destination in the far-reaching plunder of Napoleon, who brought back art from Egypt, and from Rome that had been taken by the Romans from Egypt, as he also did from other parts of Italy and from Spain and Germany and the Hapsburg domains. The Nazis followed this lead, eager to show how civilized they were. Even before they began to expand their plundering activities beyond their borders, they were determined to underscore this point by organizing a large exhibition of "true" art that ran virtually side-by-side with an exhibit of "degenerate" art. If the Nazis were consummately civilized, those who made and patronized the likes of Picasso and Matisse or anything abstract or connected to Jews, were surely barbaric. (Even an admired painter like Rembrandt, when he painted a work like "the Jewish Bride" slipped from his pedestal.)

Part of the Nazi innovation, of course, was to begin the plunder before there was a war outside their borders from their own citizens: barely was Hitler in position as Chancellor and his henchmen were forcing Jews to give up their collections--forced sales, mind you, nothing that could be legally called plundered--as gradually, over the next few years, Jews (and others) would be deprived of a range of citizenship rights before they began to be concentrated, for their own "protection" into designated camps, and before they would be deprived of their lives.

A second innovation, once the plundering process began to gain momentum, both within Germany and outside it--once the war itself officially began and countries beyond Germany either embraced (Austria, for example) or succumbed (Western Europe, for instance) to German arms--was the elaborate and systematic, multi-leveled program devoted simply to plunder. Thus on the one hand, with the Anschluss into Austria (March 1938), a program was implemented that required Jews--or anyone with even a vaguely Jewish relative--to fill out property-census forms. These listed everything they owned, from jewelry, silverware and furniture to drawings, paintings, and statues.

(One of the interesting proofs, both of how Austrian the Austrian Jews thought they were and thus of how taken by surprise they must have been by the onslaught on them not only of the Germans but of their Austrian neighbors, comes from a study of those property-census forms. When Marc Masurovsky and I had the chance a few years back to look over a few thousand of them, two things in particular, for which we were not searching, stood out. One was how Jews already living elsewhere, beyond Nazi reach, filled out forms, as required, and often added offhanded comments--for example, that a given bunch of drawings is not worth really mentioning--in a tone that indicated their sense of being virtual colleagues of the presumed readers of these forms. The second was how not only did so many Jews own works by second- and third-rate Austrian artists--Austrian artists, whose work good Austrians would own and display--but so many owned real estate, from merely part of an apartment to several apartment buildings or factories: one does not invest in real estate if one has even an inkling that one may need to leave quickly; it is too difficult to liquidate.)

Alfred Rosenberg

I digress. For a different aspect of systemic innovation was practiced in France, one of the places where Alfred Rosenberg--Hitler's expert in matters of racial distinctions (Aryans vs Slavs vs Roma vs Jews, from nose-type to hair-color to mental and moral acuity)--in charge of the organization that bore his name, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, (ERR), elaborated an extraordinary web of informants, from gallerists and museum directors to bankers and housemaids, regarding who had what and where, if it had been hidden, it could be found. It was this network that helped facilitate the plunder of cultural property on an unprecedented scale.

Part of the purpose of this massive undertaking, run by an army of plunderers who ran on a track parallel to that of the German army, was, to repeat, to underscore the cultured and civilized nature of the regime. The illusion that Nazis were civilized operated on different levels and for different sub-purposes. Oddly or not, the exhibition of proper art had been a failure: for every visitor to it more than a hundred flocked to see the "degenerate" art (Entartete Kunst) exhibit. Apparently far more Germans disagreed than agreed with Propaganda Minister Goebbels' notion of "real" art. 

Joseph Goebbels

On the other hand, the permission for several years to Jewish musicians to offer their own performances for their own, Jewish audiences--both Jewish musicians and Jewish audiences having been excluded early on from association with their non-Jewish counterparts--which permission was formally organized as der Judische Kulturbund (the KuBu, as it was popularly known); and the encouragement of music and, to an extent, visual art, at the Terezin Concentration Camp (its inhabitants often there temporarily, before being moved on to Auschwitz)--these kinds of activities were to enhance the illusion both that the Nazis fostered culture, even among the Jews, and in fact that the Fuhrer really loved his Jews. Perhaps no Nazi action with regard to art and culture was more cynical than the band of Jewish players that was organized to serenade victims at Auschwitz as they marched toward the gas chambers.

 What did the Nazis want with all the art that they plundered, besides using it as some proof of their high level of civilization and for other propagandistic purposes? Or rather, how did that intended validation play out? There was, to be sure, the art that was hoarded--but in different ways. The Fuhrer himself loved 18th- and 19th-century landscapes and images of happy, strong, beautiful--preferably blondish and blue-eyed--younger rather than older people, painted or sculpted by Northern European artists (as inherently superior than those in the south). Goering had more catholic tastes--even collecting art that Hitler would have disapproved. There was a line of German and Austrian museum directors who were looking to beef up their collections and there were Nazi upper and lower echelon operatives who wanted works for themselves, all available at bargain-basement prices through the auctions that followed both forced-sales and, later, outright confiscations.

Design for the so-called Fuhrermuseum in Linz, Austria

Hitler had in mind, in fact, to build the largest art museum that the world had ever seen in his hometown of Linz, Austria. This was effectively the other side of a project to take place in Prague: the shaping of a huge museum of Jewish ceremonial objects, using the synagogues in the city's 850-year-old Jewish quarter to house the collections. Hitler's intention was to show the world how vast and powerful had been the Jewish civilization that he had destroyed--a statement of what he had accomplished as a kind of gift to humanity. For the sake of this museum both the synagogues and the artifacts survived.

Otherwise, the plunder of Judaica was intended to lead to its destruction--usually, by melting it down if it was made of silver or gold. Degenerate art was slated to be traded for art that was more acceptable, or to be sold through myriad willing "neutral" intermediaries in places like Switzerland, Sweden and--yes--France, (to be purchased in active, question-free art markets like that in New York) in order to raise money for armaments, particularly as the war effort moved away from its early blitzkrieg of success.

By then even as the battlefield results were increasingly negative for the Nazis and their allies, the war against the Jews--the Holocaust--continued unabated. That ongoing effort was, of course, facilitated by British and American governments who found good excuses for limiting their efforts to curtail the destruction of the Jews (by bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz, for instance) on the specious grounds that this would take away from their effort to win World War II. Lucius Mummius as a model of self-promoting cultural illusion and his Nazi emulators and expanders were not alone in either looking at plundered cultural property through closed eyes or in promoting illusions about themselves to and for themselves and the wider world.

"Neutral" Europe during WWII

Who Could Believe that It Was Happening, Even as It was Happening?

A commentary by Ori Z. Soltes, chair of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP)

Ori Z. Soltes
Source: The Great Courses

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, a peculiar sort of discussion emerged eventually that, in some corners, continues to this day. That discussion pertained to the idea that the victims of the Holocaust, primarily the Jews, went “like sheep to the slaughter,” instead of fighting back. Accusing the victim for being victimized has long been an instrument with which humans who were in a position to help the victim but did not, assuage their guilt for their own failure. Blaming those who were herded and branded and slaughtered like cattle for not responding to the program of Nazi deceptions until it was too late might assuage and has alleviated that guilt for many, as they sought a return to normal lives.

It is always easy to blame someone else, and in this case, the guilt has run particularly deep and wide—not just those Germans or Austrians or French who stood idly by or contributed actively to the slaughter, but the British and the Americans who famously refused to bomb the train tracks to the killing centers, and who kept their immigration quota doors closed tight or made the paths to Palestine all but impassable. For it was one thing to be fighting the Germans and their allies in World War II, and another altogether to be fighting the Nazis in the Holocaust.

The numbers of Jews who did fight back remained, for the most part, unheralded and forgotten until the last few decades. Inevitably, those who fought did so with very little in the way of armaments and with very little reliable support from—even, at times, finding themselves betrayed by—the various non-Jewish underground forces who were themselves fighting the Nazis. Conversely, the myriad times and places in which well-armed or at least militarily experienced forces failed to resist or, in captivity, to rise up against their captors has typically been ignored.

Moreover, as in any large lie there may be a smaller element of truth, it is true that many (perhaps most) Jews did not resist. A perfect storm combined the Nazi genius for willful deception—to simplify the process of extermination by encouraging their victims to believe that they were not on the verge of victimhood—together with the victims’ desire to believe, and therefore to be deceived, that this was a storm that, like so many others in Jewish history, would pass. Physical resistance, in any case, had not been the primary means for a fragmentary minority to survive over the centuries in the face of hostility from the majority population.

For German and Austrian Jews in particular, the sense of having arrived at a point of truly being part of that majority mainstream—socially, economically, culturally, even to some extent politically—militated against believing that what was happening was happening. In the discussion of this issue it has often been pointed out that the very fabric of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Austrian and German communities was so interwoven with Jewish threads that, had the Holocaust not followed, historians would be constantly waxing about the Golden Age for Jews in those countries in that era. The photograph of which Sigmund Freud—to name one Jewish luminary among many within the Viennese firmament—was proudest, showed him with his two sons, both of in Austro-Hungarian military uniform; they were among myriad Jews who served in the Hapsburg and Prussian armies between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of World War I.

On the other hand, the Golden Age was by no means free of anti-Semitism (in fact the very term was a coinage of that era, as the Prussian pamphleteer, Wilhelm Marr, was the first one to label the Jews “Semites” in 1878—but that’s another story for another day). But this is part of what made the Nazi era so inexplicable as it gradually unfurled its full fury against the Jews. Who could imagine that such a definitive exterminationist intention would be directed toward a population so integrated into that world?

Marc Masurovsky and I uncovered one of the most extraordinary proofs of this a few years back as we were systematically studying the property census forms that every family with even an oblique Jewish component or connection was required to fill out for the Nazis after Austria fell before—or rather, embraced—the Anschluss. Our interest was in the cultural and similar property that the Nazis confiscated based on these on-demand listings of everything from silverware, desk lamps and jewelry to paintings, drawings and sculpture.

But along the way, we noted three other, unexpected features. One was the prevalent tone assumed by a good number of those who filled out the forms: little jocular side notes, as if submitting a report to a long-time superior with whom one has a warm, friendly relationship—as opposed to filling out what would amount to one’s death warrant. A second was the fact that a number of these forms were filled out and sent in from places as far away as Ankara and even New York City. This might have been out of fear for family members still in Austria, but may well have been out of a Teutonic sense of duty: one is required by the authorities to fill out a form as a Jew, then as a Jew more Viennese than the Viennese, one fills out the form—because regardless of where one lives one remains emphatically a Viennese.

Most intriguing is the third feature: virtually every form indicated the possession of real estate—from the partial ownership of an apartment to that of multiple apartment buildings and factories. The fact is that one does not invest in real estate if one has the slightest inkling of needing to leave a place quickly—it is too difficult to liquidate with alacrity. All of these Jews who bought real estate to live in, work in or employ others in, had to have been powerfully certain that they were in Vienna (after more than eight hundred years) to stay. When the Anschluss arrived and, as often happened, their neighbors turned against them, they could neither understand nor believe what was happening; it would not have occurred to them to “fight back.” That once-golden world disappeared before their eyes, never to be restored.

Ori Z. Soltes