A brief introduction to smuggling looted assets into Spain

bt Marc Masurovsky

France and the demarcation line (1940-1942)

During the German occupation of Western Europe (1940-1945), one of the major activities of the occupying forces and their local collaborators was plunder, looting, outright theft of Jewish-owned property, regardless of its form and shape, from residential and commercial property deeds to industrial know-how (patents, licenses, royalty agreements and trademarks), to financial instruments (stocks, bonds, shares) to artistic, cultural and religious objects. Let’s not forget those highly fungible precious stones and metals.

Regardless of the motivations for these wanton acts of thievery perpetrated on an industrial scale against their victims, the idea of monetizing this stolen property was high up on the looters’ priority list. An infrastructural web of connections was carefully woven, often aided by local and national police officials, fueled by pre-war business and political relationships, to allow for these transactions to take place for the benefit of the Reich and its collaborators. Oftentimes, this plundered moveable property was ferried across borders into neighboring countries that acted either as end points or transit centers for this property to move even further. Think Western Hemisphere, the Americas-North, Central, and South, and especially the islands lying between the Gulf of Mexico and the northern edge of South America.

In the case of thefts committed in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, looters looked to the south to sell off or “dump” their loot. Precious stones looted from Dutch and Belgian Jews were very easily transported and promised lucrative payoffs. An exception: many works of art looted traveled to Germany and other “Germanophile” markets to be incorporated into museum collections or sold at auction. Otherwise, paintings and other works of art were taken through Belgium and France into Spain, Switzerland or Italy. The main way station for this movement was Paris, which behaved as an international turnstile based on connections between dealers, collectors, art world officials, intelligence agents and the like. These works would find their way to Swiss cities and banks or make their way further south across the Pyrenees [Pyrénées] mountains into northern Spain.

The literature on the role of Switzerland as an endpoint for looted art is ample. From the earliest cases of Nazi thefts of Jewish assets, looted goods were sent to Switzerland from Germany (gold, jewelry, cash, securities, etc.). After the Anschluss in Austria in March 1938, a similar movement was observed from Austria into Switzerland. Likewise, Switzerland has served as a haven for Italian Fascists to deposit their ill-gotten assets in Swiss banks and estates. The passage of the Bank Secrecy Act in the mid-1930s secured complete confidentiality for foreign depositors transferring assets to Swiss institutions. 

By contrast, Spain and Portugal, but mostly Spain, have been largely ignored as loci of such activity. We’ve heard of Axis war criminals, collaborators of all stripes and shades, making their way into Axis-friendly Spain governed by the iron fist of "Generalisimo" (General) Francisco Franco and his Falange. These fugitives sought protection and shelter from prosecution and the wrath of the victorious Allied forces and national Resistance movements desirous to get their hands on these criminals and bring them to justice. 

What did these people carry with them? Little is known aside from well-documented cases like Alois Miedl, Goering’s personal banker and art agent in the Netherlands who almost single-handedly aryanized the famed Goudstikker collection. Lesser-known players have been largely ignored by the historical field. They turned out to be far more effective than Miedl to ferry looted goods into Spain. Still, it might be eventually worth taking a closer look at the Miedl case because he tapped into multiple networks of criminal gangs to ensure his flight to safety. In other words, even someone as important as Miedl was forced to rely on underworld figures and torturers to get across the Franco-Spanish border with his Dutch loot.

In the last years of the Second World War, southwestern France—an area bounded to the north by Bordeaux, and to the East by Montpellier and to the South by the Pyrenees, had been teeming with French fascists, criminal elements who were making their way to Spain. Nazi security agents, Italian and Spanish fascists worked side by side with Nazis and French fascists. In the midst of this beehive of terror and persecution, Allied agents together with Resistance elements did their best to provide some solace to refugees and victims seeking to make their way to Spain and to evade the dragnets established by local collaborators. They set up, at great risk, clandestine chains through which refugees and anti-Nazi militants could flee to relative safety. It was better to spend time in a refugee camp inside Spain than a jail cell run by Gestapo and Milice agents “up north.”

Southwestern France

In setting up these chains, it was critical to know which village, which hill, which crossroads were safe for travel away from prying eyes. Was the mayor in cahoots with the enemy? How about the local police? The priest? The judicial authorities? The baker? Not knowing was the bane of the victims and their protectors—resistance fighters and Allied agents. As you can imagine, many clandestine operatives were unmasked and arrested. Their resilience and persistence eventually saved many lives. How did one get across a porous border where no one could be trusted? As you can imagine, the odds favored the perpetrators by a long shot.

Smuggling goods and people across the border was a profitable way of life on both sides of the Pyrenees. Entire hamlets supplemented their meager resources with these clandestine acts. As long as there was an exchange of money, locals were at your service, as long as the risk could be mitigated. Knowing this, it was not very difficult for fleeing war criminals, underworld figures, intelligence agents, and economic collaborators to make full use of the “friendly” atmosphere that reigned all along the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees, viz., the Basque and Catalan regions, Navarre and Aragon, separated by a mountain chain. One still had to be careful with whom one did business and in whom one put one’s trust because he/she could turn on a dime, or a franc, or a peseta, and your luck would end there. As a general rule, you were in far more trouble if you were caught on the north side of the border than on the south side. Lastly, the political reliability of the individuals running these smuggling chains ensured the temporary safety of their clients, long enough to get them to a secure area.

To be continued….

Updated on 13 November 2024

Reviewed and edited by Maria Ruigomez Eraso

Different shades of recovery

by Marc Masurovsky

The process of recovery of looted cultural, artistic and religious objects is daunting for several reasons:

If action is not taken right away to recover a looted object, it becomes exponentially difficult to identify its current location. In the case of losses during the Third Reich, “recovery” was an absurd notion since the perpetrators of the thefts controlled the reins of political, legal, and economic power. Hence, the process of tracing the object could only occur after a regime change and with rules in place that would facilitate such searches. Moreover, if the works confiscated or plundered by the Nazi regime ended up in neighboring countries, what rights did the claimants have to recover such works, since Nazi Germany was a recognized nation in the community of nations, for better or for worse? What rights do they have now? Since most of the domestic losses suffered by Jews living in Germany were State-sponsored, there was no mechanism in place in other nations to deem the actions of the Nazi state illegal and the confiscated property subject to restitution. Therefore, if you lost your property in 1934 and if you survived all of the subsequent events provoked by the Nazis’ fury against the Jews and others, you would have to wait for at least 12 years to assert a claim of restitution.

If your missing object is located in the hands of a new owner, regardless of how that person or institution acquired the victims’ property, the laws governing property rights and title to “legally acquired” property prevent the plundered owner from obtaining restitution of his/her looted property without going through a complex tangle of legal and political maneuvers. In the absence of explicit mechanisms put in place by the national governments of nations where such looted objects have ended up, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover them. This state of affairs endures to this day and has been a continual source of frustration for victims of plunder with minimal accommodations made by governments and courts to facilitate the process of recovery.

If the looted object is declared part of the cultural patrimony of the nation from where it ended up, the recovery process involves a direct negotiation with that nation’s government, a very laborious discussion which usually ends in utter failure. What is the word of a dispossessed Jewish owner against that of an official who upholds the notion of cultural patrimony and inalienability of art objects located in State collections, whether those objects were looted during genocidal acts? Culpable countries hiding behind such imperialistic arguments are: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, to cite the worst, Eastern European nations, all of the nations that once formed the Soviet Union.

When source nations seek the return of their looted patrimony which usually consists of antiquities illegally extracted from archaeological sites or illegally removed from religious and other sacred edifices, the wait can last for an eternity; it can also be circumscribed to anywhere from a year to several decades if the aggrieved nation is willing to compromise, accept trade offs like offer commercial advantages to the withholding nation, or agree to symbolic returns with a promise never to come back and ask for anymore as in the case of South Korea and the shabby treatment it received from France over a set of priceless manuscripts.

Aggrieved source nations include but are not limited to Greece, Turkey, Italy, South Korea, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Mali.

In other words, we have not made much progress in the past several decades. As provenance continues to become optional in art market transactions and most nations do not encourage their cultural institutions to be more forthcoming in publicizing the history of the objects that are part of their “patrimony,” nothing short of a cultural revolution will sway them to change course and become, god forbid, ethical.

Rwanda: Art in a post-genocide society

by Marc Masurovsky

By all accounts, there is no reason why artistic activity should have even found a haven in a society where half of the minority Tutsi population was hacked, stabbed, impaled, shot, sexually assaulted, enslaved, raped and otherwise martyred by Hutu extremists more than 20 years ago.

Rwanda is a nation whose post-genocide population is afflicted by collective post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of the worst kind, something that is not cured by heavy doses of synthetic drugs which would serve as mere palliatives. As one cynical researcher observed who is very familiar with Rwanda, if you suffer from PTSD, Rwanda will make you feel like you are normal.

View of Kigali

If anything, the process of creating a work of art, an object of art, either two dimensional or three-dimensional, might be viewed more as a therapeutic exercise aimed at exorcising the demons of a genocidal enterprise anchored in neighborhood kinship ties.

And yet…Rwanda has emerged from its own version of hell on earth to become a society desperate to thrive and to show its best side to itself and the world.

Detail, Ivuka Arts Center, Kigali

One example of that miraculous turnabout are the artistic outputs produced largely by self-taught painters and sculptors. As some of these artists have indicated, at the very beginning of this creative process, there was no artistic activity to speak of in Rwanda. Nothing. Nada. But at the onset of the 21st century, several arts centers like Ivuka and then Inema emerged in Kigali from the aftershock of the genocide. They operated as havens of expression, free expression for those who desired it. Mostly, the children came, those who lost everything, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their relatives, their neighbors. With no one to turn to, some of these children found solace in the idea of daubing paint on a canvas and allowing their scarred minds to free up some of the light buried deep inside, that shimmer which contained their innocence and their identity as independent beings striving for a place in the world, a cruel one at that, who once played and imagined.

Ivuka Arts Studio, Kigali

Detail from a child's painting, Inema Art Center, Kigali

Group painting at Inema Art Center, Kigali

Bit by bit, canvas after canvas, these children have grown up feeling a bit less shackled to their past and looking forward to learn, discover and think about a future free of machetes, spears, and other sordid implements of torture, defacement, and death. Their palette has shifted from dark browns, greens and grey, to more vibrant colors, sometimes expressionist without knowing what that means.

Detail, Ivuka Arts Center, Kigali

Many of today's artists in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, the locus of Rwanda's art scene, have tapped their inner beings for inspiration and have not sought inspiration outside the borders of their nation.

Let's not forget the surviving Tutsi women of Rwanda who were enslaved sometimes for weeks on end, abused, tortured, raped, violated, and who somehow were able to make it out of the abyss in which they had been cast simply for being Tutsi (a number of Hutu women suffered equally because of their kinship ties to Tutsis).

Their recovery has been nothing short of unbelievable. But one has to credit a massive collective effort engineered by the leadership of post-1994 Rwanda to bring about stability and self-respect in all the communities that make up this small country surrounded by self-interested nations which have only profited from the turmoil exacerbated by the former colonial powers that controlled at one time or another Rwanda, namely Germany, Belgium, and France.

The surviving Tutsi women and their daughters are deeply scarred, in such a way that one can wonder if they can fully function. But Rwanda’s miracle is to have produced an environment in which they can find themselves again despite the pain of having to know that their torturers live not too far from them.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, let’s pay a special tribute to the women of Rwanda, to their resilience, to their internal beauty of mind and spirit, for having had the courage and strength to help keep alive and tightly woven the fabric of Rwandan civil society.

Your forced sale is not my forced sale—denial of restitution in Ghent, Belgium

Ghent
Source: Wikipedia

Ghent is a proud historical Flemish city in Belgium. It touts as one of its outstanding accomplishments to be the 7th most desirable city in the world according to “Lonely Planet.” It is a city where people can still meet people, according to Lieven Decaluwe, vice president of the “Collège des échevins” of the city of Ghent/ Gand and the échevin responsible for questions of culture, tourism and festivities. The “Collège des échevins” is the equivalent of a city council run by the city mayor [bourgmestre]. Each échevin is responsible for a particular sector of activity.

This proud city also touts an impressive museum of fine arts, the “Musée des Beaux-arts de Gand.” In it, one can find everything from Old Masters to modernists, including Expressionist painters like Oskar Kokoschka. It so happens that one painting by Kokoschka, “Portrait de Ludwig Adler,” acquired by the Museum in 1988 (or 1989 depending on which article you read) has been the subject of a claim for restitution by the heirs of the late German banker, Viktor von Klemperer, since early 2009, when the von Klemperer family’s attorney, Sabine Rudolph, notified the city council of Gand that the painting had been the subject of a forced sale in 1937 or 1938 in Nazi Germany and should be returned to its rightful owners. According to Sabine Rudolph, all transactions during that period were considered to be forced sales. She also declared that German law assumes that Jews were forced to sell their belongings during the Nazi era.

The “Collège des échevins de Gand” appointed a commission to investigate the von Klemperer claim. The head of the commission was the former chairperson of the « Commission d’étude et de la Commission de dédommagement de la communauté juive de Belgique », the main commission established by the Belgian government in 1997-1999 to assess the damage done to Jews living in Belgium during the German occupation and to articulate the foundations of a compensation law that was eventually passed in 2002. Interestingly enough, the Commission excluded thefts, misappropriations, and forced sales of cultural assets, from its mandate, arguing, strangely enough, that those assets had been transferred directly to Germany and should therefore not be taken into account.

One can therefore conclude that the former chairperson of the « Commission d’étude et de la Commission de dédommagement de la communauté juive de Belgique » was not competent to oversee such an inquiry and therefore the entire exercise conducted by the municipality of Ghent has been nothing short of a historical farce dressed up as an objective inquiry into a historical misdeed that occurred in another country whose policies wrecked Belgium and its Jewish population for close to five long years.

Predictably enough, the “Collège des Echevins de Gand”, speaking on behalf of the “Musée des beaux-arts de Gand," denied restitution to the heirs of the late German banker, Viktor von Klemperer, on the grounds that his painting by Oskar Kokoschka, “Portrait de Ludwig Adler,” had not been the subject of a forced sale in Nazi Germany at some point between 1937 and 1938, shortly before he fled to Africa with his family.

The reasons that justify such an inane ruling rested partly on an allegation that the late Viktor von Klemperer was interested in selling the work as early as 1937, and that his wife might not even have liked the painting in the first place. This is the first time that personal taste has been invoked as a factor in the assessment of a claim for restitution.

It is a sad day both for the Jews of Belgium, for the Belgian government (which may or may not exist), and for the international community, to see such provincialism and arrogance prevail in a petition for historical justice associated with acts of genocide and plunder.

The commission investigating the forced sale was incompetent and did not have the requisite skills and background to understand the scope, breadth, and complexity of the event that forced von Klemperer to shed his cultural assets in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps the Belgian authorities should ask themselves why they have one of the worst track records in Europe when it comes to the restitution of art stolen during the German occupation with the complicity and collaboration of its own citizens.

May 1945 and beyond

The Second World War is over in Europe and North Africa. The Third Reich no longer exists. The only active military front is in Asia where the Japanese Imperial Army continues to put up fierce resistance to American-led troops. That all comes to an end with the detonation of two atomic devices, one over Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki, in early August 1945.

60 million people are known to have died as a direct result of the Second World War. This figure includes six million Jewish men, women, and children exterminated in death camps, ghettos, forests, fields, marshes, and concentration camps. It also includes at least 5 million men, women, and children of other faiths decimated in concentration camps, forced labor, in villages and cities across Axis-occupied Europe. The remainder died in the crossfire between rival armies, as victims of reprisal killings, from hunger, disease, and exposure to the elements.

The victorious Allied powers set in motion policies to effect the repatriation of assets looted by the Axis to the countries from where they were forcibly removed. While laying down complex reparations formulae that leave no country satisfied, they also lay claims to assets owned by the Reich and its collaborators in countries often referred to as ‘neutral’, viz., Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and to a far lesser extent, Turkey, and Argentina.

Restitution is often confused with repatriation, but one thing is certain, restitution can only mean one thing: return of a stolen object to its rightful owner.

France and the Soviet Union argue for replacement policies—to replace objects stolen from them with objects of similar quality and value in the current possession of the defeated powers. The United States and Great Britain oppose such a move. While France continues to press for replacement into the early 1950s, the Soviet Union does not quibble over words and policies. It is busy removing untold numbers of items, equipment, and other goods from countries that the Red Army overran in its bid to defeat the Third Reich as partial payment for its losses—both infrastructural and human. One out of every three Soviet male between the ages of 17 and 45 is dead or unaccounted for at the end of the global conflict.

It is fair to say that 90 per cent of all those involved in direct fashion with the cultural plunder of Europe escaped severe punishment, with the notable exception of Alfred Rosenberg and a handful of his acolytes.  The rest faced mostly fines, escaped prosecution altogether, and few were tried and handed down light sentences. 

Every formerly occupied country in Europe busily enacts laws that restrict the ability of victims to recover items plundered by fellow citizens. Most egregious are the waivers granted to so-called third-party transactions: all individuals who were involved in brokering forced sales and illegal removals of property are granted the benefit of the doubt, lest it be explicitly proven that they knowingly handled items which had been misappropriated for racial and other reasons.  Worst of all: the main proponent of postwar restitution, namely the United States, walks away from the restitution process in the early 1950s, feeling that the job was 'well done', ignoring the plight of claimants who by then have become naturalized US citizens.

No one has done an accounting of the numbers of claimants who actually obtained restitution of lost items and assets.  Judging by the number of victims, their surviving next of kin, the figures can only be ridiculously low--in the single percentile digits.

Where are all the looted objects, aside from those which victorious armies recover by the truckloads in the aftermath of victory?

From East to West:

• items removed from Soviet territory, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, find their way into Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For instance, many cultural objects stolen in Poland are discovered in the French zone of Occupation in Germany, while Russian icons, books from the Ukraine and private collections from Latvia end up in various parts of Austria and Germany.  Although a percentage of those items are repatriated to the Soviet Union, the picture is unclear as to their numbers and the percentage that they represent of all items recovered by Allied forces.
• items from Yugoslavia enter Italy, Austria, and Switzerland.
• items from Italy go north to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as well as west to Spain and France (after August 1944).
• items from France, Belgium, Holland, travel to Italy, Spain, Germany, and as far as Austria and Poland, and in some cases even to German-occupied Ukraine where Belgian books looted by the ERR find a final resting place.
• items discovered in the various zones of occupation controlled by Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union in Germany and Austria will never be properly repatriated and/or restituted and, instead, are transferred to the territories of the occupying powers.

Meanwhile, the international art market continues to thrive unabated. Art dealers and museum officials, especially in the United States, press the US military to release unclaimed items and entrust them with their sale and safekeeping since their owners are more than likely dead.  Jewish relief organizations confuse recovery with rehabilitation and are quick to sell items that might be restitutable so that they can obtain quick cash, granted, to assist survivors.  However, a significant number of choice items end up in libraries and collections, in Europe, North America, and Palestine, sometimes at the expense of recovering Jewish communities in liberated Europe.

Plundered items infest bustling black markets across Europe; their sheer numbers make it impossible for local and Allied police and investigative agencies to intercept them. As a result, these items will slip through export restrictions and end up in collections as far away as Argentina.

The residual problem of World War II and Holocaust-related plunder is a global problem since, if half of what has just been put forth is correct, looted items are to be found everywhere, both in private and government hands. If we want to resolve this question in a way that is acceptable to all parties, knowing full well that full, 100 per cent restitution was--and will never be--possible, all countries involved must come to the table and carve out a solution which allows them once and for all to close the book on one of the worst chapters of human history. Failing that, all that we have accomplished is to inform the next generation that plunder is permissible and the passage of time allows the thieves to enjoy the fruits of their mischief without fear of accountability.