Is Switzerland changing the way it views Nazi looted art?

by Marc Masurovsky 

Here we are in the early days of 2022, looking back at 2021 and wondering if anything good came of it, notwithstanding the pandemic, the million plus deaths from COVID-19 alone, the repeated closures of public and private institutions, the inability to travel safely, the high-stakes gamble everyone of us faces when we go shopping, mingle in public places, take public transportation in order to escape from our confinement at home while we dodge the wily virus. It knows no borders, harbors no partisan bias and treats everyone equally without due regard to age, gender, occupation, faith and political affiliation.

What’s going on in Switzerland? 

In December 2021 alone, a number of developments have reshaped the restitution map in Switzerland as reported in the Swiss and international press. Two names have largely taken over center stage in the Nazi looted art story and the way it permeates life in Switzerland: Gurlitt and Bührle. The former has been ubiquitous since the transfer to the Kunstmuseum Bern of the estate of the late Cornelius Gurlitt who bequeathed his collection to the Bern Museum—the remnants that he had inherited from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. The estate consisted of more than 1400 works, mostly on paper, which Gurlitt, Sr., had amassed throughout the Nazi era and in the immediate postwar years (he died in 1956). Gurlitt, Jr., gradually dissipated its contents as his sole source of income with which he eased himself into old age.

Kunstmuseum Bern

Cornelius Gurlitt

Since 2014, the Kunstmuseum Bern has weathered international criticism over its acceptance of the Gurlitt estate. Could it have turned down the bequest? The Gurlitt collection, it must be said, has been a toxic affair from the get-go as Bern has had to learn to coexist with the indelible Nazi taint that accompanied the works. Its only way out was to take the bull by the horns and to make a conscious and very public attempt at researching the origins of each work—an exercise in due diligence, something we expect from any museum, large or small. Even more frightening was the possibility that tainted items had to be restituted, something that Swiss museums have been loath to do since the late 1940s, with few notable exceptions, using the stale but highly effective of “good faith” to justify the non-return of loot. 

Emil Georg Bührle

December 2021 has turned out to be a very busy month in the Swiss world of museums and art restitution. First off, a Social Democratic lawmaker, Jon Pult, introduced a parliamentary motion to establish an independent commission in Switzerland that would make recommendations on Nazi-era claims. A cross between the UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel and France’s CIVS with a smidgeon of Austria’s Provenance Research Commission. This motion was prompted (the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back) following the news that the Kunsthaus Zurich had agreed to put on display 203 works from the collection of Emil Georg Bührle, a Swiss arms manufacturer who owed his fortune to his wartime dealings with the Axis powers and who frolicked on the international looted art market, buying up choice pieces confiscated from Jewish dealers in Western Europe. 

Kunsthaus Zurich

Several days after the announcement of Pult’s motion, the Zurich museum garnered headlines which should have prompted its director to hit the schnapps bottle. The Bührle incident triggered an international storm of disapproval and at least one Swiss Jewish artist demanded that her works be removed from the museum. Once the winds subsided, the museum ordered a group of experts to look into the wartime history of the paintings in Bührle’s collection. The kind of effort that had already been conducted in part or in whole by numerous researchers over the past several decades, including the New York-based Commission for Art Recovery. Will their findings be shared with the Kunsthaus experts? We don’t know but we sure hope so. 

Before Xmas 2021, the Kunstmuseum Bern announced that it would part with 29 works from the Gurlitt collection with a view to returning them to the rightful owners. Will it actually restitute them? Or will the museum seek a “fair and just solution” in order to retain custody of the objects under contention? 

As we get used to the humdrum of 2022 which strikingly resembles the din of 2021, let’s hope that Bern and Zurich come to their senses and forge an irreversible path towards a more ethical treatment of their collections.

Washington Principle #3: A Critique

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled "20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future," it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]

Principle #3

III. Resources and personnel should be made available to facilitate the identification of all art that had been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.

“Resources and personnel”:

The only way to ensure that a principle is enacted properly is to allocate resources and personnel which are dedicated to ensuring its viability. In the case of “identification of all art”, the “art” in question is located in a myriad places, both public and private, accessible and inaccessible. Even if archives are open, someone has to do the research and be paid for it. If museums grant access to their records, someone has to be able to consult them and be paid for that task. If we ask art institutions to cover those costs, little will be done, that’s for certain. Hence, external sources of funding have to be made available in the form of grants, fellowships, project funds, to allow institutions to recruit the personnel needed to conduct relevant searches into relevant records so as to “identify all art”. The only country that has done so, and to a limited extent truth be told, is Germany. After Germany, we have Austria. And that’s about the extent of it, with scattered efforts to work on discrete projects with no immediate consequence on the ability to “identify all art that had been confiscated” and displaced by other means. The United States, case in point, has turned out to be a miserable failure in this department, its government providing neither resources nor personnel to make good on its own dicta stemming from the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets of December 1998.

But in order to “identify all art”, one must know what one is searching for. The widespread lack of understanding of the crime of plunder is staggering and impedes any large-scale at identifying the relevant objects that may fall under the category of “confiscated,” “dispossessed”, “sold under duress,” “looted”, “plundered,” etc.

In June 2011, we noted an inconsistency in language between Principles I and III: “Principle III embraces the notion that “all art” confiscated by the Nazis should be identified, as opposed to Principle I which just discusses “art.” Did the diplomats of the Washington Conference intend to maintain this inconsistency for any particular reason? Principle III is a massive failure.”

On a more positive note, we note that the Gurlitt exercise (since 2013) has forced the German government to reassess its provenance research funding priorities with a view to increasing funds allocated to German museums. A side effect of the Gurlitt exercise has been to compel the Swiss government to acknowledge that there has never been any systematic effort in Swiss museums to conduct research into their holdings. The Gurlitt collection’s presence at the Kunstmuseum of Bern is changing this dynamic as basic funds are being allocated for a limited study of Swiss institutions to survey their collections for any item falling under the rubric of “confiscated” or “displaced” during the 1933-1945 period. Of course, these objects would have been misappropriated in another country and then brought into Switzerland.

Likewise, an international conference recently convened in Jerusalem on October 4 renewed a call from Jewish groups worldwide to focus on provenance research as a way of identifying so-called “heirless” property.

And the regional provenance research project, TransCultAA, recently funded by the European Union, has shown the way to create historical research projects addressing the “translocation” of Jewish-owned cultural assets at the regional level, in this case the area flanked by Austria, Italy, and the Western Balkans.

For research to take place, it requires capital and people. It won’t happen without them. We’ve been twenty years for Principle #3 to be implemented on a systematic scale and it has not happened to date. The failure lies with the signatory governments to the Washington Conference of December 1998 who essentially made a deceitful commitment to provide such resources and personnel. Hence, Principle #3 is a failure.

Principle #3 should be rewritten and expanded as follows:

Resources and personnel “grants, fellowships, project funds and other financial allocation mechanism, shall be made available to facilitate the identification of all artistic, cultural and ritual objects confiscated, misappropriated, sold under duress and/or forced sales, subjected to other forms of illicit acts of dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945 and not subsequently restituted.

Recap of the Gurlitt case

by Marc Masurovsky

Two and a half years have elapsed since the Gurlitt case burst onto the international scene. Here is a recap as seen through the tinted glasses of plunderedart.

November 8, 2013

HARP petitioned the German government to release the complete inventory of all of the works of art found in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt.

January 19, 2014

The Gurlitt Task Force members are highlighted and the questions raised about its efficacy in the face of opacity from the German government to request for information about the contents of the Gurlitt collection. Emphasis is placed on the dealings of his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, as a privileged dealer and buyer for the Nazi government in the Reich and in occupied territories.

January 20, 2015

With Cornelius Gurlitt dead, progress on understanding the contents of the Cornelius Gurlitt collection eludes everyone. To add more spice to the already entangled saga of Cornelius Gurlitt, the world finds out that shortly before his death, he bequeathed his collection to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

January 29, 2015

Monika Gruetters, Germany’s new Minister of Culture, has sought to appease domestic and international critics about the apparent inability of the Gurlitt Task Force to make any significant progress in identifying looted art amongst the more than 1400 objects seized in Munich and Salzburg. She has pledged more funding for provenance research, announced a reorganization of agencies in Germany responsible for provenance research and documenting Nazi thefts of art objectsinto a new Center for Lost Art.

April 23, 2015

The apparent consistent stonewalling by the German government to seek a speedy resolution to the Gurlitt mess made us wonderwhether there was any genuine desire to invest the necessary resources to make of the Gurlitt case an example of how to address ethically and scientifically the complex nature of ideologically motivated thefts of property owned by the victims of Nazism.

August 23, 2015

Ori Soltes, president of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, reviewed one of the first English-language narratives to appear on the puzzle surrounding the unraveling of the Gurlitt case. This narrative, Hitler’s Art Thief, was penned by Susan Ronald.

January 25, 2016

With the merciful end brought to the less than satisfactory work of the Gurlitt task Force, a quick overview of the Task Force’s findings added even more confusion and perplexity to an already-opaque two year long research effort that resembled more an exercise conducted in the basement of the National Security Agency than a historical research effort aimed at shedding light on the activities of a very prolific Nazi-sponsored agent trained as an art historian and museum official, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

March 11, 2016

With the announced doubling of the research budget for the newly-formed Center for Lost Art, German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters sought to appease, once again, her critics, domestic and foreign, regarding the botched outcome of the now-defunct Gurlitt Task Force. She made a critical misstep by intimating that placing Jews on a German task force called theLimbach Commission would inject bias in its proceedings.

From the publicized discovery of the Cornelius Gurlitt art collection to the shuttering of the Gurlitt Task Force,  the German government has displayed a complicated dual face to its commitment to "deal with the past", its Nazi past, and to effect some measure of justice so that German society can move forward and address the complex crimes associated with thefts and misappropriations of property, especially cultural property. On the one hand, Germany has done a marvelous job addressing the horrors that its citizens perpetrated against Jews and other groups who were full-fledged members of German civil society until they were excluded from it.  German youth are some of the most advanced in the world, outpacing American and Israeli Jewish students, in their mastery and understanding of the events that shook their country and the conscience of the world between 1933 and 1945.  On the other hand, the German government has been unable and/or unwilling to put in place an efficient mechanism by which to identify, investigate, and process humanely, ethically, and legally, instances where looted cultural assets are found in German collections, private and/or public.  The Gurlitt Task Force is the perfect example of this systemic dysfunction and reminds us that it's easier to 'deal with the Holocaust' than with its details, exemplified by looted artistic objects once owned by Jews and which are currently displayed and traded on German territory amongst German citizens, businesses and institutions.

Much work still needs to be done.

Monika Gruetters’ “Jewish problem”

by Marc Masurovsky

On March 3, 2016, the New York Times published an article signed by correspondent Alison Smale which confirmed that the Gurlitt Task Force’s work had been transferred to the “Center for Lost Art” in Magdeburg, Germany, as part of a general overhaul of the German government’s agencies specialized in issues pertaining to looted art. Thanks to Minister Gruetters, this Center has received a badly-needed injection of funds which doubled its previous budget to reach six million euros, renewing her commitment to ensure that research would continue into the provenance of the Gurlitt collection's 1400 objects.

Monika Gruetters

Culture Minister Gruetters has been sharply taken to task by domestic and international critics for the slowness of the research into the possibility that works tainted by anti-Jewish persecution and theft during the Nazi years might be part of the now-infamous Gurlitt collection, “discovered” in 2012 and made public in the fall of 2013. As of now, five paintings are known to have been linked to a victim of Nazi plunder. There are more than 1400 works in the Gurlitt hoard.

Our problem today has to do with a comment that Minister Gruetters made in response to suggestions by Germany’s Jewish community that a member of that community be appointed to the so-called Limbach commission which hears claims for restitution of looted art present in German cultural institutions. The commission’s recommendations are non-binding and, so far, have been mostly hostile to claimants who, in almost every instance, live outside of Germany and are of Jewish descent.

Hence, the Limbach Commission’s objectivity and interest in furthering justice 70 years after the demise of the Third Reich, have been repeatedly called into question. This state of affairs has not prevented Minister Gruetters from pointing out that the presence of a “Jewish figure” at the Limbach Commission would be ill-advised because “that person would be the only voice who would be prejudiced.”

The seating of a member of the Jewish community of Germany on the Limbach Commission would be viewed as injecting bias into the commission’s proceedings. Ms. Gruetters’ comment is provocative for a number of reasons:

Jutta Limbach

1/ a Jewish member of the commission would automatically be prejudiced. In what direction, pray tell? For or against the claimant? As if the quality of being Jewish signified a taint on one’s capacity to be objective and impartial.

2/ the minister’s comment subsumes that Jews favor restitution and have never been known to oppose restitution.

3/ no one has questioned the prejudice or bias of the non-Jewish members of the Limbach Commission. Does the fact that the Limbach commission’s non-Jewish makeup ensure objectivity and impartiality in the proceedings to assess the merit of a claim put forth by a Jewish claimant, whose family once resided in Germany? If anything, ten years of proceedings at the Limbach Commission could make us wonder if, in fact, the commission’s good judgment is tainted, principally, because there is no “outside” voice amongst its members. In short, it behaves as an echo chamber of individuals reluctant to acknowledge the vicissitudes of history when it comes to cultural plunder on its territory, once ruled by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

In passing, the presence (albeit in a minority) of members of the Jewish faith on the Gurlitt Task Force did not appear to have a negative impact on the work of that commission. If anything, those minority voices acted as foils to the “objective” wisdom dispensed by its “non-Jewish” members.

Ms. Gruetters’ tasteless comment reflects a longstanding problem inherent to postwar discussions about the Holocaust, reparations, restitution, and justice. The Jewish voice is still viewed as a voice containing implicit bias in its essence, which denies that voice the capacity to infuse critical thinking in its assessment of the consequences of genocide on individual members of the Jewish community and on the merit of claims for reparations and/or restitution.

Ms. Gruetters should understand that Jews do not speak in one single, unified, public voice on matters pertaining to restitution and reparations. In fact, that discussion is rife with dissenting opinions as one is likely to find among leaders and senior officials of Jewish organizations and Holocaust memorials voices that are indifferent or in fact hostile to restitution, especially in the cultural field. There are notable exceptions, as with the Commission for Art Recovery and the Claims Conference.

It would behoove Ms. Gruetters and other German officials, now and henceforth, to view Jewish individuals as critical thinkers rather than puppets who could not reason because of their appurtenance to their faith. If anything, debate is healthy especially among bureaucrats. It helps shake off the dust and inject fresh blood and new thoughts into an otherwise stilted conversation weighed down by the burdens of law and history, but apparently not sufficiently stirred with sprinkles of ethics and morality.

The Gurlitt Task Force "fact sheet"

by Marc Masurovsky

The Gurlitt Task Force made a three-page fact sheet available to the general public dated 12 January 2016.

Since the discovery of Cornelius Gurlitt’s private collection in November 2012, too much ink has been spilled over the origins, content and disposition of this collection, which, due to its association with Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, has borne the mark of Cain for his association with the Nazi regime and for having profited therefrom. Hildebrand Gurlitt died in an auto accident in 1956. What he left to his heirs, one of whom was Cornelius Gurlitt, we do not know. We are unaware, at least we in the general public, of the total number of art objects that were in Hildebrand Gurlitt’s possession at time of death. We do not know how many objects his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, sold on the international art market, how many he loaned for exhibitions, how many he donated, how many he gave away, how many he swapped for other objects.

All we know is what we have been told by the German authorities: that there were 1256 works of art which comprised the Cornelius Gurlitt collection. 

The Task Force set about to ascertain how many of these objects had an explicit provenance which could connect it to an act of spoliation, to a theft or misappropriation directed or inspired by the Nazi regime against its owner.

After two years of work and the employment of over 20 contractual researchers on renewable short-term contracts, the Task Force has identified only 11 works as being explicitly the product of Nazi confiscations and thefts, some of which have been returned to their rightful owners, after laborious and unnecessarily complicated negotiations.

Eleven?

499 Gurlitt-owned works are listed on the lostart.de database, proof apparently that there is still a question about their ownership histories.

Let’s look at the other figures:

507 works were not considered to be tainted as Nazi loot, of which 231 works were de-accessioned from German public museums in the 1930s. Did the Task Force even bother to research their provenances once their link to German public institutions was clearly established? What if they were on loan to those institutions prior to being purged for being “degenerate”? Will we ever know?

Isn’t it a fact that the American government upheld during its occupation of a defeated Germany the Nazi de-accessioning law as a legitimate act by the Nazi Government to protect the “values” of German society? Sounds like the forerunner of our modern-day “family values” movement. The questions surrounding that politically motivated act by the American government in the immediate postwar years should be discussed in the open. One wonders if the decision to uphold this Nazi attack against culture was not motivated more by a fear of provoking a wholesale purge of American collections which had been stocked in part by donations from private collectors and dealers who had bought large quantities of “degenerate” works on the international market at fire sale prices and justified their purchases as “rescues”. One should not be shy to express these thoughts because one’s “rescue” is another’s act of complicity with acts of plunder associated with genocidal undertakings. Indeed, had the American government declared the de-acccesion law illegal, the question of repatriating to the reborn Germany all works sold to non-German collectors--private and institutional-would have had to be dealt with in one fashion or another. It never was.

We need to return to Square One here. 

We don’t really know how the Gurlitt Task Force has defined “Nazi loot.” Does it include works that were subject to “internal plunder” during the 1930s which were acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt at auctions at which objects were sold as a direct result of racial and political persecutions against the owners of those works, forced to sell in order to garner some income to be used to flee Germany? Did the Gurlitt Task Force consider as plundered objects confiscated by Nazi collaborators operating in German-occupied territories?

We don’t know.

We don’t even know how many of the works in Cornelius Gurlitt’s collection were acquired by him on the international art market without due regard for provenance.

We don’t know anything about the methodology used by the Task Force, the archives that were consulted, how far and deep the research was conducted.  Were private archives consulted? How many art historians were consulted as experts on specific artists? How did one determine that an object was subject to Nazi theft besides the obvious description of a Gurlitt object on inventories drawn up by agents of the Nazi government as confiscated?

We might hope that some or all of these questions have been answered in the full report of the Task Force, which was released in German, several hours before the German government made a public announcement of its release, thus giving no time even for Task Force members to review the report.

None of this sounds good. If this is the best that the German government can do under the klieg lights of international opinion, its every moves analyzed and scrutinized for the past two years, we should not hope for German authorities and their agents in museums and cultural circles to practice what we consider to be “transparency”, an absence of “opacity.”

Murkiness has characterized the Gurlitt process since the investigation into Cornelius Gurlitt was initially announced in late 2012. It appears to be as thick as odorous sludge.

Enclosed is the first page of the Gurlitt Task Force “fact sheet.”

Fact sheet

Results on Munich Stock of Artworks

1258 artworks: Total number of works Composed of:

          1224 artworks: Number of seized artworks 


          34 artworks: Finds from Cornelius Gurlitt’s estate which were entrusted to the Taskforce for 
provenance research after Cornelius Gurlitt’s passing in August/September 2013 


Thereof: 


507 artworks: Number of works that were found not to be Nazi-looted

Results:


o 231: Works which were dislocated from German museums by the “Degenerate Art” operation, but which had been acquired by each respective museum already before the Nazi regime came into power in 1933 and which were not on loan from private individuals

o 276: Works which could be attributed to the Gurlitt family stock because they either were created after 1945, or were made by members of the Gurlitt family, or could be attributed on the basis of personal dedications

499 artworks: Posted on the Lost Art online database since suspicions had not yet been ruled out that they may be Nazi-looted art

Results:


o 11 artworks: work identity assured; provenance established (4 works: Nazi-looting confirmed; 2 works: strong suspicion of Nazi-looting after establishing their provenance; 5 works: initial suspicion of Nazi-looting ruled out)


o 117 artworks: work identity assured; provenance indications on possible Nazi-looting; very specific indications in case of 25 artworks


o 27 artworks: work identity assured; due to provenance indications Nazi-looting seems unlikely


o 152 artworks: work identity assured; low provenance indications

o 143 artworks: work identity assured; no provenance indications


o 49 artworks:work identity not assured; noprovenance indications

252 artworks: Artworks (mainly from the “Degenerate Art” operation) for which further research is necessary before they can be categorized

Hitler's Art Thief: A Review of Susan Ronald's Book on Hildebrand Gurlitt and the Looting of Europe's Treasures (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015)

by Ori Z Soltes

This book may not be for everyone: if all you are interested in is the number of artworks that surfaced out of the anonymity of Cornelius Gurlitt's collections back in 2013, then you might as well skip it and google a few newspaper articles instead. But if you keep wondering not only how he ended up with such a cache (okay, from his father), and, more to the point, how his father, Hildebrand, acquired them and managed to pass them onto his son, beyond the newspaper references to Hildebrand as an art buyer--or, rather, art plunderer--on behalf of Hitler, then this book is required reading.

Anybody who spends time studying the Holocaust is aware of how fraught with contradiction its architects were--just think of how neither Hitler nor any of his inner circle conformed to the "Aryan" physical description that he spent so many years championing; that the tall, muscular blond super-race of Uebermenschen whom he intended to lead forward into a thousand-year-long future would by definition have excluded Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Bormann and Hitler himself. And consider the millions who cheered these fine fellows on without apparently noticing the contradiction.

Cornelius Gurlitt in his younger years

Susan Ronald's book explores various elements of this multi-leveled irony, particularly as it pertained to the lust for art and the means of acquiring it. She offers the larger contexts of both the shaping of the Nazi period in and beyond Germany and where the Gurlitt family fit into and outside those contexts. Hildebrand's father, Cornelius, was a fairly prominent art historian (a consummate specialist in Baroque art and architecture) who loved but was disappointed in Hildebrand. For the son opted, in the Age of Hitler, to abandon the Ivory Tower in its theoretical purity for the intrinsic venality of the commercial world of galleries and art dealers.

Susan Ronald

Given that this was the Age of Hitler, however, Hildebrand should not only have fallen short of the enormous success he came to enjoy. He and his family should probably have ended up on a freight train to the East rather than his taking trains and planes all over the East and West to acquire art. For one of his grandparents was a Jew. making him a 25% mischling--certainly enough to qualify for a one-way ticket to Auschwitz. And he did have quite a bevy of enemies and competitors, some in very high places. But he had just the right friends and patrons in high places to convince the Fuehrer of his absolute value as an instrument to acquire art for the regime. Far from being persecuted, he prospered.

As Hitler's premier art acquirer, he ingathered not only the sort of art that could go into the expansive museum planned for Linz, Austria, Hitler's virtual home town, but art for Goebbels and Goering and the others (including art that Hitler would not have approved, considering it degenerate), and art for lesser Nazis, and art that, albeit unacceptable to Nazi taste, could be traded, bartered, or sold either to acquire proper art or for armaments and other supplies needed for a voracious Reich. Hildebrand Gurlitt seemed to have a unique talent for finding and acquiring the best among the works of art that could serve one or more of these purposes.

One could almost--almost--read this book and forget that the context of the central events is the double matrix of World War II and the Holocaust; that millions of people were being slaughtered across Europe in foxholes and gas chambers during the financial-aesthetic intrigues about which we are reading. Ms. Ronald does not expend undo energy to focus on the horrors going on all around Hildebrand and his little world within a world on fire. But that is part of her point: he operates as if ensconced in an Iron (not Ivory!) Tower that shields him and his family from that fire. And all of those with whom he is engaged are so singularly obsessed with the art that they are pushing across diverse borders while similarly protected, that they neither think about gas chambers nor about the fate of those from whose collections they are swallowing up. The reader is left to ponder the quiet horror of such deafness and blindness.

Often Ms Ronald's references to aspects of the key figures' personalities and activities fall short of drawing a definitive conclusion regarding their lack or absence of a conscience: she provides enough information for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about these characters without forcing those conclusions upon us. She tells the story adeptly and with careful attention to just the right amount of detail to make her points without burying the reader. But she does not allow us to escape without conclusions nipping at the heels of our minds.

This is necessary to her intentions as a biographer who, in embedding the story of her key character within the larger and particularized history in which his life and death played out, has a still larger goal: to offer this story as a tale that reflects, in the end, on the larger question of human beings and what we are and what we are willing to do--often to each other--to achieve our ends. After all, as we learn, Hitler played off most of the key figures in his inner circle against each other; and nearly all of them, while they were murdering and/or stealing every possible material possession from their victims were also, where they could, defrauding each other--and cheating Hitler whenever it was safe to do so.

What makes this book so important is not only the parts of the story that offer such an incisive psychological portrait of Hildebrand Gurlitt and of all of those around him engaged in the art theft process in which he was engaged. It is an important reminder to those of us involved in the restitution struggle and an eye-opener for those who are not, that the web of deceit, venality, greed, lack of empathy for fellow human beings was far-flung across the human landscape.

Just as the Nazis could not have succeeded in annihilating so many millions of Jews and others without the willing and often enthusiastic cooperation of Frenchmen, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians (to name a few groups)--and not just Germans and Austrians--the movement into the Reich of millions upon millions of works of art and other property from all over Europe would not have been possible without the cooperation of an army of individuals from the art world.

Ms. Ronald pushes us to recognize how banal, indeed, evil can be. How those who presume to be the champions of civilization because they protect its artifacts--art historians, museum curators and directors, gallerists, art dealers and the like--can be and emphatically were the prisoners of their own greed again and again. (So much for the purity of the Ivory Tower). There are no national borders for this ugly side of human nature--not even a vast Atlantic Ocean can separate good from evil. For all of those works slated for trade and barter or exchange for cash rather than for hoarding obviously required and found willing middlemen in "neutral" countries like Spain, Portugal, Sweden and above all, Switzerland, and hungry outlets in the North and South American art markets.

We are still fighting battles for works plundered by Gurlitt and his associates that ended up in the American art world, where no questions of provenance were asked as eager buyers acquired paintings stolen from those slated for annihilation. And the same auction houses in Paris (such as Drouot) that offered their services during and right after the war to help thieves like Gurlitt abscond with property plundered from Jewish victims are still offering their services today to thieves eager to cash in on the sacred cultural and spiritual artifacts of the Hopi and Acoma tribal communities.

The miscues at the end of WWII, from the all-too-brief amount of time available to focus on Gurlitt and his cohorts to the lack of art awareness possessed by those who did interrogate these clean-handed allies of history's most devoted mass-murderers are the subject of Ms Ronald's last chapters. We walk away understanding, if we did not before, how the swiftly-arriving Cold War helped undercut the time and energy needed for more thorough investigations, while gritting our teeth at all of those who walked away, scot-free--and with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art still within their possession (Gurlitt was one of the most important of these, at least given recent events).

We walk away with many questions. We wonder why it took the Germans so long after the almost accidental discovery of Cornelius Gurlitt's hidden collections to begin to let the world know about them. And why the process of distinguishing what was plundered from what not has been wrapped in veils, and when the process will reasonably be finished. And how it is that a substantial group of Gurlitt's holdings ended up in a late will destined for the Bern Museum. And how the museum can claim to do the necessa1ry provenance research with such a small staff, so quickly.

We walk away wondering, as Ms Ronald does, how much is still hidden in how many vaults in how many places, waiting to be found. With Cornelius Gurlitt's death a little over a year ago, we may never know exactly how much is still gathered here or there from what his father managed to steal for himself while he was stealing for Hitler and others. And what of works plundered and perhaps hidden by the likes of Moeller and Voss? This book is the proof that, just when you thought the last word had been written on the Holocaust, in its profound self-contradictory ineffability, there are more awaiting the pen.

Kafka meets Gurlitt

by Marc Masurovsky

It’s fair to say that, ever since the revelation of the existence of the Cornelius Gurlitt collection in November 2013, the German federal authorities, the Bavarian authorities, the police, local prosecutors, cultural institutions in Munich and Berlin, and eventually, members of the “concerned” international community on matters of restitution of art objects looted between 1933 and 1945---let's not forget the role of the press, both German and “foreign” and the newest kid on the block, the Kunstmuseum in Bern—all of these elements thrown into a gigantic bucket have produced nothing short of a Kafkaesque exercise which has not exactly yielded as much as one would have hoped for, namely "transparency" or less opacity, honesty, justice, and, more importantly, tangible research findings.

What was supposed to have been a straightforward process involving research into the histories of the Gurlitt objects, has turned into a severe entanglement of conflicting interests, inept handling of the public and the research process itself, bureaucratic indifference and—some have said—hostility toward those the families seeking restitution of their property currently in the Gurlitt collection.

As of today, there are at least three active claims that are awaiting the inevitable outcome—the physical return of the paintings: the “Seated Woman” by Henri Matisse, “Two Riders on a Beach” by Max Liebermann, and the 'View of the Pont-Neuf," by Camille Pissarro.

Although all parties involved in these delicate negotiations have apparently sensed that the end of the process is near, a new layer of incomprehensible procedural complication has delayed the return of these paintings to their rightful owners.

Indeed, in a pattern that closely resembles past tactics used by the French government to hamper the claims process and make it horribly difficult for claimants to gain access to their own documents sitting in government archives, it appears that every living Gurlitt relative must sign off on the release of the three paintings to their rightful owners.

If you didn’t tear your hair out by now, please feel free to do so.

It would be wise and humane on the part of the German government to intercede, fast-track this already laborious process and return the paintings without further ado. Otherwise more scorn and contempt will be heaped onto their heads.

Unfortunately, the world is a complex place in which to live and co-exist. We do have long memories, which continue to be stirred up in great part by the shadow of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, the Second World War and their legacies on the postwar world. Even though Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars to individuals and nations for the calamities that the Reich wrought on the people of Europe, nothing justifies the present state of circumstances.

We have to ask:

What does it take to return three paintings to their rightful owners for which the historical evidence is overwhelming in favor of the claimants?