Walther Bernt, authenticator of looted paintings

"Merry company making music," by Jost van Geel

by Claudia Hofstee

Many art historians who were caught up in the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust threw their lot with the Nazis only to turn their coats and cooperate with the victorious Allies after 1945, providing them with the same skills and expertise that they had to their Nazi overseers. One of them was Walther Bernt who was active in Czechoslovakia and Germany.

On 30 January, 1976, the German art historian Walther Bernt (1900-1980) produced a certificate of authenticity for a painting by Joost van Geel, Merry company making Music, which the Cologne-based Lempertz auction house is scheduled to sell on 19 November 2022 (lot no. 1569). This painting was stolen from the collection of the late Adolphe Schloss and has not been restituted to his heirs. Bernt was familiar with the Schloss Collection­–one of the best-known collections of Old Masters in Western Europe at the time. His failure to report the existence of this unrestituted painting to the French authorities illustrates his complicity in the post-1945 dispersal of Nazi looted art. He became the “go-to guy” for these certificates and because of his reputation in the art world, nobody questioned the provenance of the works he authenticated. Who was Walther Bernt?

Walther Bernt is famous for authoring a four-volume monograph entitled “17th century Dutch painters” (Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts (1948-1962)”. He and his wife Ellen (1913-2002) became international experts on 17th century Dutch and Flemish painters. However, a dark shadow hangs over Bernt’s legacy. Born in Krumau (Český Krumlov, Czechoslovakia), he became an art consultant and dealer in the 1930s and from at least 1937 he worked as an editor of auction catalogs. He advised the prominent Jewish industrialist Frank Petschek of Aussig for whom he acquired a number of works of art. After the German takeover of Czechoslovakia and the imposition of a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Bernt served as an appraiser for the Gestapo in Prague for art collections confiscated from Czech Jews before they were sent to death camps. Bernt also offered his services to Hans Posse (1879-1942) in October 1940 as he was building up a massive art collection to be housed in Hitler's Führermuseum.

Not long after, Bernt turned up as a cataloguer for the Nazi art dealer Hans W. Lange (1904-1945) at Alois Miedl's (1903-1970) Berlin auction on 3-4 December 1940 which was selling works of art seized from the Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker (1897-1940). Bernt continued to advise private collectors like Hans-Werner Habig (1921-1954) from Oelde for whom he bought a painting by Joost de Momper, Stretch landscape with corn crop. [the painting now hangs at the Museum Abtei Liesborn des Kreises Warendorf (Germany) and is listed on the German Lost Art Database. The painting was previously in a private collection in Aussig in 1938.] 

After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, Bernt collaborated with Allied officials by identifying looted works of art recovered by Allied forces. Although he did not disclose his wartime involvement in looting activities, postwar documents suggest that the Allied forces had an inkling of Bernt’s work with the Gestapo in Prague. The Bernt family lived in Munich where he produced numerous certificates of authenticity for art dealers and auction houses until his death in 1980, after which his widow Ellen continued his work. As looted art flooded the postwar art market, many experts and dealers issued certificates to manufacture or hide provenance information, such as removing labels from the backs of paintings. The certificate conveyed a certain sense of legality and value to the works. Anyone looking closely at the certificates provided by Walther Bernt can see that oftentimes they do not mention any provenance and mask the dubious origin of the works.

Führerbau, Munich, site of theft of van Geel painting, 1945

During WWII, the Nazis valued art historians and used their services to legitimize their art seizures and appraise them. André Schoeller (1879-1955) is a good example of this; he was an art dealer and appraiser for Hôtel Drouot, he appraised confiscated paintings for the ERR in Paris and sold pictures to several German museums and worked closely with Nazi dealers (e.g., Hildebrand Gurlitt, 1895-1956). Besides the connoisseurship, art historians’ knowledge of collectors and their collections made it possible for Nazis to acquire many artworks. Some of the better-known art historians who were involved with the Nazis during the war were Max. J. Friendländer (1867-1958), Vitale Bloch (1900-1975) and Eduard Plietzsch (1886-1961). Like Bernt, many of these art historians hardly suffered any consequences for their wartime collaboration with Nazi officials.

More research is required about Bernt and his post-war activities and his network. Evidence can in all probability be found at the “Walther and Ellen Bernt collection”, which contains (exhibition) catalogs, card catalogs, and photographs of works of art (published and unpublished). Who knows what else we will find?

A note about the author

Claudia Hofstee MA, studied art history and graduated from Utrecht University in 2018. Specialized in 16th- and 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings. Worked as a provenance researcher for the JDCRP: The Pilot Project-The Fate of the Adolphe Schloss Collection. Working currently as an independent provenance researcher for the Mauritshuis in The Hague and is working on a collection catalogue for a private collection.

Hans Posse

Alois Miedl

Printed and Digital Sources:

www.fold3.com: RG 260 M1946 roll 10, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 121, NARA; RG 260 M149 roll 5, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 49, NARA; RG 260 M1947 roll 49, NARA; RG 260 M1946 roll 135.

Bernt, Walther. Die Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, 3 vol. Munich, 1948-1962.

Flick, Caroline. Verwertungskampagne. Beobachtungen zur niederländischen Kunsthandlung Goudstikker-Miedl, Verwertungskampagne (March 2022).
https://carolineflick.de/publikationen/verwertungskampagne.pdf

Führmeister, Christian and Hopp, Meike. Rethinking Provenance Research, Getty Research Journal, vol. 11, issue 1 (2019), pp. 213-231.

Oosterlinck, Kim. Gustave Cramer, Max. J. Friedländer, and the value of Expertise in the Arts, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, Vol. 3 Nr. 1 (2022), pp. 19-56.

https://www.archivportal-d.de/item/ZO3W5LFDX74LDMHJIQONJI2ARWNP5ZYZ?isThumbnailFiltered=false&rows=20&offset=0&viewType=list&hitNumber=8

https://www.archivportal-d.de/item/JH4TDJ2XWWLXFJ5VB6NIJISZWAJQRTSV?isThumbnailFiltered=false&rows=20&offset=0&viewType=list&hitNumber=3

https://editionhansposse.gnm.de/wisski/navigate/9165/view

Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE), London, UK

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) Foundation, Berlin, Germany

Digital art market and art history sources

Auction.fr
Bonham's, London, UK
Christie's, Inc.

Dorotheum, Vienna, Austria
Invaluable, Inc.
Koller Auction House, Zurich, Switzerland

Lempertz, Köln, Germany
Neumeister, Munich, Germany

Open Art Data
RKD, Den Haag, Nederland

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.

Silences that are Hardly Golden

by Ori Z Soltes

edited by Marc Masurovsky

With the untimely passing of Elie Wiesel, my mind wanders back to issues that, over the years, I discussed with him, and things that I wrote about him. A consistent subject of both processes was the kind of responsibility Jews have to make the world a better, more justice-ridden place—in general, given the rabbinic and particularly Lurianic mystical imperative of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), and in particular given what we as a group endured during the Holocaust. I confess that I confessed to him my disappointments at times in the failure of the Israeli or American Jewish communities to do this or that where they might have responded more positively or aggressively to a given situation. 

In one conversation with Mr. Wiesel I mused over what it is that too often prevented Jews from doing what I thought was the right thing. On the other hand, in one article that I was asked to write on “Who Speaks for the Jews?”—in which one of the figures I discussed was Elie Wiesel—the assertion that I offered was that there is nobody, per se, who plays that role in the Jewish world—there is no Pope or universally embraced political leader. One of the things that has historically prevented Jews from engaging in religious or political wars with each other on anything approaching the scale of the Crusades or the age of Religious Wars in Europe was the widespread diaspora—a thirteenth-century Jew in Germany would have been unlikely to know much about the gastronomy on Passover of Jews in Morocco, and therefore to have objected to it, much less spilled blood over it.

We remain a fractious community of communities today. Depending upon whom you ask and his/her spiritual and/or political affiliations, a given Jew may see his rabbi or his rebbe or the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) or the American Jewish Congress (AJC) —or a charismatic speaker, writer and Nobel Prize winner like Elie Wiesel—as the most appropriate figure to whom to turn for guidance regarding how to think, speak and act as a Jew. Non-Jews might think it’s the President of B’nai B’rith where few Jews are likely to think so. So it would be a surprise if we all agreed on what constitutes the “right thing” in a given situation.

There is some irony that one of Elie Wiesel’s first divergences, (following his memoir, Night), from writing novels, was his work—a personal journalistic reportage—regarding the plight of Soviet Jewry, called “The Jews of Silence.” Published in 1966, it was one of those important literary sources for inspiring Jews in America to speak up and speak out, because their oppressed co-religionists in the USSR could not. American Jews have not always been afraid to speak up, it seems.

The questions of contemporary Jewish silence in the face of injustice reminds me of another signal instance, more than fifteen years ago, when the same queries might be proffered. I refer to the attempt by the then District Attorney of Manhattan, Robert Morgenthau, to hold back two Egon Schiele paintings—“Dead City III” and “Portrait of Wally”—that had been on display at MOMA as part of a loan exhibition from the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Morgenthau sought to keep them from immediately heading back out of New York with the rest of the collection when the exhibit ended so that the claims put in by two Jewish families that these two paintings had been plundered from them by the Nazis—and that Dr. Kurt Leopold had acquired them with full knowledge of that fact—could be explored and adjudicated.

The museum community was up in arms: amicus briefs, both formal and informal flew fast and furiously. The museums challenged the validity of government interference in cultural matters. They argued the threat that the economic base of New York City would be deleteriously affected by this: that base, the assertion went, was heavily dependent on culture, specifically large-scale tourist visitation to New York’s art museums, and if the government was successful at holding back these two works, museums across the world would cease and desist from lending objects to New York museums, causing a dynamic shrinkage in loan exhibition quantity and quality, and thus of museum visitation and thus of the New York City economy.

All the museums joined this doleful chorus. My colleagues, Willi Korte and Marc Masurovsky and I, who had joined together to create the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) in September 1997, were on the other side of the fence. Willi had done and continued to do an enormous amount of research to validate the two families’ claims. Marc and I met with Robert Morgenthau to explain it—and to argue that the very assertion of the museum community was the proof of its fallaciousness: that art is big business, and that, unless one is pretty certain that one’s painting or sculpture is an ill-gotten good, one will not to hesitate to lend it to the Met or MOMA or the Guggenheim, knowing that art that has been on display in such places will exponentially increase in value.

All of the museums joined the chorus, including, of course, the doyenne of Jewish museums, the Jewish Museum of New York. Moreover, nobody among the “leadership” of the New York Jewish cultural and political communities spoke up on behalf of the claimants. The WJC really couldn’t, since its then vice-president—who in establishing the Committee on Art Recovery, announced that they would be “taking paintings off museum walls,” and might have been expected to speak up but could not—was the vice-president of MOMA’s Board and had put half a million of his own dollars into the project of bringing the Leopold Museum exhibition to MOMA. His quadruple conflict of interest—his role at MOMA vs his role at CAR vs his role in the WJC vs his earlier ambassadorship to Austria, shortened by the Austrians’ objections to his purchasing and carrying away the likes of Schiele paintings that they considered part of the Austrian patrimony, by diplomatic pouch—certainly explains his silence.

But why the Jewish Museum? What of the rest of the Jewish world? It was clear that, having spent so many decades trying to define itself as both a museum of Jewish history and culture and of art, and closer than ever since the 1960s to being accepted as part of the art museum world without alienating the Jewish world (in the 1960s it had managed the first but not the second), the Jewish Museum did not want to oppose that art world and re-isolate itself—two paintings and two Jewish family claimants seemed a small price to pay for amicus brief acquiescence. (I am not even going to raise the question of provenance in the museum’s own collections).

And the Jewish community in general?

A pundit well over a century once observed—as Emancipation was gradually breaking down ghetto walls throughout Western and Central Europe and Jews found themselves more welcome into the mainstream of culture, socio-economics and even, almost, politics, between 1780 or so and World War I—that “you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

He meant the extreme care with which a Jew feels he must operate, in words and actions, not because a riot might sweep through the now-gone ghetto, but because full acceptance into the larger community and all of the advantages of being mainstream might be denied or retracted. Is that what the Jewish “leaders” of New York City were and still are afraid of, in an America whose principles of eschewing anti-Christian sentiment have always been under assault from some quarters? Where Jews could not run for political office in some places (the state of New Hampshire) until late into the nineteenth century? Are we still faced with fear of what the non-Jews will think about us—or has it resurfaced after a period, in the 1960s and 1970s when Jews marched in Selma, Alabama on behalf of Blacks and marched in New York City on behalf of Soviet Jews?

The question is not who speaks for the Jews these days, but how many and which Jews speak up when the situation is potentially awkward but when silence is acquiescence to the miscarriage of justice. We have justifiably become fond of pointing out—it was one of Elie Wiesel’s important contributions to our thinking about the Holocaust, and the specific subject of his third novel, The Town Beyond the Wall—that silent acquiescence is a form of passive collaboration. There is a particular irony when this issue falls into the context of Nazi-plundered art, when one considers the disturbing datum that Jewish dealers like Georges Wildenstein were often more than willing to see harm done to other Jewish dealers, like Paul Rosenberg, if it served art-dealing business needs—or that perhaps the key dealer on behalf of Hitler, Hildebrandt Gurlitt, was half-Jewish.

If the Jewish role in history and art history is a complex one, and if the role of art within the context of the Holocaust was complex (another long story for another time), then the failure of Jews to speak now, so many decades later, in too many contexts where the matter of restituting Nazi-plundered art to victims’ heirs is also complex, perhaps. Or perhaps simple: fear. Whatever the reasons, that failure would have rabbis like Isaac Luria—and no doubt Elie Wiesel—rolling in their graves.

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.

The Gurlitt Affair: A canary in the coal mine?

by Ori Z Soltes

Surrounded by all kinds of interesting and problematic details, there are three large issues that stand out in the now-notorious case of Cornelius Gurlitt and his extraordinary hoard of paintings. One is that, having stumbled on this cache, between September, 2010—when Cornelius Gurlitt came back over the border from Switzerland, loaded with the residual of the cash that he had earned by selling yet another one of those paintings left to him by his late father, Hildebrand; suspicious of the volume of cash, the German authorities obtained a warrant to enter his apartment in Munich and found it piled high with some 1379 works—and its seizure in March, 2012 with the dubious provenance questions that more than 500 of these raised, (given, in particular, the fact that Gurlitt's father, Hildebrand, had been a major art buyer for Hitler's LinzMuseum project, in spite of having a Jewish grandmother), it took the Germans another eight months to let the world know that the cache existed.

The second is that, having done so, the Germans announced that a committee would be organized to examine the paintings, since they obviously do present Holocaust-era plunder questions--however they both remained secretive as to who would be on this committee, excluded some of the most skilled and experienced provenance researchers whom I at least know, and their politicians tied the hands of those on the committee, to the extent that key members of it threatened to quit. The third issue is that, sometime after this process began—after this mysterious process with its various legal and moral sides and aspects began its plod, and after, in the course of it all, the 84-year-old Gurlitt died (in May, 2014)—it emerged that there was a second cache of more than 260 paintings and drawings that had been kept in Gurlitt's farmhouse outside Salzburg, Austria that first came to light in February, 2014, and that the entire hoard had been left, in his will, to the Kunstmuseum (Museum of Fine Arts) in Bern, Switzerland.

This third issue presents at least one question and one serious practical problem. The question is how it came about in the first place that the Bern Museum—rather than, say, some Museum in Germany, where Gurlitt lived and died—received such a substantial inheritance. How was the relationship that led to this outcome forged? What, for example, might have been the role of the museum in who knows how many transactions in the previous half-century and more, during which Gurlitt never held a job, but lived by periodically selling paintings from his collection—in Switzerland?

If this question may never be answered, the practical problem is at least as troubling. In accordance with the arrangements outlined in the will, the Bern Museum will use its own staff resources exclusively to explore the provenance histories of all of these paintings—in 90 days—and its opinions/decisions will be final. Those of us who have worked in the provenance-research trenches are all too aware of how slow the process can be and therefore of how unlikely it is that honest and forthright, definitive conclusions can be drawn so quickly about so many works by so small a group of potential researchers (of relatively limited experience in this matter) in such a short period of time. HARP’s letters to the Museum Director have not yielded anything resembling a satisfactory response.

But the question is: why should anyone care about these three issues? The answer in broad, emotional terms is that all three of them pull at the meta-issue of justice, and whether it will be—or can be—done. More specifically, they pull at justice as it pertains to the enormous matter of the Holocaust and the specific subset of that matter that focuses on the plunder of cultural property—and what that act of plunder, and the failure to see property that was plundered restituted to those from whom it was forcibly taken (or to their surviving heirs), signifies about justice and/or the lack of justice in a post-Holocaust world.

There are more specific historical concerns that these three issues raise, however. If, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once famously observed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," the arc of the specific history of Germany, Austria and Switzerland as it pertains to Holocaust-related justice has been an instructive one. In general, as everyone knows, the Holocaust was an event that in the immediate aftermath of the war provoked some outrage and a desire to punish the perpetrators and some of the major figures, like Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop were sentenced to death. But that first period past quickly, and the Holocaust was shortly all but ignored between the time of the Nurnberg Trials and the Trial of Adolph Eichmann in 1961.

The latter event, coupled six years later with the outbreak of the Six-Day War of June, 1967, between Israel and multiple Arab nations—just prior to which it appeared more than possible that Israel, with its 2.5 million Jews, would be annihilated; a few million Jews massacred while the world stood by and shrugged its shoulders, which possibility dredged up historical memory barely two decades old—began the process of bringing the Holocaust to the surface of particularly European and American Jewish and non-Jewish consciousness. This is the time-frame in which Yad VaShem came into existence in Jerusalem and within a decade of the June War the US Holocaust Memorial Museum was being planned in Washington.

Where Germany in particular is concerned, members of the Taetergeneration ("Perpetrator Generation"), who carried out the war, including thousands of former Nazis, after the first burst of show-trial sentencings had been carried out—by American, British, French and Russian judges, not by the Germans themselves—found plenty of jobs during the post-Nurnberg period in the civil service and even in the government, including some 25 Cabinet members and a President. This is what the journalist Ralph Giordano called Germany's zweite Schuld: "second guilt." Nobody was interested in the Nazi past; it was only in 1958 that West Germany established a central office for investigating war crimes--and with little real power, at that. The German judiciary did little with regard to former Nazis—how could it, since it was itself studded with former Nazis? The legal terms under which individuals might be found guilty of war crimes were narrow enough that very few could or would end up serving time for them. Of perhaps 6,500 members of the SS to survive the war, fewer than 100 were tried in German courts and only 50 were convicted.

All of this began slowly to change in the world at large as well as in (West) Germany by the 1970s, when the wartime pasts of a growing number of former Nazis living comfortably in the United States were uncovered. The culmination of change arrived to Germany with the trials of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, an autoworker living and working outside Cleveland. After being deported from the United States, being tried and convicted in Israel for crimes allegedly committed in Treblinka and having his sentence overturned by an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court, Demjanjuk was sent back to the US but with his citizenship revoked and ended up sent to Germany, where he was eventually found guilty of crimes committed at Sobibor.

The point is this: he had originally been accused and found guilty of being someone who in the end he was said not to have been—“Ivan the Terrible,” a brutal guard at Treblinka—but, by virtue of having been a guard at Sobibor, regardless of particular actions that he did or did not commit, he was found guilty of having been part of the “extermination machinery.” Although John Demjanjuk died (he was 89, by then) while awaiting the outcome of an appeal, the German authorities and media largely regarded this as a turning point in German legal history, since it suddenly opened up new possibilities with regard to punishing former Nazis. One might say the process begun in Israel with the Eichmann trial culminated in Germany with the Demjanjuk trial.

The further point is this: that although in the matter of such legal proceedings, the turning point came only early in the new millennium, the psychological groundwork was being laid for thirty years, evidenced by the explosion of Holocaust memorials, large and small throughout Germany, the renaming of streets in cities like Berlin to draw attention to prominent Jews whom the Nazi regime had destroyed, and by laws making it illegal to deny the Holocaust. Where Nazi-plunder art and cultural property is concerned, by the late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium the Germans were ahead of the curve of most of the rest of the world in how broadly the term “plunder” was defined by them and in their willingness, indeed apparent desire, to address victims and their heirs who put in claims for restitution in an equitable manner.

At around the same time—from the mid-1990s to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, changes might also be felt elsewhere, as, for instance, in Austria and Switzerland. For half a century the Austrians had claimed that, in the Anschluss they were the Nazis’ first victims; by the end of the 1990s they were officially acknowledging how enthusiastically they had embraced the Nazis and how eagerly they had followed and even exceeded Nazi prescriptions for dealing with their Jewish neighbors. The Swiss had claimed to have remained successfully neutral due to the German fears of engaging their brave soldiers in the treacherous Alps. By the end of the millennium they were acknowledging that their role—particularly in the realm of plundered art, with regard to its sale and trade on the open market—had been essential for the Nazis, and that this had facilitated their unmolested neutrality. Swiss banks that had refused to turn over accounts to the heirs of Nazi victims (“Can you show me proof of your father’s death—perhaps his death certificate?” “They did not hand out death certificates at Auschwitz!”) were beginning to make the process of claiming such accounts more reasonable, in part under pressure from the US.

One of the concomitants of all of this was that, in general terms, anti-Semitism seemed to be on the wane; gradually from the 1970s through the new millennium’s first decade, it at least became increasingly unfashionable to make anti-Semitic statements or to engage in acts that could be called anti-Semitic—in general and particularly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other countries that had actively assisted the Nazi extermination of Jews.

So why are the three large issues associated with the Gurlitt affair so significant? Why, aside from the meta-issue of justice and whether or not it gets carried out, in general terms or in the specific terms of the Holocaust, its perpetrators and victims—or in the sub-specific matter of cultural property, provenance, theft and restitution? Because these issues suggest a disturbing pattern wherein the arc of history is curving back upon itself.

During the last several years—the years when the Germans remained silent for 8 months regarding Gurlitt; and when they opted for an obscure and unforthright path with respect to researching his collection’s provenance history; and when the museum in Bern has seen fit to violate legal/moral assertions championed in 1998 in the so-called Washington Principles as well as the principles regarding provenance research and its concomitants heralded by ICOM (of which august international museum organization the Bern Museum is a member)—there has been a precipitous rise in anti-Semitism. What was unsayable a decade ago can be heard with ever-growing frequency. What cannot be directly said is said by proxy in some quarters—most often by condemning Israel for behavioral patterns that are exhibited in many places across the planet but ignored by those same Israel critics.

As troubling as the Gurlitt affair is in its own capacity, what it signifies with regard to the turning back of Germany—and Switzerland—toward a very dark place from which they both seemed to have emerged not that long ago is very disturbing indeed. Placed against the backdrop of a large look at the world and what appears to be an unshakably negative attitude towards Jews and Judaism to which far too many individuals resort whenever socio-economic or political conditions become difficult or complicated, the Gurlitt affair feels like a canary in the coal mine, whose quiet death warns us and asks the question: when will the breathable air run out?

A Gurlitt painting waiting to be restituted: View of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf, by Camille Pissarro

by Marc Masurovsky

One of the paintings found in the infamous Salzburg Depot in Western Austria which were part of the art collection of the late Cornelius Gurlitt is a view of the Seine from the Pont-Neuf by Camille Pissarro. It turns out that this painting had been stolen from a safe deposit box owned by the late Max Heilbronn and his family after they had fled Paris. The painting turned out to be a perfect match with the one listed in documents illustrating the plundering ways of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in France between the fall of 1940 and the summer of 1944.

The painting can also be found on page 257 of the Répertoire des biens spoliés en France as still missing.

Please find some of the relevant documents concerning this painting so that you can appreciate how the historical evidence comes together to demonstrate that a theft took place and restitution becomes the order of the day.

The ERR inventory list tells us that the late Max Heilbronn had an apartment at 1, Place de l'Alma and a safe deposit box at the Crédit commercial de France in Mont-de-Marsan, in southwestern France. The Devisenschutzkommando (DSK) sent agents down to the CCF to remove the Heilbronn collection from its safe and transferred it to the ERR in Paris. The removal took place before February 13, 1941.

The  ERR assigned to the painting the title of "Ansicht auf Paris, 1902" under the moniker of "Heilbronn 7."  A card was then created for this painting confirming that it had been officially processed and indexed at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, a central sorting, cataloguing, displaying, and shipping point for cultural and artistic objects plundered in Paris, the neighboring regions and selected parts of France (Bordeaux region in particular and Nice). You can find more details on the ERR database.

The painting was placed on an easel and photographed.  The use of the easel is most closely identified with the Louvre annex where most objects were stored and which served as a glorified warehouse for the ERR art historians from which they would retrieve objects, bring them to the Jeu de Paume for processing and then return them to the Louvre where they awaited their fate.

Mrs. Tomforde completed the Heilbronn inventory in July 1942.  On October 31, 1942, the Pissaro view of Paris from the Pont-Neuf was subject to the 23rd exchange (Tausch) engineered by Bruno Lohse, deputy commander of the ERR plundering unit in Paris and Gustav Rochlitz, a German dealer based in the rue de Rivoli in Paris who came up with the concept of the exchanges and proposed them to Lohse as an efficient way of unloading "modernist" works in exchange for Old Masters more coveted by the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

At this point, the painting vanishes.  Since we know that Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, obtained the painting and that he traveled frequently to Paris, one should presume that Gurlitt acquired the Pissarro work in Paris either directly from Rochlitz or through a mutual acquaintance.

After the war ended, the Heilbronn heirs filed a claim with the French government and reported their cultural losses to the Commission de recuperation artistique (CRA) set up to investigate cultural losses and facilitate restitutions to rightful owners.

The painting only resurfaced in the spring of 2014 upon the discovery of the Salzburg Depot.

To view the work go to the website of the Kunstmuseum Bern and download the list for Salzburg.

Sources: Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B323; Ministere des affaires étrangères, La Courneuve, France, Fonds RA