The Ides of March

by Marc Masurovsky

Julius Caesar

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

Fast forward several millenia.

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

15 March 1939

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

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

15 March 1941

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

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

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

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

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

15 March 1942

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

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

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

15 March 1943

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

15 March 1945

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

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

15 March 1961

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


Selected sources:

Czechoslovakia

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

Dr. Karl Epting

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

Charles Laville

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

Mr. Rossignol

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

Jean Seligmann

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

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

Acronyms:

ERR: Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg

ORE: Office de Récupération Economique

Archives:

Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany

fold3.com

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

Photo credits:

Julius Caesar, courtesy of Wikipedia.

"Der Garten Daubignys," Vincent van Gogh

Shortly before the troubled, inspired, and heartbreaking life of Vincent van Gogh came to a violent end on July 29, 1890, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he produced a series of oil paintings focused on the garden of the painter Charles-François Daubigny.  One of them was "Der Garten Daubignys" or "Le Jardin de Daubigny" or "Daubigny's Garden", painted at some point in June 1890, and measures 53 x 103 cm.

Der Garten Daubignys, Charles-Francois Daubigny
Source: Wikimedia

In 1929, Ludwig Justi, director of the National Galerie in Berlin paid 240,000 Marks for “Der Garten Daubignys [Jardin de Daubigny/Daubigny’s Garden] which he acquired from renowned Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg.

In 1938 the National Socialists accelerated their war against all forms of “degenerate” art by enforcing the de-accesioning of those works deemed to be objectionable and antithetical to the new racially-tinged esthetic creed, which could be found in cultural institutions subsidized by the State. As part of this purging campaign, the National Galerie in Berlin was forced to disgorge its “degenerate” art including three oils by van Gogh, one of which was “Der Garten Daubignys.” According to Franz Roh, Hermann Goering took custody of the three paintings and sold them with the help of one of his trusted dealers, Josef Angerer, who later served Goering in a similar capacity—seizing and brokering sales of looted cultural assets—across German-occupied Europe. The “Jardin de Daubigny” presumably fetched 150,000 Reichsmarks for the Reich. The buyer of the van Gogh painting was a German-born banker, Franz Koenigs, who, as a result of his antipathy towards the National Socialists, elected to move to neighboring Holland, converting much of his cash into cultural assets. Koenigs became a naturalized Dutch citizen in 1939.

According to Jeannette Greenfield, Koenigs sold the “Jardin de Daubigny” to Siegfried and Lola Kramarsky. However, based on information gleaned from the Sage Recovery website, Koenigs had sent to Knoedlers Gallery in New York for safekeeping another van Gogh painting, “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, purchased under similar circumstances as the “Jardin de Daubigny” following its de-accession from a Frankfurt museum. Kramarsky then “took” Gachet as collateral for an unpaid loan consented to Koenigs by Kramarsky’s bank, Lisser and Rosenkranz. Koenigs died in 1941 presumably at the hands of the Gestapo. Did the “Jardin de Daubigny” follow the same path as “Dr. Gachet”? Publicly available information does not shed light on this particular aspect of the transaction. Suffice it to say that the painting remained in New York in the private collection of the Kramarskys for many decades.

Enter the Japanese. Flush with capital at the height of an economic and financial boom in the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese bankers and investors go on massive shopping sprees in the West and buy up for then-astronomical sums masterpieces by Impressionist painters. Van Gogh paintings are snapped up at outrageously inflated prices in headline-grabbing auctions.

The Hiroshima Museum of Art opens its doors in 1978. It is not clear whether the “Jardin de Daubigny” is “present at the creation” or enters the permanent collection of the Hiroshima Museum thereafter. But it does currently adorn the walls of Gallery 2 of this famed Japanese cultural institution. Jeffrey Archer indicates that this version of the “Jardin de Daubigny” went to the Nishido Gallery in Tokyo. That fact is impossible to verify.

Does the saga end here? Not quite, since for decades, a pall of suspicion has been cast over “Der Garten Daubignys” as a possible forgery produced by a French painter who had fallen in love with van Gogh’s works, Emile Schuffenecker.  Even the Japanese subjected the painting to a series of rigorous forensic tests using state-of-the-art technology to ascertain its authenticity, which they maintain to this day.

Hence, here we have a late masterpiece by van Gogh, illegally removed from the walls of a German State collection, sold to raise cash for the Reich, purchased by a German-born banker, and acquired under less than clear circumstances either in Holland or in New York, which now hangs on the wall of a museum in Japan. Who is the rightful owner? According to a statement released by Christine Koenigs in April 2000, the “Jardin de Daubigny” is listed as one of many works “displaced” from Franz Koenigs’ collection.