Restitution is an elite sport

by Marc Masurovsky

The post-1945 years have shown that State intervention in the treatment of restitution claims arising from wholesale plunder of Jewish-owned property ensured that the playing field would be somewhat level, allowing victims of modest income to have equal access to State officials as did members of elite and well-connected families, by reason of rank, status, and income.

This illusion of equal access did not last long. The vast majority of restitution claims were converted into compensation requests. In other words, the message to claimants was clear. Unless we think that your loss lessened the cultural patrimony or heritage of the Nation, you are better off asking for some form of financial compensation. Goodbye!

We can actually date this change of mind, somewhere between 1946 and 1947, not more than two years after the most destructive war devastated most of the European continent.

Jewish groups have behaved in similar fashion. Rushing to declare all unidentified Jewish cultural losses as “heirless”, they lobbied postwar officials and Allied military authorities in Germany and Austria across Western and Central Europe to turn over to them hundreds of tons of unclaimed Jewish property so that they could be sold off to benefit displaced persons and refugees. Choice pieces were transferred to Palestine/Israel where they were inevitably incorporated into Israeli cultural institutions.

Without a lawyer, an accountant, and one or more friends in “high places,” if your name was not Rothschild, Zuckerhandl, Seligmann, Bernheim, Rosenberg, Mannheimer, and so forth, your loss as a result of Nazi/Fascist anti-Jewish persecution and plunder was your problem, no one else’s.

Fast forward to the last 20 years…


The US government, at the outset of the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets of December 1998, issued 11 principles, most of which shaped and framed by American museum officials, to guide the future behavior of museums and governments alike when faced with restitution claims. As soon as the conference ended and the Principles were announced to great fanfare, everyone went home and the 42 governments that had sent representatives to what was supposed to be a watershed moment in the postwar treatment of Jewish losses, forgot why they had attended the conference and business resumed as usual in some kind of amnesia-driven haze which had characterized their behavior since 1945 when confronted with Jewish losses-human and material.

Enter the private sector to fill the yawning void left gaping by governmental neglect, indifference and absenteeism. Private lawyers, consultants, researchers, treasure hunters and other glory seekers, entered the fray to “help claimants” with their quest for justice. The catch? If your loss was not “interesting”, viz., if your objects did not fetch a high enough value on the art market, your claim was dead. If, on the other hand, your objects, if found and recovered, could yield several hundred thousand dollars or euros and up to the tens of millions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of millions, you could easily find enough logistical and political support to carry you through the tedium of a restitution claim. High-value objects signed Schiele, Klimt, Pissarro, Picasso, Kirchner, Grosz, Modigliani, and many others, have shaped th public’s understanding of cultural plunder. Why would anyone steal something other than a “masterpiece”? It’s as if there were only a hundred artists in the entire world whose works the Nazis coveted. Wrong again. Still, the restitution game has fueled that perception which, in its very essence, is a-historical and a profound lie.

In the end, the top 1 to 5 percent of the claimant class can afford to obtain support for their quest for justice in the shape of a “solution” to the adverse ownership of an object looted and recycled on the international art market. For the beleaguered rest, go fish!

Justice is elusive for those who cannot afford it.

As of today, there is no mechanism, twenty years after the Washington Principles, 74 years since the end of WWII, which allows claimants to achieve measurable justice that rises above the word “imperfect” so perfectly touted by Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat and his ilk.

What’s worse is that wealthy claimants do not feel any compunction to come to the aid of the less fortunate amongst them. Not one, not a single one, and their lawyers, after recovering millions of dollars from the sale of restituted objects, has thought to support the less fortunate claimants with research and legal support. It is dog eat dog out there, no room for solidarity, compassion or commonality of interest, just like during the Holocaust. If you were of modest income, you were on your own and you definitely could not rely on your wealthy neighbors to bail you out. Too bad. Life’s not fair. Far more worthwhile to plant trees and give to your favorite animal rescue effort. History? Who cares? Culture? Who cares? Cultural rights? Yeah, right. Justice? Get over yourself.

Mainstream Jewish organizations have taken the greater part of 70 years before paying attention to victims of plunder. In so doing, they have continued to ignore individual claimants who seek the return of cultural objects from museums, auction houses and private collectors, except for the Claims Conference, the Commission for Art Recovery and the Holocaust Art Restitution Project.

Organizations established to promote the cause of restitution and aid in recovery efforts found themselves blurring the lines between justice and profit.

Holocaust memorials around the world pretend that the word “plunder” does not apply to their mission and should not be taught to their visitors. Selective ignorance is bliss.

The State of Israel has had a very ambivalent attitude towards the victims of plunder, preferring to ignore them rather than helping them, with the exception of Hashava, a State agency set up to assist in recovering looted objects and property located in Israel. It unfortunately closed its doors last year, therefore, Israel has no mechanism by which to assist claimants whose families endured the worst cataclysm to befall the Jewish people.

The only state agency in the United States that gives claimants a glimmer of hope is the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) which has been in existence for over 20 years.

In the end, the 95 percent of claimants have been on their own since 1945. No wonder so many of them have chosen to forgo the torture of seeking the return of their lost property, to the great relief of those who own their property. After all, what are laws for except to protect the interests of those who own property even if looted during an act of genocide?

Plunder pays for itself. It is a crime against people, against communities, against culture which the international community has decried but done nothing measurable and concrete to prevent and to punish. Ownership of private property is more important than restorative justice for losses incurred during genocidal acts, objects ripped out of the ground of source nations, or forcibly removed from indigenous communities worldwide, powerless to oppose the white devils and their fire-breathing sticks.

Why should we expect museums, galleries, auction houses, art dealers and collectors to behave any differently? There is no incentive for them to be more “ethical”, no rewards for good behavior and no measurable consequence for bad behavior resulting in the acquisition and possession of looted cultural assets. They keep on doing what they do best—aid and abet the plundering ways of our fellow brothers and sisters around the world across generations. Catch us if you dare!

Arnold Toynbee summed it up beautifully when he declared that our species, Homo sapiens, should be renamed Homo cruellis.

ERR database—Untangling the Hugo Simon collection

by Marc Masurovsky

It may come as no surprise if I say that the job of documenting Nazi-sponsored art thefts can be a tedious undertaking.  The Hugo Simon collection is a case in point.

Hugo Simon was a German-born man of Jewish descent who fled Germany shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933.  He settled down in Paris on the rue de Grenelle in the 7th arrondissement.  Seven years later, the sound of jackboots came back to haunt him as German armed forces converged on his adopted home.  This time, he fled to Brazil leaving all of his belongings behind--works of art, rugs, stock certificates, personal papers--everything that he could not carry with him.

In 1947, Hugo Simon submitted a claim for his lost property to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  It contained lists of items that he remembers having left behind in Paris and which he rightly presumed to have been stolen by the Germans.

During the Nazi occupation of France, the ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume compiled its own lists of items removed from Hugo Simon's home.  They produced an inventory containing 25 items and typed up 11 cards.  The Jeu de Paume database documented initially the 11 cards.  Therefore, the first task at hand was to add into the database the items that had not been carded by the ERR but which had been listed on their inventory.  Once that was accomplished, these 25 items could be compared with the items listed by Hugo Simon on the inventories that he had submitted to the French government and also against the lists produced by the French government of items belonging to Hugo Simon which had been recovered and restituted to him.  Simple? Think again...

It turns out that the list of lost items submitted by Hugo Simon contained items which the ERR had neither carded nor inventoried.  To make matters more complicated, the ERR had carded and inventoried items which Hugo Simon had not listed on his inventory.  Not to say that those items did not belong to him.  He simply forgot to list them.  If you're lost or confused, I don't blame you.  So was I.  After twelve hours of forensic work, some semblance of historical truth emerged from the conflation of lists produced by Hugo Simon, the ERR, and the French government.

First, the events as they might have transpired:

Late 1940-Early 1941:  A unit of the Dienststelle Westen, the local operational arm of the ERR in German-occupied Paris pays a visit to Hugo Simon's apartment.  The early date--the Germans have only been in Paris for less than 5 months--indicates a special interest in Mr. Simon perhaps due to his being a former German citizen, Jewish, and with some proclivities for anti-Nazi sentiment.  His collecting habits confirm his progressive leanings as the ERR soon discovers, since Hugo Simon collects mostly 'degenerate' art--works created by German expressionists like Erich Heckel, Ludwig Meidner, Max Pechstein, Max Hunziker, and others.

The ERR inventory of Hugo Simon's collection leaves blank the date of seizure, which reaffirms suspicions that it occurred early on in the occupation of Paris.

16 October 1941: An important shipment of looted art leaves Paris and heads for Fussen, one of the most important storage and organizing depots established by the ERR in Bavaria to recycle cultural plunder from Western Europe.  A crate marked 'Collections Diverses' (Miscellaneous) is on that train carrying a painting attributed to Canaletto and labeled H.S. 1.

15 May 1942: The ERR records the official entry of Hugo Simon items into the sorting and selection center of the Jeu de Paume, or 15 months after the original theft took place.  What happened in between?  Also, the ERR inventory does not include all of the items declared by Hugo Simon as his property, especially rugs, statuettes, fine silk, a number of Impressionist works by Pissarro, Corot, and Daumier and an interesting 15th century 'cassone'.   The ERR inventory, however, takes note of the 'degenerate' works in Hugo Simon's collection and proceeds to label them as 'vernichtet' or 'slated for destruction.'  As if this was not complicated enough, the ERR had assigned to Hugo Simon's collection the label of 'SI'.  Then it changed its mind and labeled it 'Si-unb.' perhaps because someone lost track of the items and could no longer figure out how they had fallen into ERR hands.  When the 1942 inventory is produced, the new moniker for Hugo Simon is a sober 'H.S.' 

1946-1947: A number of items are recovered by Allied troops in Germany and Austria and shipped back to France for restitution to Hugo Simon's representative.  Amongst them is a crate--H.S. 2--containing silver items that were part of a crate inventory drawn up by the ERR in preparation for its shipment to the Reich.

In conclusion, it can be stated that, as of today, works by the following artists including the 15th century Cassone, Chinese decorative items and a piece of furniture, have never been recovered and should still be considered as stolen property:

Honore Daumier, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Ruysdael, Kees van Dongen, Max Orlik, Max Hunziker, Marie Laurencin, Franz Masereel, Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Ludwig Meidner, Springer, Christian Rohlfs, Aristide Maillol, Heinrich Haller, and Demeter.