Once upon a time...

US Soldiers toast victory at Berchtesgaden
Source: Wikipedia via US Army

Once upon a time, an American private first class entered Adolf Hitler’s lair in Berchtesgaden, tantamount to taking a stroll through Ali Baba’s cave. He and his commanding officer could not resist and assembled an elaborate, yet simple scheme to misappropriate objects of all kinds, from Hitler’s desk, cabinets, works lying on the floor, against walls and so forth. They sent these items including an engraving by Cranach, to the US via the military postal system—APO. An untold number of objects left the lair in that fashion. Only one was recovered, only because the soldier, who had registered as a graduate student at a New York City college in the late 1940s, had admitted his wayward behavior to his counselor who reported it to the dean who alerted the State Department. Next thing we know, after arduous negotiations, the student ceded the stolen item without revealing the existence of the other items. To this day, he has protected the identity of his commanding officer, fumbling and stuttering when explaining the reasons for his action. This individual became a leading Holocaust scholar and one of the foremost academic opponents of restitution as an ethical concept, as a teachable concept, as a historical phenomenon following acts of genocide and plunder driven by ideological crimes against an entire people, and as a strategy of justice for Holocaust victims and their heirs. This irrational behavior regarding his crime mirrors strangely the comportment of Jewish officials, Holocaust museum directors, Holocaust studies faculty and administrators, curriculum designers and Holocaust educators as they reject a cardinal principle of the Third Reich policy against its Jewish victims, as well as a pillar of antisemitic behavior--the forcible removal of all property belonging to Jews as the first step towards their dehumanization and marginalization as productive members of civil society.

Art world officials have behaved in similar fashion when confronted with the realization that they might have to part with objects in the collections that they steward. They behave much like the former PFC from Berchtesgaden, with an inflated sense of proprietariness, a very kindisch behavior that one might expect more from an outraged, self-righteous child. And yet, the grandstanding indignation of museum officials and curators and dealers and collectors and their attorneys and even art historians and so-called provenance research specialists in those very institutions, all behave as if they are the self-anointed guardians of Kultur.

It’s all very weird.

A 1940 “fait divers” in Fascist Italy

Dateline 1940.

Two years have elapsed since the Fascist Government of Benito Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish laws, inspired by the infamous 1935 Nürnberg Laws in Nazi Germany and a forerunner of the Fall 1940 anti-Jewish edicts in Vichy France.

Although this arduous period of Italian history has not received the full treatment that it deserves, when compared to its neighbors to the North, Jews--and especially foreign-born Jews who had escaped to Italy--were transformed overnight into second-class citizens whose rights were being reduced to nil across the Italian boot.

And so it was that a Hungarian-born Jew, Vittorio Földes fu Martino, living in Vicenza, approached a Munich-born German hotel owner who managed a pensione in Fiume, to sell him a 15th century miniature signed L.C., executed in the style of Lukas Cranach, and which portrayed the head of Saint John.

The German owner of the pensione called upon a friend of his, Emil Starle (or Stark), who was then the director of a Dürer Museum in Nürnberg (Norimberga). Mr. Földes probably should not have trusted these two men, but when you are in desperate search of money to help you survive, your capacity to doubt the sincerity of others might be trumped by your need for resources with which to survive. In other words, Mr. Földes was ripe for a duress sale. He left the painting with the hotel owner from Munich.

He was told to come back the following day. When he did, there was no one to greet him and to provide him with the funds that he needed in exchange for his 15th century miniature painting. The two Germans had vanished.

Luckily, Mr. Földes survived the war and filed a claim in June 1945 with the Occupation Military Government in Germany (OMGUS), which forwarded his request to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP). Not too surprisingly, the work was not found. However, he did encourage his American interlocutors to go knocking on the door of the Dürer Museum in Nürnberg and see if his portrait of Saint John had ended up there.

Although we do not know the outcome of this all too familiar story of theft, Mr. Földes is convinced that he was fleeced because he is a Jew who sought help in Fascist Italy.  One should wonder how many stories like Mr. Földes’ occurred in Italy between the enactment of the anti-Semitic legislation in 1938 and the invasion of Italy by Nazi Germany in 1943.

How much attention did postwar Italian authorities pay to these crimes which were not committed by German troops, or the SS, or the Gestapo, but by German citizens who felt that they could act in impunity on Italian soil under cover of the anti-Semitic laws?

Has anyone cared to ask?