Torso of General Psamtik, Governor of Upper Egypt

by Marc Masurovsky

MA-AEGY 1, front

MA-AEGY 1

This Torso is one of the more stunning Egyptian antiquities looted by the Nazis and their French collaborators from Jewish collectors living in Paris.

Described by the Nazis as "A torso of a man (Männlicher Torso)", it was inventoried at the Jeu de Paume museum in central Paris on 1 October 1943 as one of many objects confiscated from Jewish owners under the aegis of Möbel-Aktion. The person responsible for the description of this torso was Ernst Adalbert Voretzsch, a German archaeologist and specialist with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Paris. He actually oversaw the description of all ancient Egyptian antiquities rounded up during M-Aktion in the Paris region in 1943. 

ERR card for MA-AEGY 1

The ERR, when it inventoried the Torso as MA-AEGY 1, had originally mis-identified it as dating from the 13th dynasty in an earlier inventory dated 16 September 1943. Indications on the inventory show that the item had also been miscast as an “Asian” object. Lots of confusion at the Jeu de Paume. Apparently, there were no Egyptologists on hand, although Paris had its fair share of experts still on duty during the German occupation period. The Torso was ultimately dated to the 26th dynasty. 

Back of ERR card

ERR inventory page for MA-AEGY 1

mention of torso in Bernheim-Jeune restitution file

Shortly therafter, the ERR packed up the torso and sent it to one of its depots in Seisenegg, near Amstetten (Austria) on 18 November 1943. The looted objects stored at Seisenegg were eventually repatriated to France. As a M-Aktion piece, it was not obvious to identify the rightful owner. But eventually, the torso was restituted on 14 June 1950 to Jean Bernheim-Jeune, the heir of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery and inventory.

Fast forward 60 years…

On 5 June 2013, the Torso came up for sale in a Paris auction house, Boisgirard-Antonini, as a 30th dynasty piece, thus contradicting earlier appraisals of the object performed by French and German specialists. It allegedly broke a record. The Torso was then shown at TEFAF-Maastricht Art Fair in March 2014. Throughout this period, questions about the status of the object came up. Although the Paris auction house was aware that the object had been looted during WWII, those showing the piece at TEFAF wanted to be certain about its entire history.

The Paris-based Bernheim-Jeune family of art dealers and collectors had owned the Torso in the early part of the 20thcentury. The question then became: did they own the piece at the time of its confiscation by Möbel-Aktion agents?

Further research was necessary to ascertain that, in fact, the victim was Bernheim-Jeune. The family’s own restitution claim and recovery documents confirmed their ownership of the piece. The Torso had been on view atop a fireplace mantle at the Bernheim-Jeune residence in Paris up to the time of its seizure. The complication resided in the fact that those responsible for the seizure were French Fascists who had taken over the Bernheim-Jeune residence. The Torso was transferred at some point to the Nazi authorities in Paris and catalogued as a Möbel-Aktion piece. All of this makes little sense but the events speak for themselves.

This story of a restituted object being sold on the art market decades after its confiscation and restitution attests to the diligence exercised by those who handled the Torso in 2013 and 2014 in ascertaining the proper facts surrounding the object’s history prior to selling it.

Sources:

Bundesarchiv B323 series, Koblenz

Publications where the Torso appeared:

L'Art moderne et quelques aspects de l'art d'autrefois: cent-soixante-treize
planches d'après la collection privée de MM. J. & G. Bernheim-Jeune: poèmes de
Henri de Régnier, I-II, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1919, p. 5 (vol. I),
pl. 173 (vol II).

J. J. Clère, `Autobiographie d'un général, gouverneur de la Haute Égypte à
l'époque saïte', Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 83,
1983, pp. 85-100, pls IX-XII.

H. de Meulenaere, `Un général du Delta, gouverneur de la Haute Égypte',
Chronique d'Égypte: Bulletin périodique de la Fondation Égyptologique Reine
Élisabeth, 61, 1986, p. 203-210.


Shorter, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 11, 1925, pp. 78-79.
H. Kees,`Der angebliche Titel "Vorsteher der südlichen Türöffnung (von
Elephantine)"', Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, 70,
1934, p. 86, n. 5.


E. Otto, Die biographischen Inschriften der ägyptischen Spätzeit, Leiden,
1954, p. 92 and p. 128.


Wörterbuch Die Belegstellen, II-V, 1937-1953 where the inscription is cited
several times; for the references, see Clère op. cit., p. 86.

Nazi art historians and the Netsuke

by Marc Masurovsky

Life at the Jeu de Paume for any art historian would have been the closest thing to working in an aesthetic playpen. Every day, new shipments of stolen cultural property entered the Jeu de Paume. Your job was to examine, sort, describe, card, index, and prepare these items either for shipment or for sale.

The Japanese netsuke (根付) are a case in point.

Dr. Boschert and Ms. Tomforde at the Jeu de Paume processed cultural objects produced in the Far East which had been looted from Jewish homes in and around Paris. Those objects coming from "unidentifiable owners" were catalogued under the acronym MA-OST (Möbel-Aktion).

Judging by the photographs that were taken at the Jeu de Paume, Boschert and Tomforde indulged themselves in a comparative examination of the netsuke. Indeed, items classified as MA-OST were comingled with items from the RHE collection in staged group photographs. RHE objects belonged to Maurice Rheims, a highly respected French art historian and auctioneer at famed Hôtel Drouot in Paris.

The Rheims netsuke together with the rest of his art and artifact collection arrived at the Jeu de Paume in November 1942 while the MA-OST items were catalogued on 1 February 1943. The photographs were taken before their shipment to the ERR depot of Buxheim.

For more details concerning these and other netsuke, please go to www.errproject.org/jeudepaume. Type in "netsuke" in the search box.

RHE and MA-OST
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

RHE and MA-OST
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

RHE and MA-OST
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Mennetsuke (面根付) in RHE and MA-OST
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

The fate of the Nikolsburg hoard

Nikolsburg Castle
Source: Wikipedia

Nikolsburg, now Mikulov, lies in the south Moravian region of the Czech Republic. After the Munich Pact of September 30, 1938, the town was annexed to the Niederdonau Region of Lower Austria, itself part of Austria which had been absorbed in the Anschluss and renamed “Ostmark” by the Nazis.

From the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1945, the Castle at Nikolsburg was transformed into a depot of works of art and objets d’art stolen by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) mostly in France, and to a lesser extent in Belgium, and Holland. At least 5 trains filled with loot packed into hundreds of crates made their way from Paris to Nikolsburg where they were dutifully unloaded and placed in dozens of rooms throughout the Castle. As the Western Allies advanced across France, Belgium and Holland, many of the crates were transferred to Altaussee in the Salzkammergut section of Austria where the Reich authorities had created a central underground facility consisting of a network of salt mine galleries in which to store plundered art from across Europe. Not all the crates from Nikolsburg, however, made it to Altaussee. An unknown number remained at the Castle.

In the final days of the Second World War, a fierce battle raged in and around Nikolsburg opposing retreating German forces and advancing Red Army units. The town was not spared and the Castle took massive artillery hits. As Soviet troops closed in on the town, the occupants of the Castle removed many of the remaining objects to safer locations across town, including the local museum. A major fire produced by systematic shelling gutted the Castle. To this day, it is not clear how much of it burned down.

French restitution authorities including Rose Valland concluded that the Castle had burned to a crisp and its contents turned to ash. Curiously enough, however, two years after this hasty verdict was pronounced, the Czech government returned to France several hundred items from Nikolsburg/Mikulov which bore the identifying numbers assigned to them by the ERR in occupied Paris, at the Jeu de Paume, where they had been brought and sorted.

Some of these items belonged to Veil Picard (WP), David David-Weill (DW), Louis Louis-Dreyfus (DRF, DRD), the Hirsch family (HIR), the Oppenheimers (OPPE) and many others, including objects seized during Möbel-Aktion (MA-B).

Until a full accounting is produced of the items stored at Nikolsburg, a doubt will always linger whether more objects from the Nikolsburg hoard remain in the Czech Republic or in Slovakia or even perhaps in Austria. No one knows for sure.