865 kilos of art flown into Barcelona

by Marc Masurovsky

There are historical documents that tend to capture the imagination and leave us dangling for answers and solutions. However, archives can be fickle, in that they are structured like labyrinths of clues, false leads, erroneous analyses and deductions, amongst which one finds pure gems. You just have to endure the pain of hitting your head against a brick wall one too many times until, at the last minute, when you are ready to throw in the towel, you read a document with a throw-away sentence or paragraph on page 20 and you have that aha moment. Yes!

Nothing like that has occurred so far—no aha moment—with the contents of a very strange headless document, unsigned and hiding in plain sight (others have already read it, but they seemed unable to digest it in any meaningful way!). This 11-sentence long document was drafted on 19 March 1945, with a handwritten indication that the intelligence actually dates to the period of 16-28 February 1945.

It speaks of 865 kilos or 1907 pounds (a truckload) of “objets d’art and pictures which have recently arrived in Barcelona on the Lufthansa airline in two consignments. The rest of the cargo was destined for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid courtesy of the Spanish Ambassador to Berlin, Ginès Vidal y Saura.

Apparently, another plane flew in carrying “5 crates of religious objets d’art” which were “consigned to the German Embassy in Madrid, courtesy of the German Reich." When the rats abandon ship, they usually take their loot with them or whatever they can grab at the last minute and leave Dodge City, in this case, Berlin, en route to “freedom” in Franco Spain.

This very brief raw intelligence note was tucked into a folder of the Roberts Commission (Record Group 239) regarding goings-on in Spain during WWII. The Roberts Commission collected raw information from US, British and other Allied agencies about the illicit movement of art works and objects as well as their handlers across Axis-occupied Europe flowing into so-called “neutral countries” like Spain and perhaps even ending up in the United States.

The preceding document was a report dated 20 August 1945 from the Art Unit of OSS to a member of the Blockade Division at the Foreign Economic Administration regarding art smuggling “in the Iberian peninsula.” The following document was handwritten by Theodore (Ted) Rousseau, Jr. (1912-1973), one of the key members of the MFA&A squad in Western Europe.  His jottings pertained to Lufthansa cargo flights landing in Barcelona in February 1945. One of them—dated 10 February 1945—contained unknown cargo. The others were filled with mail, newspapers and spare parts for Lufthansa planes.

And that’s it.

In order to confirm if this document related to an authentic, verifiable event, one would have to follow the trail in the bowels of the records of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services/Record Group 226) for Spain in 1945 and a deeper dive into the Roberts Commission records (Record Group 239) since not all of its records were digitized. There’s no other way. That requires a series of trips to the National Archives, College Park MD, where the OSS records and those of the Roberts Commission are kept.

If the document relates to an actual verifiable event, the prospect of nearly 1 ton of works and objects of art arriving in Barcelona in February 1945 is a symbolic reflection of the extent to which Franco Spain was used as a transit or destination point for looted art coming in from all over Europe.

Happy hunting!

Other relevant digital sources:

“The factual list of Nazis protected by Spain”

« Ginès Vidal y Saura, embajador español en Berlín y excelentísimo ordinario de arte expoliado por los Nazis »

Pearls of wisdom from the May 6-7, 2011 Provenance Research Seminar

“You can’t restitute if you don’t have good research,” Kaywin Feldman, AAMD

Interesting comment in view of the fact that, traditionally, American museums are loath to restitute regardless of how thorough and meticulous the historical research is on objects being claimed by victims.

“Who knew what when?.... There is no statute of limitations on genocide.” Jim Leach, National Endowment for the Humanities.

A marvelous truism by former Congressman Jim Leach, who was the most outspoken advocate of a public dialogue on Holocaust-era looted assets in Congress during the Clinton years. The principle that genocide trumps statutory limits is an ethical principle that has not permeated national courts either in the Americas or in Europe.

“Provenance research is restitution research,” Lynn Nicholas, author, The Rape of Europa

Here, I beg to differ with Lynne Nicholas. Restitution is a possible outcome of provenance research but it is not the incentive underlying it. Provenance research, above all, is about due diligence, transparency, and intellectual honesty.

“Why do we need footnote.com? Why not open source access to historical documents?”, Uwe Hartmann, Bureau for Provenance Investigation and Research, Berlin

Uwe Hartmann raised a fundamental point about the proprietary and for-profit nature of current research tools in the digital world that are being made available to the general and specialized publics. Indeed, the National Archives in the United States had entered into a contract with a private company that produces digital versions of archival records, www.footnote.com. Unfortunately, the idea of paying to have access to an un-indexed, un-catalogued, un-organized document that could just easily be retrieved from an archive without having to pay off is somewhat injurious, unless, of course, you have no plans on coming to College Park, MD, or Washington, DC, for that matter. The same holds true for the National Archives of the United Kingdom which charge for downloads of archival documents.

The idea of open source is one that is extremely popular in the computer programming world but one which has not entered into the habits of researchers and historians who are, by nature, proprietary about their work for obvious professional reasons guided by publishing and career-enhancing considerations.  Historical archives starved for cash are resorting to commercial tactics to replenish their coffers. By doing so, they penalize their audience and make it more difficult and penurious to conduct historical research.

Nevertheless, in an ideal world, digital historical information should be publicly-available much as the database of art objects at the Jeu de Paume tries to do by unleashing on-line as a public service all that there is to know, as of now, on art thefts in German-occupied France.

Lessons of the May 6-7, 2011, World War II Provenance Research Seminar

An event such as this one does not happen very often, especially not in Washington, DC.

Co-sponsored by the National Archives and the two leading museum associations in the United States, partially underwritten by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, this seminar promised to deliver a hefty dose of knowledge and information culled from the provenance research experience of American museums.

Who came?

In attendance were representatives from over 50 American museums, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and one museum from Zurich, Switzerland. The two global leaders of the auction market were on hand, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as a handful of American restitution lawyers, representatives of claimants’ organizations, the New York-based Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference).

The director of the archives at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to show the flag for France, one can only presume that it was a last-minute decision but a good one at that. Only one claimant was in attendance: the heirs of Paul Rosenberg whose archive is being offered for research via the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A number of independent researchers were in the room, from Canada, France, the United States, Austria, and the United Kingdom. The US Department of State sent a delegation as well, perforce.

However, no scholars of the Second World War and the Nazi era were invited, except for yours truly, a strange feeling since the Holocaust is, well, a historical event that engulfed tens of millions of individuals on a continental scale for 12 long and painful years.

What’s new?

The field of provenance research has not evolved in substance, only in numbers. The training programs are seriously flawed since they are not equipped to provide contextual and forensic content to those who are not familiar with this line of research.

The emphasis of the conference has been heavily weighted, almost untenably so, towards resources in Germany and Holland. Not a bad thing in and of itself, in fact, those resources are extraordinary and growing by leaps and bounds, but they are solely and exclusively focused on market disruptions within the former Reich and German-occupied Holland. There is no novelty here, simply additional layering of information. And, yet, as was pointed out by several individuals, not many, the thefts of art plagued 19 countries. Should sought objects have entered the Netherlands and Germany, one can only be so lucky, resources are available to garner information about them, assuming, of course, that these objects fit within a specific art-historical mold.

Discrimination through art history

Not to make a big deal about this, but…

The bias of art historians and museum experts remains as pronounced today as it has always been ever since the issue of looted art entered into popular consciousness. From the forlorn days of recovery in the post-1945 world to the present, research remains limited to the great masters of Western culture who have entered the pantheon of US museums. There still is no room for the thousands of artists whose works were the subject of misappropriation but the appreciation of which never extended into the collecting habits of Tier One and Tier Two museums in the United States as well as objects produced by other cultures, three-dimensional objects and decorative pieces. As one curator indicated from the Harvard Museums, provenance research is limited to works in their collections. Ergo…

What is to be done?

Unbeknownst to the organizers of this two-day provenance fiesta, or if they do know, they simply cast it aside, many attendees moped about the crying need for international coordination of research into looted art, including some of our colleagues from Germany. They request federated or unified resources on-line and human in order to strengthen and broaden research talent and resources. Training is sorely lacking as most acknowledge that they are overwhelmed by the level of complexity inherent to conducting research into the whereabouts of works that changed hands illicitly over decades. And yet, there is no recognizable effort by the Museum associations to promote the kind of training that is essential if one is to harness the complexities of art thefts that occurred within a genocidal context over 60 years ago.

What can be the answer to such striking levels of inaction and institutionalized passivity? Independent efforts that lie outside the museum community are our only hope, fueled by organizations, foundations, and perhaps even research institutes in Europe and the Americas whose interest lies in providing utmost transparency in the revelation of the myriad ways in which art works and objects have been mishandled until today. For instance, there is a glimmer of hope in Prague where the European Shoah Legacies Institute (ESLI) is finally coming together and may in fact one day find ways of encouraging and promoting what precisely the US museum community is loath to do—training and contextualized historical research into the wartime and postwar fate of looted objects of art. Also, in Munich, the Central Institute for Art History possesses over 8000 photographs of objects that include many which were forcibly removed from France and Belgium. The Institute appears to be willing to promote such international exchanges of ideas and resources and its invitation is most welcome.

Last but not least…

For once, US museum officials have acknowledged that their attention has been too focused on Old Masters and Impressionists and must extend to three-dimensional objects from Asia. This is good since the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, appears to be leading the charge, albeit modestly.

A parting shot

The future lies in full transparency of resources and the revamping of thousands of so-called provenances so that they reflect accurately the sinews of ownership that go along with objects that are hundreds of years old or even simply seventy years old. Museums must promote the accurate labeling of those histories so as to inform their public of the extraordinary journeys that those objects have taken in order to reach their walls. Until such time, opacity will reign supreme, intellectual dishonesty will veil the truth behind the histories of those objects and the ensuing lapses in ethical behavior will dominate a field that ought to be celebrating its resources and contributions to world knowledge about art.