Nazi looted property in the United States in the 1930s

by Marc Masurovsky

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933. The subsequent Nazi era lasted until May 9, 1945, when the National Socialist Third Reich signed an unconditional surrender to the combined Allied military forces which brought an end to a six-year global military conflict known as the Second World War (1939-1945).

In the winter of 1933, there were at least 400 American companies and businesses operating inside Nazi Germany, most of which were subsidiaries of American-based corporations. There were also American-based banks and financial firms as well as businesses displaying, buying and selling art objects. For Americans, Hitler’s coming to power was but a hiccup, for otherwise it was business as usual. For the Jews of Germany and for American Jews, Hitler’s arrival was cause for concern and rightly so.

America’s borders remained open as well as Germany’s. Therefore trade relations between the US and Germany were maintained even if the political checkerboard had changed radically and Germany’s priorities were rooted in a deeply racialist, white supremacist and antisemitic ideology.

The first expropriations of Jewish property began several months after the Nazis took power. The first forced sales accompanied these expropriations in the form of auctions taking place across Germany. Items sold included everything that one could find in a Jewish household, including art objects, precious metals like gold and silver, furniture and decorative objects.

Tourists continued to flock into Germany, despite the economic depression that was engulfing the US, but those who had deeper pockets than the average working person could still afford to “have a good time” in Germany. Tourists usually bring back souvenirs so it’s no surprise if some of the more enterprising ones attended auctions where Jewish property was being sold willy-nilly.

Art collections were being sold under duress. Their owners were persecuted for being Jewish, deprived of an income and therefore forced to sell their belongings in order to fund their exit from Nazi Germany. Their property was dispersed among the local population but it was also acquired by foreign visitors who had a special interest in the art objects and the decorative pieces offered for sale. This illegal outflow of Jewish property reverberated inevitably into the countries of origin of these foreign buyers who returned home with their acquisitions.

As a growing number of Jewish collectors and dealers were being forced out of their professions and obliged to sell their inventories, gallerists and dealers in neighboring countries and the United States saw their demise as a business opportunity for them to acquire at depressed prices items of value which could then be resold for a hefty profit in due course.

Likewise, German art dealers, collectors, museum curators and art historians who had established productive relationships with their counterparts in the US crossed the Atlantic in search of good deals, especially Old Master paintings, on behalf of their wealthy clients. The lines were continually blurred between American and German art world personalities owing to their symbiotic business and scholarly relationships. The same can be said about American university professors and researchers who continued to exchange data and research with their German colleagues and even fostered exchange programs that saw American students and professors spending time on German university campuses after Hitler’s rise to power.

As the years progressed and the ensuing repression intensified against Jews in Germany, an exponential mass of high-value tangible assets changed hands from Jewish to non-Jewish ownership through a pseudo-legal process known as “Aryanization,” a direct result of anti-Jewish laws being enforced to the letter by Nazi administrators. Corporate boards were purged of their Jewish members, while business continued to flow between American subsidiaries, their German clients and the Nazi State. Profit before people. A well-known adage that witnessed a perverse application in the antisemitic German world.

By the late 1930s, Germany had brazenly announced its true colors: territorial expansion and elimination of Jews from all walks of life. Genocide was around the corner. Faced with an appeasement-oriented world that wanted to keep Hitler at bay without antagonizing him, Nazi Germany took it as an invitation and absorbed its neighbor, Austria, in an “Anschluss” in early March 1938, followed a year later by a so-called “police action” against Czechoslovakia which resulted in the disappearance of that country and its replacement with a "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." Similarly, Austria became Germany’s new province of Ostmark.

If one surveys the New York auction world as of the mid-1930s, one is likely to read about objects coming out of privately-owned Jewish collections which were subjected to seizure and forced sales. German dealers and collectors, specializing mostly in 20th century art, emigrated to the United States bringing with them parts of their inventories which, if scrutinized properly, would have revealed the presence of objects acquired from Jewish collectors and artists who were subjected to duress and forced to sell, or that they had acquired at “Jew auctions.” These objects in turn were displayed in New York galleries and other American cities with few questions asked about provenance. We call it willful ignorance.

Lastly, American businessmen were accustomed to travel to European art fairs and pick up merchandise for their businesses back home and they would sign trade agreements with local European partners including German ones. The Leipzig trade fair, for instance, was flagged by the US Treasury Department as an international event which was suspected of offering for sale expropriated Jewish household goods, including textiles (rugs and wall hangings). This is just one of many instances of how easy it was for foreign businessmen to acquire property displaced from Jewish owners without their consent.

Jewelry was the easiest commodity to move from one border to the next due to its small size. As Jewish jewelers and precious stone brokers were put out of business, their inventories were cast wide on the market and often ended up across the ocean. Although extremely difficult to trace back to original owners, these luxury items were dispersed in urban centers along the East Coast of the US.

In summary, art, decorative objects, jewelry and textiles were some of the many categories of objects which made their way to the United States in the 1930s, unbeknownst to the buyers who had no idea that they had once belonged to a Jewish owner suffering under the Nazi yoke and forced to sell them in order to stay alive. But for how long?

Belated open letter to the "New Republic"

Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of The New Republic, Source: Brandeis University

by Marc J. Masurovsky

Why did it take so long for the "New Republic" to write about cultural plunder and restitution of looted art? Is it really because of the incongruous convergence of the so-called “Gurlitt Affair” and the global release of that “trashy and supercilious film”—the Monuments Men? Or put differently, why the silence for so many decades despite the fact that “restitution [is] as much as the next child of the dispossessed”? There are probably no easy answers to those questions and perhaps they are best left alone. Still...

“The obsession with restitution” is an obsession with justice, as exemplified by restitution of lost cultural assets, those items, those objects, those artifacts, regardless of value or museum worthiness, those parts of ourselves that serve as our extensions and our means of expressing non-verbally our deepest sentiments, longings, loves, and aspirations.

It is not just about Fragonard, Bellini, Tintoretto, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Leonardo and countless other “masters”. It is not just about the finest silver and the finest gold and the finest stones set in the finest settings. It is not about those rarest of rarest of books and incunabulae, or textiles carefully woven with the most precious fabrics for that most precious person. Actually, we are talking about something that makes you and I and our friends, our children, our relatives, and those around us whom we do not know, it is what makes us human, it is about culture. And culture is what Hitler and his henchmen and collaborators across Europe sought to uproot wherever it was deemed to be “Jewish” and “degenerate”, in order to substitute something clean, tasteful, that was Judenrein.

A crime against humanity.

In order to proceed with the uprooting of culture and the mass of objects encapsulated under that moniker, Hitler’s henchmen and collaborators across Europe committed an act of genocide. That makes Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, an accessory to genocide, together with all other art dealers, collectors, museum officials and curators, art historians, auctioneers, and appraisers who found opportunity in State-sanctioned mass displacement of property that accompanied the slaughter of millions.

The dispossessed lost their homes, their property, their sense of self, the beauty around them was extinguished and they were only left to wonder why such horrors had befallen them.

There exists a significant emotional and spiritual linkage between people of all ages and backgrounds and ethnicities and creeds and the objects that surround them, that populate their lives. It could be a candelabra, it could be an incense burner, it could also be a small drawing by Edgar Degas, or a satirical piece by Georg Grosz or even a surrealistic painting by Felix Nussbaum, or a ditty scrawled on a napkin. It doesn’t matter what it is; it is the meaning that it embodies which is precious to us all. The crime consists in rending that object from our bosom, as if part of our soul had been ripped to shreds, and for what? For being Jewish, for being “different”? for being “unacceptable”? “undesirable”?

We certainly do not place objects above people. We place objects in the constellation of people, much like satellites circling planets. And when the satellite leaves its orbit, all hell breaks loose and we are released into the wilderness of space, aimless.

Fighting for restitution does not weaken our loss, it acts as a vital reminder of the world that was consumed in flames and gas, not completely, but almost. Obtaining restitution is but a small step to establish the cardinal principle that justice does exist and that with resolve and perseverance and belief in ourselves and in our kin and in higher principles, even if the outcome is hopeless much like it was for those young fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, my personal heroes, we can assert the value of justice and reaffirm our right to exist while honoring the loss of those who came before us and cannot be with us due to a crime against humanity.

For myself, I am the single child of two artists, two artists who sought out the famed “School of Paris” and bought a one-way boat ticket from New York to experience it all in the City of Lights, poor as could be, rich as could be. Miserable but filled with the soul and spirit of what they embraced and lived—art and culture. Breathing it, in and out, every day, as pure as the driven snow, which drove them into the ground, because, as you know, the art market is unforgiving, cruel, and indifferent to human plight. By the way, Lincoln Kirstein and his ilk are part and parcel of that market, that cultured elite which enjoys driving artists into the ground in the name of Kultur. I make no apologies for being so fiendish and cynical but that is the cold reality that artists must endure. By extension, the “Monuments Men” would not have given the time of day to most artists incinerated in the Nazi apocalypse. Sad but true.

Where are we now? Most people think that the excitement today is about money. It always has been. People are what they are. A cheap headline always includes money. Journalists do not write about a restituted collection if the word “million” is not included in the header. That state of affairs comes from ignorance and intellectual opportunism, the flip side of “pornographic journalism.” It is no different today than it was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Yes, it is true that high-priced restitutions are good for the art market. There is a certain twisted logic in the way that the press, comforted by today’s elites, creates a perverse and distorted linkage between the restitution of looted art and the staggering values derived from those objects that have been returned to rightful owners. As if the only objects that were stolen by the Nazis were of museum quality and affordable only to the 1 per cent. Let's not forget that the 99 per cent are ignored by the press and whose clamor for justice is never heeded? Why then claimants to give up and simply “remember"?

Once again, it is not just about Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. It is about those thousands of artistic minds and creative spirits from dozens of nations who produced all kinds of works, in all sorts of media, as extensions of their spirit. It is up to us to appreciate them or ignore them, but their sum constitutes our cultural and artistic patrimony, like it or not. As to your quip about rescuing a piece by Damien Hirst, he occupies a space in our culture, even if we do agree here that his work might not be worth saving. But, if I did not save Hirst, why should anyone save my parents’ works? Who am I to judge what is worth saving and what is worth abandoning to a hellfire? Such flawed reasoning puts us square in the lap of the Monuments Men whose mission was to rescue the “cultural treasures” of Western civilization, worshipped in countless museum studies programs, institutes of art, and revered temples of culture, at the expense of the lesser-known, the lower tiers of cultural and artistic output. Cost-benefit analysis correlates with the rarefied air of high-priced recoveries and restitution of stolen art.