French masterpieces for sale in postwar Germany

by Marc Masurovsky

From a business standpoint, art dealers do not run charities. They buy, sell, trade works and objects of art to make money, and, hopefully, lots of it. The dealer’s instinct is—you guessed it—to look for opportunities, expand networks of informants and clients, make deals, and jump on them before the competition does. As a result, the oftentimes legendary rivalries that arise between art dealers shape and transform the art world as well as the business of art. Every now and then, their acquisitions and sales influence the taste of current and future generations. A thrilling wave to ride but one that comes with a heavy price.

For those dealers who are willing to go all the way, they may assign ethics and History to a backseat in order to unleash their thirst for acquiring unique, expensive and (maybe) transformative objects wherever they can be found hopefully at a low enough price. During the Nazi era (1933-1945), dealers made a pact with the Devil by ignoring the heinous nature of hate-based political systems rising across the European continent and elsewhere. They saw how the discriminatory policies unfurled by the New Nazi/Fascist Order could generate immense opportunities for them as a result of the involuntary disgorgement of valuable works of art on the art market by the victims of Nazi/Fascist violence and persecution.

The dealers, collectors, agents, cultural officials and brokers who invested themselves in acquiring and selling Nazi victims’ cultural property did so willingly, eyes open and focused on the prize. And it so happens that even dealers who fell victim to the rapacity of Nazis’ covetous seizure of their inventories between 1933 and 1945 also saw opportunities for themselves and their colleagues as the genocidal dust of the Nazi-driven Holocaust was barely settling across war-torn Europe. Even if their desire to acquire such works might have been guided by the best of intentions…as art dealers.

To wit, Paul Rosenberg, an iconic figure of the international art world in Europe and the United States, had a keen visionary eye for high-quality art. He exercised his skills with brilliance on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 12, 1946, Rosenberg penned a two-page proposal to the Foreign Division of the US Treasury Department in Washington, DC, regarding the disposition of works of art located in the US zone of occupation of Germany (viz., Bavaria) which belonged to impoverished collectors. Here are the relevant portions:

“There are, in Germany, many great art collections…which include internationally famous French paintings…there might be a possibility that the owners of these paintings, due to lack of funds, might be interested in selling their collections. [Some] are celebrated masterpieces…We, as art dealers, are interested in these pictures…If this is possible, many of these great masterpieces would be acquired..by American collectors and…be donated to American museums or artistic institutions, thereby adding to their greatness.”

The “we” refers to a group of art dealers and their galleries based in New York who shared Rosenberg’s feelings and agreed to contact the US government and encourage the US military occupation authorities in Germany to enact policies that would loosen up export restrictions from the former war zone and allow art dealers and collectors to resume business as usual. The desire to “liberate” heaps of cultural objects from the shackles of Allied military policy and (re)fuel the engine of the international art market appears to be the main motivator behind this proposal. It is unclear whether this proposal was accepted, but it would not have sat well with American cultural officials who were working around the clock in Washington and in liberated Europe to ensure that art collections and individual objects located in liberated areas would be prioritized for restitution and not be offered for sale.

 In June 1946, the celebrated Roberts Commission committed harakiri and put itself out of business, confident that, to a large extent (although the proof for this has always been elusive) its leaders opined that very little looted art had entered the United States.  Before doing so, almost to legitimize its own demise, the Roberts Commission had successfully revoked Treasury Directive TD 51072, a key instrument in the fight against illegal imports of looted property into the United States. The directive was issued on June 8, 1944, two days after D-Day, under sections 3(a) and 5(b) of the Trade with the Enemy Act. Its aim was to restrict the importation into the US of any art object with a value exceeding 5000 dollars or is of artistic, historic and scholarly interest irrespective of monetary value.” The method of restriction was sequestration of objects falling under the aegis of the Directive. The Roberts Commission's job was to review the documentation accompanying these sequestered objects and either approve or refuse their release under a license issued by Treasury.

It should come as no surprise that Paul Rosenberg's proposal came at a time when some parts of the US government were no longer focused on restituting victims' property but on returning to business as usual as quickly as possible even if it meant releasing art objects from Europe into the United States with no filters and no way of vetting imports for evidence of loot.

Source:

Paul Rosenberg to Foreign Department, US Treasury Department, Washington, DC, 12 December 1946, 2 pages, Enclosure III, Box 28, Lot 62D4 (Ardelia Hall files), RG59, NACP, College Park, MD.

Revisiting the numbers game

by Marc Masurovsky

Since 2011, the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) has periodically addressed the problematic of quantifying the thefts of art works, art objects, and other items of esthetic value, looted between 1933 and 1945 under National Socialist rule, during WWII and the Holocaust. After the conflict, there was no internationally-sanctioned and organized audit of cultural losses suffered by the victims of National Socialist and Fascist aggression on the European continent. Therefore, experts and amateurs alike have wallowed in the murky waters of estimations of human and material losses from 1945 to the present.

Regarding the scale of human losses, the international community accepts that between 45 and 55 million men, women, and children lost their lives as a direct and indirect result of the continental conflagration between September 1, 1939, and May 8, 1945. That figure includes the six million Jews targeted for physical extermination by the Nazi government. The continental theater of operations included 15 European countries (and North Africa) which were directly involved either as a result of being militarily occupied by Axis powers, annexed by Nazi Germany, or allied to the Axis: Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Soviet Union, North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia).

Wherever the German Army and the Nazi political and security apparatus went, there followed intense repression, the physical eradication of local populations accompanied by systematic, State-sponsored acts of plunder and illicit displacement of individual and communal properties.

By the time Nazi Germany agreed to terms of unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, the Allies had realized that “art treasures” (museum-quality objects) were systematically looted across Axis-controlled Europe, stored away in gigantic depots or sold on the international art market to replenish the Reich’s warmongering coffers. Allied focus on “art plunder” went hand in hand with “rescuing the treasures of Europe” and returning them to the countries from which they had been forcibly removed. In and of itself, this task was barely manageable, but if you factored in “everything else” that was stolen, the task was simply unmanageable and would have required several decades of full-time focus by myriad specialists from the victorious nations to sort out what had been stolen by 1945, what was recovered, and what was still missing as of Victory-Day (V-E-Day).

The ex-Soviets always wanted to do things their own way, which, if you look back at the consequences of WWII on the Soviet Union’s infrastructure, human and industrial capital and cultural infrastructure, you might understand some of their reasoning. Their losses for the period of 1941-1945 are estimated in the millions. One snapshot of these staggering figures can be best summed up by their estimation of museum losses: 1,129,929 units of conservation comprising objects, rare books, manuscripts, as well as archival collections.https://lostart.ru/fr/svodnyj_katalog/

Some more elliptical estimates suggest that 20% of European art was plundered “from Jewish collectors and other individuals and organizations.” We don’t know what 100% amounts to, which would represent the universe of “stealable” European art. Hence, the 20% ratio seems a bit vapid and lacking substance. 

We still don’t really know…

In the media-hungry and attention-starved world that we all bask in, there has developed an insatiable appetite to provide numbers that explain the true extent of the plunder and what is still missing. These valiant self-interested pronouncements do not usually come from historians and experts who, for professional reasons, are reluctant to venture in such murky and troubled waters. They emanate from politicians, international personalities, media hounds, and anyone seeking attention for not more than 3 minutes but whose pronouncements will live on forever as random digital factoids on the Internet which end up restated and reposted blindly and thoughtlessly. Repeated enough times, they are true. Fact-checking, go take a hike!

So, what’s the problem exactly?

In November-December 1998, an international conference dubbed the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets took place in Washington, DC. It brought together under one roof 44 nations and a smattering of NGOs to assess where we were with respect to honoring postwar claims for compensation and restitution submitted by Holocaust victims’ families to the governments of their adopted countries and against the main architects and perpetrators of the horrors unleashed upon them and their families—Germany and its allies. Although the results of the Washington Conference were mixed, a set of eleven principles was released on its last day to guide the art market and governments on how to address the possibility that looted art objects may have entered public collections and businesses and how to resolve these claims to everyone’s satisfaction (one would only hope…). These principles avoided mentioning anything about the private art market and—in true diplomatic verbiage—kept the notion of plunder at its vaguest and limited the main perpetrators to “the Nazis.”

Ronald Lauder, who, at the time of the December 1998 Washington Conference, was Chairman of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the chairman of the recently-established Commission for Art Recovery (CAR), proclaimed that 110,000 art works were still missing, half of the total number that was allegedly stolen (or 220,000)-- a figure advanced without a hint of critical insight as to its veracity and on what facts it rested. He also placed a value on the missing works: 10-30 billion dollars (1998 value). This would assign an approximate value per object of 100,000 dollars, give or take 50,000. The average value of art objects looted from Jewish owners could be estimated grossly at between 5 and 10,000 dollars (1998) and that is still an uneducated guess. Only 5 to 15%--again, uninformed guesses based on years spent reviewing restitution claims and Nazi inventories of stolen property—reached or exceeded the values hypothetized by Mr. Lauder.

Mr. Lauder's estimates pale against those proffered by the Polish government. They estimate that their battered nation alone lost 600,000 works of art, many of which remain unrecovered. 

Since 1998, the London-based Art Loss Register (ALR), one of the most important proprietary (privately-owned) databases of stolen art in existence today, proffered an estimate of 200,000 stolen works of art, and even averred that 170,000 had been recovered and therefore that would leave only 30,000 still gallavanting about and waiting to be plucked for a handsome finder’s fee. These figures are astounding for several reasons: 1/ they are unjustified and unverifiable; and 2/ they presume a rate of restitution of more than 85%! A rather extraordinary feat which, it too, is surreally wrong. Of course I invite you all to fact-check this and contact ALR directly to verify or infirm the above.

600,000 art objects stolen, 100,000 still missing

This formula, backed up by no scientific research or historical documentation, has been the most popular mantra proffered by government officials, reporters, and restitution lawyers.

The most notable proponent of this statistic is Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, currently Special Advisor on Holocaust Affairs to the US Secretary of State and an internationally-recognized authority on the diplomacy of reparations for Holocaust victims. He first posited (as far as we can tell) these figures at an international conference held in Prague (Czechia) in June 2009. Mr. Eizenstat repeated those figures as recently as 2018 which were reported in 2019 by the Washington Post.

These figures have also been repeated in the following media outlets:

-history.co.uk,
-Time Magazine,
-the Smithsonian Magazine in 2022,
-Swissinfo.ch
-Deutsche Welle
The DW article contradicts itself when, in the same breath, it posits that 5 million artworks changed hands illegally. Which is it?
-The LA Times, whose editorial board actually wondered whether the estimates might be much higher.
-National Public Radio
-and, of course, the US Department of State

Other far-flung estimates include:

-30,000 looted art works are still missing
-10,000 works are still missing

How do we stop the misrepresentation of one of the most heinous crimes committed against culture, against humanity as part of a genocide of the Jewish people?

When someone asks you how many objects were looted during the Nazi years (1933-1945), 

1/ you do not to provide an accurate figure because there is none. 

2/ You do not know how many objects have been recovered, 

3/ you do not how many have been restituted, and how many are still missing, regardless of style, value, and importance to art world denizens. 

4/ you must err on the side of caution and state in all seriousness: between six and ten million.

For more clarifications, see:

30 May 2011
Analysis of an address by Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat at Prague in June 2009

21 April 2015

The illusion of numbers
10 May 2015

The day after...
23 May 2018

Some frequently asked questions

“Happy” New Year 2021

By Marc Masurovsky

 

[This opinion piece reflects my own views and does not necessarily represent those of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and its members.]

 

The word “happy” should be framed with heavy quotation marks.  In year two of a worldwide pandemic triggered by the seemingly unstoppable spread of a deadly virus popularly known as COVID-19, our everyday routines have been permanently upended. Each and everyone of us has had to rethink how to make ends meet in a largely virtual world. Millions of lives have been cast into disarray and oftentimes shattered, as a confluence of factors generated and fueled by self-centered human behavior has exarcerbated an already terrifying daily reality:

-inadequate and sometimes cynical government responses to the health crisis—that’s putting it mildly!—and their lukewarm initiatives to stanch the damage they have unwittingly stoked;

-citizens’ extraordinary expressions of self-righteous entitlements about not taking even the most elemental hygienic precautions—mask-wearing, social distancing, limiting involvement with and participation in group events and gatherings—just because they can…;

-illogical and irrational politicizing of basic civil and civic behavior aimed at curbing and neutralizing a deadly virus… just because…

 

Our exit from 2020 allowed us to breathe a sigh of relief with hopes of return to some kind of “normalcy”. That wish was quickly interrupted by the State-sponsored right-wing populist assault on the Congress of the United States on 6 January 2021. The product of decades of discontent and radicalized feelings of alienation, disempowerment of a large segment of the American populace, mixed in with ignorant and uneducated fantasies of Aryan supremacy and profound dislike for the “other” whom these elements have routinely blamed for their own suffering and sense of hopelessness in a fast-moving, rapidly-evolving world. A lethal cocktail that American politicians and elected officials, including the outgoing president, have stoked and manipulated for their own base motives, themselves nurtured by idealizations of what it would be like to be in charge of a largely monolithic, authoritarian, violent and very “white” system.

 

Knowing all of this, is it still possible to continue discussing crimes against culture resulting in the massive displacement of cultural objects owned by individuals or entities targeted for their “otherness”?

 

The answer is a resounding “YES.”

 

The victims of cultural plunder are resoundingly the “others” who don’t fit into a white supremacist, nationalist, monolithic view of a world bereft of difference.

 

Advocating on their behalf means that we uphold their essential humanity, their inalienable right to exist, thrive and create in this world of ours which is theirs.

 

Fighting for the restitution of objects displaced and plundered during the Nazi era, or during conflicts around the world, or resulting from attacks against indigenous communities worldwide, means that we fight for our collective and individual rights to culture, regardless of place and context.

 

Encouraging and promoting a broad-based and democratic approach to the documentation of these displaced objects by acknowledging the stories of their creation and their creators as well as their tumultuous movement occasioned by displacement, theft, misappropriation, and recycling on the international art market.

 

We are all equal and we are all in this together—regardless of race, creed, religion, ethnicity, and belief.  And together, more than ever, we shall prevail, if not for our sake, for the sake of our children and grand-children and their progeny until the ends of time.