Lifting the veil

Handwritten note explaining that UNB belonged mostly to Rothschild
Source: Bundesarchiv, B323_1078

by Marc Masurovsky

Since the plundered art blog was first launched in 2011, it has published a number of articles on the objects labeled as “unbekannt” (unknown origin) which were stored and processed at the Jeu de Paume Museum in central Paris. From fall 1940 to August 1944, the Jeu de Paume served as a transit station for tens of thousands of objects of all kinds confiscated and stolen from residences and businesses inhabited and managed by Jewish individuals principally in Paris and its outlying areas. Objects belonging to Jews were subjected to systematic State-sanctioned theft or plunder as of late June 1940, barely two weeks after the Germans defeated France and occupied Paris.

The first phase of thefts targeting Jews and opponents of the Nazis in German-occupied Paris mobilized a plethora of security and police agencies as well as French collaborators in the police, the criminal underworld and the art world as of summer 1940. First it was the German Embassy that took control of the cultural plunder of Jewish collections helped by specialized hybrid units known as Geheime Feld Polizei (GFP) units. Then from late September 1940 to July 1944, Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Goering sidelined Ambassador Abetz and his boss Joachim von Ribbentrop to take charge of the systematic plunder targeting thousands of residences, businesses, banks, brokerage houses, storerooms, religious establishments, libraries, and other facilities which contained assets of interest to the Nazis.

Three vast rooms were set aside at the Louvre Museum as well as the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries Gardens in central Paris. These facilities served as permanent storerooms where plundered objects could be examined, catalogued, sorted, inventoried, compared, carded, crated, shipped to various parts of the German Reich or sold on the local Parisian art market.

From fall 1940 to winter 1941, Nazi officials associated with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) oversaw break-ins and seizures on an industrial scale but failed to record the names and addresses of their victims, perhaps because they relied heavily on local thugs in their pay to conduct many of the thefts during this chaotic period. More than 5000 stolen objects were thus not properly recorded, their provenances left murky until today. In February-March 1941, a new team took over the daily functions in the Paris region connected with the plunder of Jewish collections. The post-theft handling of Jewish-owned objects thus became more coherent and rational and gradually resembled a well-organized criminal operation benefiting Nazi officials, German cultural institutions and the international art market. 

UNB 101*_page 1 of inventory
Bundesarchiv, B323_301

The 5000 or so undocumented objects stolen before Spring 1941 received the label of “unknown” or “unbekannt” or “UNB” to denote ignorance of the identity of the objects’ owners. Decades later, attempts are being made to reconnect those unknown objects with their actual owners. A decade-long effort analyzing detailed inventories and crossing them with spotty police and law enforcement records and comparing them with postwar restitution files submitted by the victims of the thefts, has made it possible to cobble together a tentative list of despoiled owners once known as “unknown.” Keep in mind that half of the objects labeled “UNB” were paintings, works on paper and sculptures, while the other half consisted of furniture. On a final note, the working sample from which the raw information was extracted consists of close to 700 individual postwar restitution files, the B323 series at Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, and captured German documents at the National Archives in College Park, MD (USA).

Here it is:

Hans Arnhold
Alexandre Ball
Roger Bernheim
Jules Blum
Marcel Blum
Mme. Robert Braun
Mme. Deutsch de la Meurthe
Raymond Dreyfus
Diane Esmond
Mme. J. Feuchtwanger
Salomon Flavian
Jules Fribourg
Michel Georges-Michel
Maurice Hamburger
Louis Louis-Dreyfus
Emmerich Kalman
Alphonse Kann
Antoinette Léonino
Moïse Levi de Benzion
Auguste-Michel Levy
Veuve Lucien Levy
Tony-Georges Levy
M. Levy-Clarence
Mme. Levy-Hermannos
Charles Mayer
Michel Mayer
Roger Meyer
Erwin Rosenthal
Robert de Rothschild
Walter Strauss
Me. André Weyl
Mme. Jean Zay
Mme. de Zuylen de Nyevelt

*: UNB 101 was brought to the Jeu de Paume on 14 January 1943. It had been picked up on rue Victoire in Paris where it had been stashed with help from a unit of the NSKK and of the Field police unit 913. UNB 101 consisted of more than 700 medals. The date of their "discovery" is unknown but it probably took place in 1941. We don't know who "found" them and where. This collection stands as an imposing group of bronze medals representing historical characters from across Europe with some dating back to the 17th century.

ERR Database

For more details about the above victims of Nazi plunder in German-occupied France during the early phase of the Nazi repression between 1940-1941, please consult the Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume: Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg at www.errproject.org.

Instructions on how to find UNB objects at www.errproject.org.

Click on Jeu de Paume database. You can then click either on “Advanced Search” and then browse the various names of owners, or you can click on “Browse” and search for the name of the owner under “Art Owner”. Or you can click on the "UNB" tag after you click on "Advanced Search." This will allow you to get an idea of the types of objects that the ERR’s units removed from the owner’s residences, bank vaults, storage spaces, warehouses, galleries or other facilities harboring their assets.

Primary Sources

Archives

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B323 series, Koblenz (Germany)

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et de l’Europe (AMAE), La Courneuve (France).

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD (USA)

Archives of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC.

Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (France).


Related blog pieces in plundered art (2011-2025)

ERR Database-UNB section [unbekannt/unknown owners]

A work of art is not a work of art

The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris, Part One

The Destruction of works of art in wartime Paris, Part Two

A Recapitulation of Jeu de Paume articles (2011-2025)

Part Two--Some of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s pals in German-occupied Paris

Dr. Erhard Göpel, representative of the Linz Museum project, accessory to acts of cultural plunder both in German-occupied Holland and France, had a “special” relationship with the Expressionist artist, Max Beckmann, while he was living in Holland during the period of German occupation.

Gopel by Max Beckmann
Source: Google

Karl Epting, anti-Semitic head of the German Historical Institute, and participant in the earliest acts of plunder conducted in Paris against leading art collectors by the German Embassy in the summer of 1940

Epting, right, with Celine
Source: Google

Otto Abetz, German Ambassador to the Reich in German-occupied Paris

Otto Abetz
Source: Google

Martin Fabiani, one of the most important collaborationist art dealers in wartime Paris and friend of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Fabiani, by Henri Matisse
Source: Google

Walther Andreas Hofer, the official art expert on all acquisitions of works and objects of art in Axis-occupied territories, who reportedly directly to Hermann Goering.

Walther Andreas Hofer
Source: Google

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs, one of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s main clients.

Von Ribbentrop
Source: Google

Van Gogh's 1889 depiction of his mutilated self smoking a pipe--PR 144

In a catalogue of works from the private collection of Mary and Leigh Block of Chicago, IL, the first painting that one sees is an iconic work by Vincent van Gogh, the result of an unfortunate absinthe-laced binge which led to the legendary self-mutilation of the chronically depressed visionary Dutch-born artist's right ear. Known as the “Dutchman Smoking a Pipe [Hollandais à la Pipe]” or « l’homme à l’oreille coupée », the Block catalogue merely refers to it as « Self-Portrait, » which ironically is also the title given to it by the art historical staff of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in 1944.

Autoportrait à l'orielle bandée, Vincent Van Gogh
Source: Wikipedia  

As is so typical of art catalogues, no hint of a work’s peculiar history is provided, especially when it involves something so egregious as a Nazi-organized theft. And yet, it was exhibited at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from February 2 to April 14, 1968.

Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait”, executed in 1889, one year before his suicide, belonged to the world-class Parisian art dealer, Paul Rosenberg. In a preventive move to safeguard most of his priceless collections of modern works of art from the vagaries of an inevitable continental war in 1939-1940, Rosenberg shipped the works to various locations in the southwest of France, including a château that he had rented at Floirac and a bank vault at the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie (BNCI) at Libourne.

PR 144
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

The “Self-portrait” was stored, unframed, at Libourne and bore Rosenberg’s inventory No. 2215. Following the Nazi takeover of half of France in May-June 1940, a specialized unit of German agents, informed by unscrupulous Paris-based art dealers, appeared at the BNCI branch in Libourne to remove more than 160 works belonging to Paul Rosenberg. They were first taken to the German Embassy's Paris depot on rue de Lille before being transferred to a storage area at the Louvre which had been set up to accommodate the initial seizures made by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) as well as those conducted by police units answerable to the German Ambassador, Otto Abetz.

Alois Miedl, one of Hermann Goering’s preferred bankers and intermediaries in illicit art acquisitions, was most famous for his role in the Aryanization and seizure of the Goudstikker Collection in Amsterdam. His relationship with Goering entitled him to gain access to choice pieces stolen from French Jewish collections including van Gogh’s “Self Portrait.” Together with a dozen other modernist works, Miedl shipped the stolen paintings to Switzerland by way of the German diplomatic pouch and the crate containing them was placed at the Volksbank in Zurich under the care of a Dr. Wiedekehr.

Subsequent to Miedl’s arrest in the late summer of 1944 as he tried to cross the Franco-Spanish border with his family, Allied intelligence operatives located the stolen works that he had sent covertly to Switzerland, leading to their eventual repatriation to Paris and subsequent restitution to Paul Rosenberg.

The only concrete evidence that we have of the painting’s presence at the Jeu de Paume is the card that the ERR staff typed under the number PR 144 as well as the photograph taken of the work.

PR 144
Source: ERR Project via NARA

The next time this painting is ever exhibited, the public might be interested in knowing the tortuous path that it followed from Paris to a bank vault in Libourne and from there to the German Embassy on rue de Lille, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, and finally Zurich, before returning to Paris and ultimately sold to a Chicago-based family.