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

Research from the bedroom

by Marc Masurovsky

Prerequisites:

Internet connection within reach.
Sufficient battery time in your laptop to last at least 3 hours.
And some tea…or coffee.

Nowadays, if you want to launch into a research project involving the history of art objects, known as “provenance research,” you can get do so without having to get up, except to make yourself a cup of tea or for most of you out there, a cup of java.

Let’s get started….

I have to assume that you have not registered for any paying online database like the premium version of MutualArt, artnet, artprice, etc…which we will not discuss today.

You will only rely on freely accessible databases. No questions asked…Your focus will be on Nazi-era cultural losses. That means the start date is January 30, 1933, Hitler’s rise to power. Not September 1, 1939, not March 10, 1938, not the fall of 1935. January 30, 1933.

The databases that are mentioned in this article are by no means the only ones in existence. They are some of the more important tools at our disposal to engage in critical historical and forensic research into the history of art objects that crossed through the grinder of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the Second World War, combined.

These databases are all works in progress due to the mountains of information that exist which must be reconciled before being entered and made available to the public at large.

The obvious places to consult are:

1/ the database of the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, which is under the aegis of the German Ministry of Culture and which has been recently absorbed into a reorganized “German Lost Art Foundation. The objects listed in the database were, for the most part, “lost” within the borders of Germany between 1933 and 1945, either through forced sales or outright confiscations and aryanization measures. The information can be very sparse or rather well fleshed out. Whenever an object’s claimant has retained a lawyer, you will find the name of the law firm that represents the interests of that claimant on the bottom of the dataset that you are exploring. Sometimes, there are intriguing details that make you wonder whether the object has ever been restituted.

Clicks: four clicks away from retrieving individual datasets.

2/ The ERR/Jeu de Paume database (formal title: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume) documents cultural losses, mostly in German-occupied France, but also contains objects taken in Belgium and the Netherlands. The period covered by the database is 1940-1945. No need to search in this database for objects misappropriated in Germany or Austria. The database provides as much information about the object from time and place of confiscation to the postwar if at all possible, based on archival records in the US, France, and Germany. You can get the total number of datasets fairly quickly by clicking on “search” without filling out any field in the “advanced search” function of the ERR database. As of 15 February 2016, there are 28849 datasets representing about 30,000 objects.

Clicks: three clicks away from retrieving individual datasets.

3/ Object database of the European Commission for Looted Art (ECLA)

The datasets cover losses throughout Axis-controlled Europe. There are overlaps between this database, lostart.de and the ERR database. There are substantial data on Hungarian Jewish losses. The provenance information can be skimpy.

Clicks: three clicks away from retrieving individual datasets.

4/  “Entartete Kunst” database at the Free University of Berlin

This database focuses exclusively on works of art which were de-accessioned and confiscated in Nazi Germany for being “degenerate”, thematically objectionable or the artists producing these works being undesirable for a host of reasons defined by the Nazi authorities. The provenance information can be skimpy on many of the objects, but, as with all databases, it’s best to have the objects on display.

Clicks: three clicks away from retrieving individual datasets.

5/ Getty Provenance Index

This art historical database, emphasis on art historical, is hosted by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA. It provides a different point of entry into the search for and identification of misappropriated objects throughout the duration of the Third Reich. Sales information from German catalogues can provide critical information to show one of the many paths borrowed by looted objects.

Clicks: four or five depending on how you enter into the Getty Research Institute.

This link gives you access to the Getty Provenance Index Databases.

5/ RKD website of the Rijksbureau v. Kunsthistorische Documentatie

Clearly one of my favorite websites, which specializes on Dutch artists. The search process takes you through artists, and their works. The information supplied on each work can provide a gold mine of information about the history of art objects. This website is invaluable.

Clicks: three if you start from the main site.

6/ Musées nationaux récupération database of unclaimed objects listed as being in French museums.

This is a hybrid website with an index of objects, known as MNR, and is hosted by the French Ministry of Culture. Searches can be deceptive and all-inclusive, meaning that you might collect information about objects that are not directly connected to your search. But, it’s a minor inconvenience. The historical information about each MNR object is quite detailed. One advantage with the MNR site is that you can correlate objects with dealers’ names, like Fabiani or Gurlitt. From that standpoint alone, the search can be instructive.  It's best to use the MNR database with the ERR database (above) and the MCCP database (below).

Clicks: at least two depending on how you start.

7/The Division for Looted Art of the Polish Ministry of Culture

This site provides you a digital version of objects by type which disappeared from Poland after the German Army overran its territory in September 1939. Losses are mostly from public collections but also include registered losses from some of Poland’s best known aristocratic families whose estates were thoroughly plundered.

8/ the Munich Central Collecting Point database is a digital representation of the index cards that the American personnel from the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A) section of the US Occupation Military Government in Germany (OMGUS) compiled to document the entry and exit of looted objects that fell into the hands of American troops in the closing months of WWII.

From the main website of the German Historical Museum which hosts this database, it requires at least four clicks to gain access to the main page of the MCCP database. From there, you can maneuver by artist, type of work, title, and owner or thief, depending on what kind of information you have. You will need to use variant spellings because there are many misspellings in this database. However, it is an important tool for research because of the information contained on the cards which complements what you can find in other databases. Oftentimes, as in the case of paintings, markings from the backs of the paintings will be indicated on the MCCP index cards. Therefore, you will need to click on the cards themselves and read the information extracted from the backs because sometimes it has been badly transcribed in the database.

Well, that’s it for today.

These eight databases, when combined, will provide you with information about cultural losses in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland,  as well as a smattering from Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

By checking these sites, you are exercising multi-source due diligence. A detailed consultation of these online databases can sharpen your research strategy for an actual visit to a physical archive and/or an art historical library with documents that you have to consult, yes, the kind that you touch with your fingers and that are made out of paper or the microfilms and microfiche which hold photographic images of the documents that you need.

The database checking process is not lengthy, although it can be addictive. So beware.

The very existence of these databases makes it more difficult to argue that “you did not know” that an object in your care or that you wish to purchase or exhibit had a complicated history mired in theft and genocide where the victimized owner was never reunited with her property. That’s when all the trouble begins.

Overview of the first year of activity on the “plundered art” blog

In order to know who you, the readers of “plundered art”, are, Google provides a potent tool—Google Analytics—which provides a glimpse of the readership of a blog or a website. In the case of “plundered art”, the following can be said:

You, the readers of “plundered art”, are mostly women, followed closely by men. More than one third of you are at least 35 years old.

Your favorite posts were, in descending order of popularity:

1. Van Gogh's 1889 depiction of his mutilated self smoking a pipe—PR 144
2. The five Schiele drawings of Karl Maylander
3. Jacopo Zucchi, "The Bath of Bathseba": or how pieces of a story build a new story about the same story ex post facto
4. Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, Easton, PA: a debriefing (II)
5. Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, October 26-28, 2011: a debriefing (I)
6. In search of a triptych "Purificato Mariae" by Marco d'Oggione
7. MNR (Musées Nationaux Récupération) Notes—R 6 P « Femme au turban, » by Marie Laurencin
8. The Hemer case or how a claimant does not want to be a claimant
9. The Wildenstein reality check
10. French loot in Poland

You live in more than 1000 cities and towns located in 90 countries across 5 continents.

Many of you speak at least one of the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Czech, Hungarian.

You work in global auction houses, multinational companies, national and supranational government agencies like the European Commission, the “Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes” in Paris, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, the United Nations, UNESCO, the US Department of Justice and the US Department of State.

On the academic front, you hail from universities, academies, and institutes in the Americas, the West Indies, Europe, and Asia.

You also work for international news agencies, libraries and archives, as well as world-renown art museums and galleries.

WOW!

May 1945 and beyond

The Second World War is over in Europe and North Africa. The Third Reich no longer exists. The only active military front is in Asia where the Japanese Imperial Army continues to put up fierce resistance to American-led troops. That all comes to an end with the detonation of two atomic devices, one over Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki, in early August 1945.

60 million people are known to have died as a direct result of the Second World War. This figure includes six million Jewish men, women, and children exterminated in death camps, ghettos, forests, fields, marshes, and concentration camps. It also includes at least 5 million men, women, and children of other faiths decimated in concentration camps, forced labor, in villages and cities across Axis-occupied Europe. The remainder died in the crossfire between rival armies, as victims of reprisal killings, from hunger, disease, and exposure to the elements.

The victorious Allied powers set in motion policies to effect the repatriation of assets looted by the Axis to the countries from where they were forcibly removed. While laying down complex reparations formulae that leave no country satisfied, they also lay claims to assets owned by the Reich and its collaborators in countries often referred to as ‘neutral’, viz., Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and to a far lesser extent, Turkey, and Argentina.

Restitution is often confused with repatriation, but one thing is certain, restitution can only mean one thing: return of a stolen object to its rightful owner.

France and the Soviet Union argue for replacement policies—to replace objects stolen from them with objects of similar quality and value in the current possession of the defeated powers. The United States and Great Britain oppose such a move. While France continues to press for replacement into the early 1950s, the Soviet Union does not quibble over words and policies. It is busy removing untold numbers of items, equipment, and other goods from countries that the Red Army overran in its bid to defeat the Third Reich as partial payment for its losses—both infrastructural and human. One out of every three Soviet male between the ages of 17 and 45 is dead or unaccounted for at the end of the global conflict.

It is fair to say that 90 per cent of all those involved in direct fashion with the cultural plunder of Europe escaped severe punishment, with the notable exception of Alfred Rosenberg and a handful of his acolytes.  The rest faced mostly fines, escaped prosecution altogether, and few were tried and handed down light sentences. 

Every formerly occupied country in Europe busily enacts laws that restrict the ability of victims to recover items plundered by fellow citizens. Most egregious are the waivers granted to so-called third-party transactions: all individuals who were involved in brokering forced sales and illegal removals of property are granted the benefit of the doubt, lest it be explicitly proven that they knowingly handled items which had been misappropriated for racial and other reasons.  Worst of all: the main proponent of postwar restitution, namely the United States, walks away from the restitution process in the early 1950s, feeling that the job was 'well done', ignoring the plight of claimants who by then have become naturalized US citizens.

No one has done an accounting of the numbers of claimants who actually obtained restitution of lost items and assets.  Judging by the number of victims, their surviving next of kin, the figures can only be ridiculously low--in the single percentile digits.

Where are all the looted objects, aside from those which victorious armies recover by the truckloads in the aftermath of victory?

From East to West:

• items removed from Soviet territory, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, find their way into Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For instance, many cultural objects stolen in Poland are discovered in the French zone of Occupation in Germany, while Russian icons, books from the Ukraine and private collections from Latvia end up in various parts of Austria and Germany.  Although a percentage of those items are repatriated to the Soviet Union, the picture is unclear as to their numbers and the percentage that they represent of all items recovered by Allied forces.
• items from Yugoslavia enter Italy, Austria, and Switzerland.
• items from Italy go north to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as well as west to Spain and France (after August 1944).
• items from France, Belgium, Holland, travel to Italy, Spain, Germany, and as far as Austria and Poland, and in some cases even to German-occupied Ukraine where Belgian books looted by the ERR find a final resting place.
• items discovered in the various zones of occupation controlled by Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union in Germany and Austria will never be properly repatriated and/or restituted and, instead, are transferred to the territories of the occupying powers.

Meanwhile, the international art market continues to thrive unabated. Art dealers and museum officials, especially in the United States, press the US military to release unclaimed items and entrust them with their sale and safekeeping since their owners are more than likely dead.  Jewish relief organizations confuse recovery with rehabilitation and are quick to sell items that might be restitutable so that they can obtain quick cash, granted, to assist survivors.  However, a significant number of choice items end up in libraries and collections, in Europe, North America, and Palestine, sometimes at the expense of recovering Jewish communities in liberated Europe.

Plundered items infest bustling black markets across Europe; their sheer numbers make it impossible for local and Allied police and investigative agencies to intercept them. As a result, these items will slip through export restrictions and end up in collections as far away as Argentina.

The residual problem of World War II and Holocaust-related plunder is a global problem since, if half of what has just been put forth is correct, looted items are to be found everywhere, both in private and government hands. If we want to resolve this question in a way that is acceptable to all parties, knowing full well that full, 100 per cent restitution was--and will never be--possible, all countries involved must come to the table and carve out a solution which allows them once and for all to close the book on one of the worst chapters of human history. Failing that, all that we have accomplished is to inform the next generation that plunder is permissible and the passage of time allows the thieves to enjoy the fruits of their mischief without fear of accountability.