The Ides of March

by Marc Masurovsky

Julius Caesar

If we succumb to folklore, bad things are supposed to happen on 15 March, the day that Emperor Julius  Caesar succumbed to 23 stab wounds at the Curia de Pompeyo in Rome in 44 BC. The culprits were for the most part Roman senators in open rebellion with Caesar. Brutus administered the fatal blow which produced the timeless retort from a dying Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” (loosely translated as “you too, Brutus?).

Fast forward several millenia.

I picked 15 March as a random, yet symbolic, date as a pretext to take a (micro?) historical look at what unfolded on that day during and after the Nazi era. The following selection is mostly centered on France with snippets on Czechoslovakia and Belgium.

15 March 1939

France’s abandonment of the Sudetenland to the Third Reich gave the Nazis a green light to invade and occupy Czechoslovakia.

60,000 Spanish Republican refugees—children, women, soldiers and militiamen—fled to France to escape from Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s counteroffensive at the close of the Spanish Civil War. They were placed in several “concentration camps” established by the French authorities at Rivesaltes and Barcarès near Perpignan.

15 March 1941

Jean Seligmann, Jewish art dealer and collector, son and heir of the famous antiquarian Jacques Seligmann, underwent a second day of interrogation at the hands of agents of Gruppe 603 of the Geheime Feld Polizei (GFP) who had arrested him the day before on grounds of acts of sabotage for the Allies and financing Allied propaganda efforts. Dr. Karl Epting, an eminent figure in Franco-German intellectual collaboration during the war, also accused Seligmann of acquiring works of art from suspected Spanish “Red [Communist]” agents and colluding with the British and the Americans. Labeled a “terrorist,” Seligmann was executed by a German firing squad in mid-December 1941 at Mont-Valérien.

On the same day, a train with 25 cars lumbered from Paris to an imposing castle in Bavaria, Neuschwanstein, the main depot used by the ERR to store and inventory confiscated Jewish-owned art objects from Western Europe. The objects on the train were from the following owners: Rothschild family, Seligmann, Alphonse Kann, Halphen, Weil-Picard, Wildenstein and David-Weill. The Nazis had hastily packed the train and failed to register and inventory its contents before departure. A special team from the Paris ERR headed to the Bavarian castle for the sole purpose of inventorying the train’s contents.

While the loot train made its way to Bavaria, a Jewish art dealer, Paul Graupe, reached New York where he registered as a political refugee. He had to abandon many of his precious cultural belongings in a warehouse in Paris where they were later confiscated by German agents.

During a brief visit in Paris, Marshal Hermann Goering, who had a first right of refusal on all confiscated Jewish-owned collections, selected a number of objects for his private enjoyment which belonged to James and Alexandrine de Rothschild.

The ERR in Paris gave Josef Angerer, one of Hermann Goering’s agents in France during WWII, a wooden statuette of a seated woman which came from a crate numbered 686 that had been stored at the German Embassy in Paris and been transferred to the Jeu de Paume in late Fall 1940.

15 March 1942

Charles Laville, deputy secretary of the anti-Jewish “Institut d’Etudes des Questions Juives”, sold a vast quantity of photographs that were the property of Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. He sold 4500 photos to Mr. Borelly, the owner of a journal called “L’Atalanque” for 10,000 francs and 1200 photos to a Parisian art dealer, Louise Leiris who managed the interests of Daniel Kahnweiler.

Rose Valland, curator and spy extraordinaire stationed at the Jeu de Paume, noted in her journals that the personnel of the Jeu de Paume were working overtime to make room for additional shipments of confiscated objects to the museum. Little did she know that these measures presaged the onset of the so-called “M-Aktion or Möbel Aktion”, a sweeping wholesale gutting of the contents of Jewish residences in the Paris region which lasted until June 1944. The overseer of this massive cleansing operation was SS Colonel Kurt von Behr, of the ERR in Paris.

The administration of the French concentration camp at Rivesaltes mobilized labor battalions comprised exclusively of Jewish male prisoners. They were referred to as “Palestinian groups.”

15 March 1943

The mass deportation of the Jews of Saloniki (Greece) began. The city council and the church authorities conspired to eliminate a fourth of the city's population--the Jewish community--concentrated in the Baron Hirsch section of the city close to the rail yards and seize the Jews' property and valuables. Only 1 in 10 Jewish residents of Saloniki returned home from the horrors of Auschwitz.

15 March 1945

The French Assembly passed a law declaring claimants responsible for presenting all material evidence in support of a claim of forced transfer of their property (duress) so that some form of indemnification could be provided to them in lieu of restitution. This law did not extend to financial instruments sold on the Paris stock market (Bourse). [Caffery to State, March 21, 1945, no. 1342, Secret, RG 84, Paris Embassy Confidential Files, 1945, Box 4, NARA.]

The Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS in Paris launched an investigation into the wartime activities of Michel Skolnikoff who had acted as the main go-between for the Germans to corner the French and Monegascan hotel market through a network of agencies that cloaked the identity of the beneficial owner behind the purchases of these hotel properties, namely Skolnikoff. The previous day, Allied representatives had met at the US Embassy in Paris and decided to place Skolnikoff on the British “Black List” and the US “Proclaimed List.” Skolnikoff had already fled to Spain where he resided at the Hotel Palace in Madrid. [From Saint, BB/036 [London] to Saint/BD001 [Lisbon], Subject : Michel Skolnikoff, Secret, 11 April 1945, RG 226, Entry 109, Box 14, NARA.]

15 March 1961

Mr. Rossignol, an advisor to the ORE, a Belgian agency responsible for war reparations and economic relief, ordered Louis Cahen, the chief curator of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, to take custody of objects from Congo and Angola which Allied officials had repatriated from Germany after 1945. These objects had a total market value of 15000 francs. Cahen objected because the provenance of these objects was suspicious. Rossignol insisted that he serve as their “custodian until further notice.”


Selected sources:

Czechoslovakia

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/march-15/nazis-take-czechoslovakia

Dr. Karl Epting

https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/en/vierteljahrshefte/vfz-archive/issue-index/2023/issue-july-2023

Charles Laville

Index cards on art looting suspects, RG239 E34 b1 NARA, available on fold3.com.

Mr. Rossignol

A. Rossignol, ORE to L. Cahen, Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale, 6 September 1961, AR 2/AGR 2-Dépôt Joseph Cuvelier, 020/510, Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium.

Jean Seligmann

Erste bericht, Kommissariat 1, GFP 603, 15 mars 1941, B323/287, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-art-dealer-lantiquaire-by-francois.html

Acronyms:

ERR: Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg

ORE: Office de Récupération Economique

Archives:

Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium

Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany

fold3.com

NARA: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

Photo credits:

Julius Caesar, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Rose Valland mania

by Marc Masurovsky

Many books have been published about Rose Valland, the unsung French heroine of WWII in her quest to recover and protect France’s cultural heritage. One might ask if her idea of cultural heritage also included works produced on French territory by Jewish artists who elected to live and work in France before ending up in the crematoria and gas chambers of the Final Solution. The answer to that question lies in the copious notes she left behind.

Regardless of how she felt (the subject of another text), it might be instructive to give you a quick overview of the many volumes and visual productions that have created a "persona" for Rose Valland as a creature of the French museum world who rose above the fray to do the unimaginable in times of war—put her life on the line to document the plunder of art collections during the Nazi occupation of France (1940-1944). She was passionately devoted to a certain idea of the cultural heritage of her nation, ready to defend it at any cost, even if it meant sacrificing her own life. Truly admirable.

Here is a brief recap of monographs published in French and English since 1961 when the “Front de l’Art (Art Front)”, Rose Valland’s account of her wartime defense of French cultural heritage appeared in its original French edition at Editions Plon. There followed two updated French editions of the “Art Front” in 1997 and 2014. The first English-language edition of the “Art Front” came out in 2024.

Books

1961 

Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, Plon, 262 pages

1997 

 Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, RMN 262 pages

2008 

 Rose Valland : Résistante pour l’art, Frédéric Destremeau

2009 

Rose Valland, Capitaine Beaux Arts, Tome 1 Claire Bouilhac, Catel, Emmaneul Polack

2014 

 Le front de l’art, défense des collections françaises, 1939-1945 Rose Valland, RMN (update of the 1997 edition), 403 pages

2016 

Rose Valland, une résistante sauve des œuvres d’art, Mano Gentil

2019 

Rose Valland, une vie à l’œuvre, Ophélie Jouan

Les Carnets de Rose Valland: le pillage des collections privées d’œuvres d’art en France durant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, Collectif

2023 

Le livre de Rose, Emmanuelle Favier (Editions les Pérégrines)

2024 

 L’espionne à l’œuvre, Jennifer Lesieur

2024 

The Art Front : The Defense of French Collections, 1939-1945, Rose Valland

Rose Valland’s notebooks are translated and annotated in an English-language version, courtesy of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. 

2025 

Michelle Young, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland,  

Erin McGuire, The Spy in the Museum: How Rose Valland saved art from the Nazis

Films featuring Rose Valland

1964 

The Train, John Frankenheimer

2014

 “The Monuments Men” starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett (in the role of Rose Valland).

2015 

Rose Valland, l’espionne aux tableaux (the Art Spy) by Brigitte Chevet. Aired on May 4, 2015, as an episode of La case de l’oncle Doc

Rose Valland mania spread to the French educational sector.

Schools and institutes named after Rose Valland

Collège Rose Valland, Saint-Etienne-de-Saint-Geoirs

Ecole élémentaire publique Rose Valland, Le Mans

Ecole Rose Valland

Institutes

Even a research institute bears her name in Berlin, Germany.

Rose Valland Institut, Berlin

Parting thoughts

We cannot cry over spilled milk. Strong-willed women (Evelyn Tucker, cultural advisor to the US zone of occupation in Austria, and Ardelia Hall, cultural officer in the US Department of State (1944-1961), Rose Valland, cultural officer in charge of recoveries of French cultural treasures) fought an uphill battle to implement Allied restitution policies so as to provide some measure of justice to the victims of National Socialism. 

Life is what it is. Words are one thing. Deeds are quite another.  Something that these three outstanding women found out and fought through in order to assert a policy that was quickly reneged by the very people who shaped them. Alea jacta est.

We haven't forgotten them and we honor them. Role models. We need them now more than ever.

Sources

Photo courtesy of "The Collector."

https://www.thecollector.com/rose-valland-art-historian-spy-nazi/

What happened during WWII at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris?

Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris courtesy of wikipedia

by Marc Masurovsky

I have to admit that historians are a strange lot, especially in the choices they make on what to research and write about. Whether they are aware of this or not, their choices, once published and commented on, shape our popular understanding of history and their omissions (what they are not interested in) deprive us of a fuller understanding of historical events, large and small. 

Take the Museum of the Jeu de Paume in central Paris. It is a typical example of this. Aside from the work of Emmanuelle Polack, there is not a single book that has been exclusively devoted to the history of the Jeu de Paume during the years of German occupation (1940-1944) of France. But there are at least 12 non-fiction books solely devoted to Rose Valland’s heroism and work as a French spy and a cultural property recovery officer for the French government.

The outside world may have experienced the historical Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries through the eyes of Rose Valland’s hagiographers. If you are a movie buff, you may catch a glimpse of it in “The Train” by John Frankenheimer, a paean to French railroad workers during WWII who tried their utmost to prevent France’s cultural treasures from being removed to Nazi Germany in the closing months of the German occupation of France. 

The rooms of the Jeu de Paume have been a regular feature on the French Ministry of Culture’s website for over a decade, illustrating its many rooms through contemporaneous black and white photographs made interactive so that you can discover the looted objects displayed there for Hermann Goering’s pleasure.

Do you really know what happened at the Jeu de Paume from Fall 1940 when it opened as a depot and processing station for confiscated Jewish cultural property to early August 1944 when it ceased to function as such? Do you know who worked there, what their jobs were, what objects they handled, how decisions were made day-to-day, why they chose certain objects and not others, their likes and dislikes, who hated who, who slept with who, the internal cliques? This is "perpetrator history" and it should not be ignored. Otherwise, you, we, end up knowing little about a fundamental cog in the machinery of cultural plunder devised by a perpetrator in the 20th century. History tends to repeat itself like an old cliché.

The Jeu de Paume was a laboratory of cultural plunder created by the perpetrators—the German occupying power and a Nazi plundering agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), its employees, experts and agents. It is therefore logical to dissect its internal mechanisms so that we can understand how looted, confiscated, misappropriated cultural assets are “handled” by those who carry out these crimes.

Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the ERR

To this day, the Jeu de Paume and the four-year long campaign of confiscation, processing, and dispersal of Jewish-owned cultural property reflects the dark side of the museum world and its cultural workers. Your involvement in the arts and cultural activities, whether as a producer or consumer, does not shield you from engaging in heinous acts as a deliberate cog in a machinery of racially-motivated exploitation, grand theft, and persecution. These people are your typical “collaborators”, persons who intentionally cast their lot with the new sheriff in town—in this case, the Nazis and their local Fascist supporters (in this case, partisans of the collaborationist Vichy government).

PS: The only "depot" of cultural objects that has received proper scholarly treatment is the postwar Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) which supplanted Hitler's Führerbau as of May 11, 1945, as a central processing station for recovered looted objects. American cultural officials referred to in pop culture as the "Monuments Men and Women” managed the site. Dr. Iris Lauterbach of the Munich-based Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte is the author of that study.

The next article will be devoted to inventories, basic didactic instruments that document cultural plunder.

For more on WWII films with some mention of cultural plunder, check out:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-challenges-of-making-historically.html

For more on Rose Valland, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2012/01/three-graces-of-art-restitution.html

For more on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, see:

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in.html

https://plundered-art.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-destruction-of-works-of-art-in_5.html

 

The Auerbach Case: Part Two-Cabal of art dealers

by Marc Masurovsky

Rose Valland, c/o Ministère de la Culture

On 10 November 1949, Rose Valland, France’s point person on repatriation and restitution issues, wrote to Stefan Munsing, then Chief of the CCCP, to inform him on the activities of a recently naturalized American citizen of Jewish extraction living in Paris. His name was Heinz Berggruen. “He flaunts his privileged access to American museums. However, the US Embassy in Paris does not like him. Our suspicions about him grew when we compared his project with the one promoted by Auerbach and Wildenstein.” According to Valland, Berggruen was organizing a sale of paintings in Bavaria in which Georges Wildenstein held an interest. The works being sold had been consigned by Berlin dealers who knew that American clients would be congregating in Munich for that purpose. One of the dealers, a Mr. Buren, apparently consigned two French paintings, one by Corneille de Lyon and the other by Nattier. Valland notified Munsing that France reserved the right to assert its jurisdiction over those paintings and any others offered on the art market. She asked him to take the necessary measures to warn American museums not to deal with these “gangsters” whose behavior is unacceptable. 

Munsing’s investigations into Berggruen produced meager results. Berggruen was mostly dealing in rare books on his frequent visits to Bavaria. He also flaunted his contacts in high French circles as well as his familiarity with French customs who “never opened my bags.”

 

Theodore Heinrich

On 13 February 1951, Theodore Heinrich wrote to one of his former MFAA colleagues, Lane Faison. He warned him about his concerns regarding notables (Jewish and non-Jewish) of the art market who might be involved in postwar shady transactions. He was once the director of the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point in the US zone of occupation in Germany, while serving with the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) administration. The MFAA had established the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) in central Munich in May 1945 in order to process and dispose of cultural assets stolen from Nazi victims across Europe. In application of international law, their mission was to identify the place where these assets had been stolen and return them to those countries from which they would then be restituted to the rightful owners. At least in theory… Heinrich suspected that something ominous was brewing in the postwar art market with respect to the fate of “undistributed holdings at MCCP.”

The cast of characters included:

Karl Haberstock

- Karl Haberstock, Nazi art historian and art dealer who carried out the plans of Nazi dignitaries to acquire thousands of works of art for Hitler’s Linzmuseum project and, in so doing, partook in the spoliation of Jewish collections across Western and Central Europe.

Georges Wildenstein

- Georges Wildenstein, a legendary art dealer based in Paris, London and New York who was in a business partnership with Karl Haberstock before and—some allege-during WWII. His relationship with Haberstock apparently survived the war years.
                                                                                                                                                            
- Heinz Berggruen, a German Jewish refugee who settled in San Francisco in the 1930s, returned to Europe with the US Army and established what became one of the most famous art businesses of the postwar era, starting in liberated Paris.

Heinz Berggruen

- Dr. Philip Auerbach, a Bavarian official who worked closely with Jewish organizations on the question of unclaimed Jewish cultural assets located in the US zone of Occupation of Germany where he worked.

- Grace Morley, a native of Berkeley (CA) and a UNESCO official who headed its Museums division (innocent bystander)

Grace Morley

It is unclear when and how Theodore Heinrich discovered the “sub-rosa” relationship between Karl Haberstock and Georges Wildenstein. He nevertheless accused Berggruen (Paris), of acting as a go-between between Wildenstein (New York), and Haberstock (Bavaria).

Lane Faison (director of the Munich CCP) was aware of the fact that « many dealers had come to Munich in fall and winter (1950-1) to meet with Auerbach and other officials about Goering’s assets. These dealers believed that some of the Goering treasure would be made available to the art market. Faison condemned this behavior saying that it was antithetical to the spirit of restitution. He made it known that the US would never tolerate such a strategy.

                                                                                                                                    to be continued...

The destruction of works of art in wartime Paris--Part One

by Marc Masurovsky

This is the first in a series of articles detailing the selective impact of Nazi cultural policy at the Jeu de Paume museum between September 1940 and July 1944. During that time period, the Jeu de Paume served as a central clearinghouse for artistic, cultural and religious objects confiscated from Jewish collectors in Paris and other parts of France.

One nagging question which has not received an adequate answer is the extent to which Nazi cultural policies, strictly enforced inside the Greater German Reich, were equally applied in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

If Adolf Hitler’s views about art were to be followed to the letter, any artistic object produced after the 1850s (emergence of Impressionism) would be subjected to intense scrutiny by Nazi agents operating in occupied lands, leading inevitably to seizure and confiscation (which happened in any event), censorship (recurrent but not systematic), and/or destruction.

Let’s focus on German-occupied France. There, the machinery of cultural plunder operated as follows.

Jewish collections of objects of cultural, religious and artistic value and significance became the target of confiscations orchestrated by a number of Nazi agencies, most notably the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Kunstchutz (cultural arm of the German military administration) and assorted security agencies and police forces (Devisenschutzkommando, Gestapo, SD, etc).

Tens of thousands of objects seized in and around Paris, sometimes from as far as cities and towns in the French Southwest, were stored in a number of facilities and depots scattered about the French capital but mostly centered in its wealthier Western neighborhoods, the most important of which was the cluster comprised of the Jeu de Paume museum and three rooms provided by the Louvre Museum as a storage annex to the Jeu de Paume.

At least 20000 confiscated objects were transferred to the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex beween 1940-1944. There, roughly 25 per cent of them were photographed, eh vast majority were inventoried, carded and assigned an ID number. ERR staff members decided which objects to transfer to the Reich, which ones should remain in occupied France and which ones should be sold and/or exchanged for “acceptable” works, namely Old Masters.

In order for the staff members of the ERR at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume to implement Nazi cultural policies, they had to set aside those objects which did not conform to official esthetic and ideological dicta which distinguished between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” or “degenerate” art. Hitler even insisted that no French Impressionist works could enter the German Reich, irrespective of quality and value.

What happened to the objects that were set aside? Two scenarios were contemplated: either offer them for sale to local art dealers and perhaps even dealers in neighboring countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain), or destroy them.

In July 1942, almost two years after the Germans invaded France, works of art not meeting Hitler’s strict esthetic and ideological considerations were inventoried separately, some of them having wallowed at the Jeu de Paume/Louvre complex since late 1940. They were subjected to a separate inventory, reassigned to new categories (Gruppe I, Gruppe II, Gruppe III, Gruppe IV), and crated separately while their fate was being decided. That process lasted until March 1943. At some point during or after this process, a decision was made to get rid of these objects after having gone through the tedium of inventorying and crating.

At least 625 paintings, 48 works on paper, two sculptures (one by Ernst Barlach and the other by Hans Arp) and one of uncertain medium (Friedrich Unger) were set aside and inventoried. Rose Valland, a French curator ordered by Louvre officials to remain at the Jeu de Paume to be the eyes and ears of the French museum administration inside the very museum where she had spent her days prior to June 1940, testified after the war that ERR staff members destroyed these objects by repeated laceration and cremated them with the help of German soldiers in a day-long bonfire on July 21, 1943. Although she witnessed some of the lacerations, she did not witness the bonfire.

The jury is still out about the bonfire having consumed hundreds of “unacceptable” works of art.

After having carefully examined the archival documentation that retraces in minute details the processing of these objects at the Jeu de Paume, we know the following:

-None of the works classified as Impressionist, Pointillist, or Fauvist, were condemned and “destroyed”.

-No work explicitly tagged as “Jude” [Jewish] by artists like Camille Pissarro and Marc Chagall was condemned and “destroyed”.

In other words, Nazi cultural policy somewhat fell apart at this moment and shifted gears, judging “unacceptable” works by their esthetic value and not by the origins of their creators.

Of the 257 collections which were carded and/or inventoried at the Jeu de Paume, 21 collections contained one or more objects which were deliberately set aside for “destruction” (vernichtet).

ERR ID                          Description of collection                                 Numbers “destroyed”

Aux                                   Auxente/Avxente/Alexandra Pregel                                  181
DW                                   David David-Weill                                                                 1
ESM                                  Edouard Esmond                                                                 30
HS                                     Hugo Simon                                                                         12
KA                                    Alphonse Kann                                                                     25
KAP                                  Mrs. Kapferer                                                                         6
L.H                                    Levi-Hermannos                                                                    1
Loewell                             Pierre Loewell                                                                        8
Loewenstein                      Fedor Loewenstein                                                               20
MA-B                                Möbel-Aktion Bilder                                                            13
MGM                                 Michel Georges-Michel                                                     298
PE                                      Hugo Perls                                                                              5
Reichenbach                      François Reichenbach                                                            1
Rosenberg Bernstein         Paul Rosenberg [Bordeaux area]                                            1
Rosenberg Paris                 Paul Rosenberg [Floirac/Paris]                                            14
R                                Members of the French branch of the Rothschild family               8
Spira                                   Mr. Spira                                                                                 1
Spiro                                   Eugen Spiro                                                                          18
U                                         Friedrich Unger                                                                      4
UNB                                   Unbekannt                                                                             18
Watson                               Peter Watson                                                                            9

In Part two, we wil begin the discussion of each collection and the artists who did not make the cut, so to speak.

Sources: 

ERR Jeu de Paume database

Records from the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, RG 260

Records of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, series B323

Deconstructing the Jeu de Paume

by Marc Masurovsky

The process of understanding what exactly unfolded at the Jeu de Paume museum in German-occupied Paris between late 1940 and July 1944 has been in the works for close to a decade.

Jeu de Paume in 1861

Why?

The Jeu de Paume museum, emptied of its contents because of the impending German entrance into Paris in 1940, became the  most important processing center for art objects looted by German and French agents from Jewish owners, mainly in the Paris area but also from sites throughout German-occupied France, and to a lesser extent from Belgium and the Netherlands. The collections seized in Belgium and the Netherlands represent but a fraction of what was removed from France and processed through the Jeu de Paume.

For four years the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) staff managed that processing center to which thousands of objects were brought in crates provided by Parisian moving companies.

Typical truck and crate operation at the Louvre

ERR staffers unpacked them, assessed their appearance, condition and importance. Based on their recommendations, these objects were catalogued, inventoried, carded, and either shipped to the Reich or handed over to other German agencies for sale through the Paris art market.

Many post-WWII art restitution cases filed in Europe and in the United States are rooted in the events that transpired at the Jeu de Paume.

What is involved in the deconstruction of the Jeu de Paume?

The bulk of the reconstruction relies almost exclusively on a close examination of primary source documents which attest to the confiscation, transfer, stockpiling, inventorying, cataloguing, carding, and shipment of art objects which were forcibly removed from their Jewish owners.

These documents include, but are not limited to:

-Cards designed and filled out by ERR staffers describing the objects processed at the Jeu de Paume. These cards were also completed in other ERR centers

—in Brussels (Belgium), Fussen/Neuschwanstein (Bavaria, Germany), the Louvre (Paris, France). and Kogl (Austria).

ERR card describing a Rothschild item

-Inventories were produced by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) art specialists in Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria;

-the typewritten version of the handwritten notebooks compiled at great risk by Rose Valland, curator at the Jeu de Paume whose hierarchy asked her in effect to spy for them and document the hemorrhaging of “French cultural treasures” from their Jewish owners to various sites in Germany and Austria;

-restitution claims filed by surviving victims whose property was plundered by German agents between 1940 and 1944;

-wartime and postwar correspondence regarding the thefts authored by victims, perpetrators and witnesses;

-reports compiled by Allied intelligence agencies documenting acts of cultural plunder, including investigations into the actions of specific officials like Hermann Goering, Bruno Lohse, Robert Scholz;

-French police reports detailing their raids on Jewish-owned businesses and residences in close cooperation with German agents;

-records of French anti-Jewish agencies (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives) responsible (and competing against the ERR) for confiscating Jewish-owned property and facilitating the Aryanization of their businesses.

The ERR staff photographed a number of the confiscated objects. Not all of the objects carded and inventoried were photographed. These photographs are scattered about in various archives throughout Europe—Belgium, France, and Germany. Our task is to reunite them with the corresponding datasets. Their quality varies significantly based on the circumstances under which the photos were taken.

One set of photographs was taken rather crudely in 1940 and 1941. 

Marais aux songes, Max Ernst

 The objects were placed on an easel, a handwritten label identified the alphanumeric code assigned to the object by the ERR, and the object was photographed together with the easel. In other words, the first photographs were produced amateurishly and did not reflect a coordinated policy of treatment of the confiscated objects. Once the Jeu de Paume operation was rationalized and structured under the guidance of Bruno Lohse and other art specialists of the ERR, the photographs took on a more professional quality, often printed on high-end photographic paper.

The official tally reported by French and Germany officials of the number of objects processed at the Jeu de Paume is slightly above 21000. This figure, which I rounded off, has been oft-repeated since 1945 and comes from the official records of the ERR itself and was confirmed by Rose Valland and other French officials after 1945.

The deconstruction of the Jeu de Paume has managed to challenge that official figure upwards and, by so doing, to clarify its meaning.

The 21000 or so objects that were “carded” by the ERR staff in its various depots throughout Europewere objects that the staff considered more from an esthetic viewpoint than an ideological viewpoint. After all, if Nazi ideology had dominated the judgment of the ERR staff, thousands of objects would not have been inventoried or carded because of their “unworthiness” and, therefore, the official figure would have been much lower.

The number itself is low and does not reflect accurately the true extent of the thefts of Jewish-owned cultural assets and the proportion of those assets which entered and left the Jeu de Paume.

Of note are the crates which contained confiscated items. The crates are the most important forensic measure of the actual number of objects which entered the Jeu de Paume from late 1940 to late July 1944. Crates were often assembled in the places of confiscation by the Parisian movers, they contained the fruits of the plunder. They were transported as such in trucks supplied by Parisian moving and storage companies to the Louvre and Jeu de Paume.

Their contents are not always provided in the available documentation. Hence, the Jeu de Paume database can only list the crates, the time at which they entered the Jeu de Paume and exited therefrom.

As of now, there are more than 33,000 datasets in the ERR database, each containing information on at least one object. Several thousand datasets pertain exclusively to crates and their contents, exclusive of the individual objects listed in the database. In other words, these crates contained objects that the ERR did not bother to inventory and/or card for reasons that are not yet clear.

The close examination of Rose Valland’s notes on the contents of crates passing through the Jeu de Paume is the closest that we will ever get to grasping the full extent of the Jeu de Paume operation, the number of collections that were processed there, and the fate of the objects contained therein both during and after WWII.

Crate inventory (partial)

In order of magnitude, the cards, when tabulated,  bring the total number of objects at the Jeu de Paume close to 21000. The inventories of the various collections processed at the Jeu de Paume provide a more accurate but not complete snapshot of the number of objects confiscated from individual Jewish owners. The total number of objects listed in the inventories brings us closer to 30,000 objects. If we add the crates with objects not tabulated in the cards or the inventories, the total number of objects could far exceed 40,000. And finally, the inventories of losses submitted by victims of Nazi and Vichy-sponsored plunder, when confronted with the German inventories, more often than not, contain far more objects than the German inventories. Hence, if we factor in the objects listed on victim inventories which were not carded or inventoried or listed in the description of crate contents, we must ask: where did those objects go since the apartments, mansions, estates, galleries and other sites containing those objects were virtually gutted of all their contents.

Once we reach the end of this exercise, we will be able to provide a more accurate picture of the scope and detail of the cultural plunder of Jewish victims of Nazi occupation and Vichy rule in France.

The process is long and painstaking, but it fulfills a vital mission: to understand the crime of cultural plunder, to document the confiscations, understand the path taken by the various objects during and after the war, and to paint a more complex picture of Nazi cultural policy in occupied territories, the impact of that policy on the art market, and the postwar fate of the objects removed by force from their owners’ possession.

This project is currently funded by the New York-based Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany (better known as the Claims Conference) as a joint project with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

The information on the Jeu de Paume can be found at www.errproject.org.

The Real Monuments Men—and Women

by Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Associate Professor of History, University of Denver

Elizabeth Karlsgodt
Source: University of Denver,
Arts Humanities & Social Sciences

George Clooney’s latest film, The Monuments Men, offers audiences an action-packed adventure set in Europe during the final days of World War II. The film is based on the true story of American and European art experts who became officers in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section of Allied forces and recovered several million cultural objects from castles and salt mines that had become Nazi art repositories. It is a feel-good saga about American heroes who outsmart Hitler, the ultimate villain. The actual history of the Monuments Men is riveting in its own right, but without the happy Hollywood ending.

Franklin Roosevelt charged the MFAA officers with protecting European cultural heritage from the ravages of war. They initially focused on preserving churches, palaces and other historic buildings but ended up recovering the art found in Nazi caches as the Allies moved into Reich territory. The repositories held objects evacuated from museums in the Third Reich and stolen from German-occupied territories across the continent, such as Belgium’s famed Ghent altarpiece and the Bruges Madonna by Michelangelo. Most tragically, the Nazis had plundered much of the loot from Jewish art collectors across Europe, while agents working for Hitler, Göring and other Party leaders had bought thousands of pieces relinquished by Jews under duress.

Madonna, by Michelangelo

 

In Clooney and Heslov’s version of events, the Monuments Men race against time as the Third Reich is crumbling, trying to find art repositories before the Nazis destroy the hidden treasures. The Nazis, the story goes, would rather obliterate masterpieces than let them fall into Allied—especially Soviet—hands. The Germans are implementing Hitler’s Nero Decree of March 19, 1945, which ordered the demolition of infrastructure that could be useful to the Allies—railways, bridges, factories. In the film, the Germans include works of art as potential enemy assets and systematically burn paintings in the Heilbronn salt mine as the Monuments Men race through Germany to stop them.

In reality, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer largely thwarted implementation of the Nero Decree and the Germans did not carry out an eleventh-hour demolition of looted art. In Berlin and Paris, they had burned thousands of paintings they considered “degenerate”—Cubist, Surrealist, and Expressionist works they considered harmful to the Aryan mind and spirit—but they did not methodically destroy art they valued. On the contrary, Hitler aimed to preserve all the art the Nazis had accumulated, using it to glorify himself and the Third Reich.

Why would Hitler, the man who had wrought such destruction across an entire continent, preserve art? He was building the world’s greatest museum in his childhood hometown of Linz, Austria. His planned display of the continent’s masterpieces would symbolize his military power, much as Napoleon had done with the Louvre collection before him. Hitler’s last will and testament written the day before his suicide states that all works of art in his possession should go to the Linz museum: “It is my most sincere wish that this bequest be duly executed.” His drive to preserve fine art, however, was directly connected to the Nazi destruction of people who had owned it. Seizing and profiting from Jewish assets, including artworks, was central to the Nazi Final Solution.

It is true that Hitler ended up endangering the seized works of art by issuing the Nero Decree and feeding a climate of fear and uncertainty among German leaders as Allied forces advanced into Reich territory. In Austria, the fanatical Gauleiter August Eigruber intended to carry out Hitler’s orders and placed explosives inside the Alt Aussee salt mine, repository for 6500 works of art, including the Belgian treasures and works from Vienna museums. In early May 1945, Austrian mine officials received authorization from SS officer Ernst Kaltenbrunner to seal the mine and protect the art inside. Two MFAA members in the Third U.S. Army, Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein and Captain Robert Posey, arrived at the mine on May 16, 1945, a week after V-E Day, and oversaw work by Austrian miners to dig through the rubble and regain access to the mine, locating the cultural treasures.

In the film, we see the Monuments Men organized into a platoon. They survive boot camp in England together, land on the Normandy beaches, and develop a sense of camaraderie in their hunt for looted art. But such a platoon never existed. Instead, the military command scattered cultural officers across Allied armies and they most often worked alone or with one partner, meeting occasionally to share information and avoid duplicating efforts.

The challenge of working in isolation is illustrated by the work of Lieutenant James Rorimer, future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the inspiration for Matt Damon’s character, James Granger. A curator at the Cloisters Museum in civilian life, Rorimer landed with French troops at Utah Beach on August 3, 1944, two months after D-Day. He immediately began surveying the damage to churches and other historic buildings nearby, documenting in painstaking detail the destruction inflicted by German and Allied bombing.

While maintaining contact with superior officers, Rorimer mostly worked alone in Normandy, without a vehicle or assistant. Determined to inspect damage at the grandiose medieval abbey of Mont Saint Michel, he hitched rides on Allied military vehicles and with French civilians. When those vehicles veered from his destination, he walked. Alone. One Air Corps MP Captain suspected he was a German spy, incredulous that a U.S. officer would travel in Normandy without his own transportation. Rorimer and his MFAA colleagues used cunning and imagination to make up for the dearth in personnel, equipment and preservation supplies. Fogg Museum preservationist George Stout, the inspiration for Clooney’s character, managed to secure a beat up German Army Volkswagen without a roof, and New York architect Bancel LaFarge, after weeks of hitchhiking and walking, procured a small British car to navigate country roads.

The terminology “Monuments Men” itself elides a rich part of this history: the role played by remarkable women. One was Rose Valland, a French museum official who inspired the Claire Simone character in the film, played by Cate Blanchett. In the film, Simone shows Granger the extent of Nazi looting by taking him to Paris warehouses filled with everyday objects plundered from Jewish homes, much as Valland did with Rorimer in December 1944. Romantic tension between the film characters is pure Hollywood invention, but in real life the two were a powerful team, as Rorimer used Valland’s records of Nazi art looting to track down the treasures of France stashed in Neuschwanstein castle and other repositories. Valland later became a Captain in the French Army and from 1945 to 1953 worked in Germany to help return the collected art to countries of origin. A recipient of the Resistance Medal, the French Legion of Honor, and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, she remains one of the most decorated women in French history.

Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume

Edsel’s non-profit foundation includes Valland and several other women on its list of more than three hundred “Monuments Men” from thirteen countries. Among them was Captain Edith Standen, a Canadian-born art expert who became a U.S. citizen in 1942, joined the Women’s Army Corps, and in June 1945 became director of the Wiesbaden central collecting point. Ardelia Hall was a cultural officer at the U.S. State Department from 1946 to 1962 and worked tirelessly to promote restitution of looted art to rightful—mostly Jewish—owners.

The Monuments Men should be seen as an entertaining entry to a far more complicated history embedded in the Holocaust. The recent international controversy surrounding the revelation of Cornelius Gurlitt’s art hoard in Munich shows how difficult the work of restitution remains. In the chaotic postwar years, restitution was defined in national terms, to countries of origin that would determine rightful owners, despite the fundamentally international nature of the art market. Over the past seventy years, works seized from Jewish collections or sold under duress during the Nazi era have been resold across territories with varying statutes of limitation for illicit trade, even within the United States. For this reason, the central mission of many Monuments Men and women, restitution to rightful owners, is not yet accomplished.

Looted Renoir painting on the French Riviera

by Marc Masurovsky

SS Officer Hermann Brandl, also known as the head of the infamous black market organization in wartime Paris called “Otto” left France in a hurry shortly before the Liberation with at least one if not two truckloads full of loot. One item that he had stolen was a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, entitled “La femme au puits”, also known by its German title as “Junge Frau am Brunnen.” Renoir had painted this modest work in the area around Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1886.

Junge Frau am Brunnen, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Source: ERR Project via Bundesarchiv

Captain Doubinsky, Rose Valland’s deputy in the French Zone of Occupation, located the warehouse where Brandl had stored the goods he plundered in France in a small farming community called Kölblöd west of Passau, and had them transferred in early 1949 to the Munich Central Collecting Point for further identification. “La Femme au Puits” was one of a small group of paintings by Renoir among the many works stolen by Brandl from Nazi victims as well as dozens of decorative objects, furniture items, antiques, and works on paper. 

Ko 7, front
Source: MCCP Datenbank via Bundesarchiv

Ko 7, back
Source: MCCP Datenbank via Bundesarchiv

The Renoir painting was repatriated to France on June 3, 1949. Owner unknown, the painting was consigned to the French museum authorities for ultimate disposition. As had happened with so many other unclaimed looted works of art of museum quality, "La Femme au Puits" ended up in a Paris museum depot where it languished for decades before being transferred to the depot of the Musée d’Orsay, a museum in the heart of Paris inaugurated in December 1986 to house mostly 19th and 20th century works of art. In 1995, “La Femme au Puits” left the Orsay Depot and headed south to the sunny shores of the French Riviera where it is now at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer. It is doubtful that the public will be made aware of the checkered history of this small painting which is waiting for its rightful owner to identify and claim it.

Musee Renoir, Cagnes-sur-Mer
Source: Wikipedia

Current research will focus on someone by the name of de la Chapelle who acquired this painting in April 1941 from the notorious Parisian art dealer, Raphael Gérard, 

The “three graces” of art restitution

"The Graces of the Gardens of the Hesperides", Rubens, taken by the ERR
Source: Holocaust-Era Assets Portal, NARA, RG 111-SC-374665

Although they were not paragons of beauty by any Classical standard, Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker, and Rose Valland, constitute a trinity of hard-nosed women who flew the standard of art restitution in the post-1945 era as high and as steadily as they possibly could with the bare means put at their disposal to do justice in their own special way.

Indeed, each one of them behaved in a unique way, faced with specific sets of challenges that on occasion may have seemed insurmountable to them. And yet, they persevered. Although Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker left their respective duties with very mixed feelings, Rose Valland, in relative terms, fared far better and benefited from additional institutional support for her mission to recover items belonging to France and to individuals living in France at the time of the German occupation and the Vichy years. In true French style, Rose Valland was awarded some of the highest honors commensurate with engaging in feats of Resistance during the German occupation.

On the other hand, Ardelia Hall and Evelyn Tucker, the former at the US Department of State, the latter in the US zone of occupation in Austria, were given short shrift throughout their tenure in the US government and were forced to turn into one-woman armies with skeletal staff support in an all-male world. I emphasize this gender issue because it stands out as self-evident. The worlds of international diplomacy and Allied military occupation and civil administration were populated by men, while women, for the most part, served in auxiliary functions. Even the various Allied art recovery commissions established by France (Vaucher), Great Britain (Macmillan), and the United States (Roberts) were all-male casts of museum directors, art historians, curators, and civil servants.

While Ardelia Hall and Rose Valland were creatures of the prewar museum world, Evelyn Tucker was not. Ardelia Hall was a specialist in ancient China and began her museum career in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts before moving on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from which she was tapped to serve in a small office of cultural affairs at the US Department of State in 1944. Rose Valland worked in a curatorial capacity in prewar Paris, and was referred to by a senior curator in France, as a “little mouse”[la petite souris du Louvre] at the Louvre, before she was thrust into the weird world of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) at the Jeu de Paume.  Her tenacity earned her many postwar stars as an unwitting observer of institutional plunder for four long years. Following the Liberation of France, she served at Baden-Baden in the French zone of occupation of Germany where she coordinated restitution operations on behalf of the French government.

In some strange way, based on a comparative reading of the correspondence between Ardelia Hall, Evelyn Tucker and Rose Valland, Ardelia appeared to be the one on whom they both relied for strength, inspiration, and support, especially Evelyn whose continual run-ins with the US military administration in Vienna and Salzburg and confrontations with the leadership of the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) made her tasks all the more arduous. This might explain why Evelyn Tucker became increasingly an advocate of Austrian interests, sometimes setting her at odds even with official US restitution policy.

More will appear in these pages about Ardelia, Evelyn, and Rose. Suffice it to say, for now, that without their extraordinary displays of bravura and stubbornness, we would not be blessed today with hundreds of thousands of pages of invaluable information regarding thefts, investigations, and recoveries of countless cultural items purloined by the Nazis in Europe. In a corny way, I feel compelled to doff my invisible hat and say to them: thank you for sticking by your guns and handing over to us and future generations a priceless legacy of historical information documenting one of the most complex events of the last century.

Les trois muses. Fragment de décoration de la maison de Titus Dentatius Panthera à Pompéi, (54-68 ap.J.C.)
Source: Radio France Internationale (RFI) via Musée national d'archéologie de Naples

Nazi looted art conference at Lafayette College, October 26-28, 2011: a debriefing (I)

From left to right: Rachel Davidson, Diane Ahl, Radu Pribic

Courtesy: Lafayette College

It has now been close to two weeks since Lafayette College in quaint Easton, PA, hosted a first-ever conference on Nazi looted art. Starting from scratch, the organizers of the conference, Professors Diane Ahl and Radu Pribic, brought together a group of speakers who represented different perspectives on the issue of looted art and art restitution.

Day 1: October 26, 2011

The conference opened on a screening of “The Rape of Europa”, a freewheeling adaptation of Lynn Nicholas’ landmark work of same name which detailed the Nazi-orchestrated plunder of works and objects of art across Europe, while focusing most of its attention on the Allied—read American—civilian and mostly military response to those exactions and the means taken to repair the damage caused by Nazi thefts.

This was my third viewing of “The Rape of Europa” The first time was on television, the second time was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, during a Jewish Film Festival. That screening was memorable only because I ran into Lynn Nicholas looking a bit lost in the line of viewers waiting to see the film being shown in the East Wing. When I asked her what she was doing there, she said simply that she wanted to be there in case anyone had questions about the movie. What? You mean you weren’t invited to speak at your own movie? No, was the answer. The third screening was in Easton. At the second screening, I noticed three things:

1. someone intimately involved with production and scriptwriting decided to go for the schmaltz factor by inserting several high points of art restitution in the United States—the return of Marie Altmann’s famed paintings by Gustav Klimt, and the recovery of a painting by François Boucher from a Utah museum which had belonged to a member of the Paris-based heavily splintered Seligmann family. The true schmaltz occurred when a German citizen was featured as self-anointed rescuer of Judaica from his small town, the name of which escapes me completely. Not having anything to do with the “Rape of Europa,” it did, however, take on a life of its own by injecting the personal into the political, thus illustrating how a complex topic such as cultural plunder can transform daily lives into a quest for justice and, for others, redemption.
    
2. the Russians were very emotional and steadfast about their desire to equate their policy of no-return of so-called ‘trophy art’ and the humanitarian catastrophe wrought upon them by the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Luftwaffe against the former Soviet Union, especially during the years-long siege of Leningrad. Interestingly, and memorably, one of the hard-line ministers of culture who was interviewed in what is now Saint-Petersburg dropped a portentous hint, indicating that his countrymen would be willing to discuss the return of trophy art in 20 years or so. Since the movie was produced in the late 1990s, that would place a potential return date… within six to eight years. Now, that’s a sign of hope!
    
3. the “Rape of Europa” spends an unnecessarily long, long time on the siege of Monte Cassino in Italy. That accursed monastery drew hellfire for weeks without harming German defenses, but managing to erase a major cultural monument and killing close to a thousand civilians huddled for safety in what they had rightfully viewed as a ‘sanctuary’ from the horrors of war. Needless to say, I cannot blame your average GI Joe for wondering why ten thousand men had to die for that rock.

The third screening reaffirmed what I had long suspected, that the subject of art looting per se was given short shrift throughout this award-winning documentary. Although well-illustrated in its broadest possible strokes, the “Rape of Europa” goes very light on the very complex and very heavy on the not-so-clear. To wit: the actual plunder of collections in occupied Europe was a complicated affair brought about by conflicting interests within the Nazi hierarchy (Goering, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, von Ribbentrop, to name a few) and the plethora of local opportunists that the Nazis encountered in countries that they occupied, who were only too willing to provide their assistance, support and expertise in exchange for a cut of the booty. Too heavy on the not-so-clear is evidenced by the French episode on the Jeu de Paume and Rose Valland, the iconic heroine of art restitution in France on the verge of attaining sainthood should anyone pay close attention to the myths that have been designed around her career as an unwitting curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume in downtown Paris during the period of German occupation and as the lead postwar restitution officer for a succession of failed French governments up until the early 1960s. 


Myth #1: Rose Valland volunteered for her mission to spy on the Germans at the Jeu de Paume; myth number two: she risked her life every day while taking copious notes on the ins and outs of looted works entering and leaving the Jeu de Paume; myth number three: no one knew that she spoke German. These are some of the many details that have filtered out into postwar revisionist history of cultural plunder in France.

Producers of "Rape of Europa": Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham, and Bonni Cohen
Source: Rape of Europa

On the plus side, I was delighted to finally meet up and converse with Nicole Newnham, one of the producers of the “Rape of Europa” who spoke candidly of her experiences making this beautifully-filmed and edited documentary on a subject that resonates even more today than it did a decade ago and which, for some corny reason, brought me close to tears, more so because we are still so far away from reaching a far-reaching solution to the long-term effects of the continental-wide plunder of cultural items during the Third Reich and the postwar occupation of Germany and Austria by Allied forces. It’s not so much the Rape of Europa as it is the rape of the cultural heritage of the victims of Nazism and Fascism, writ large.