Franz Fühmann's "The Car with the Yellow Star"

by Marc Masurovsky

In order to understand how antisemitism works, it’s often wise to hear it from the proverbial horse’s mouth. In this instance, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical novel, “The car with the Yellow Star” is a good starting point. Although understated in its treatment of the Jews, it remains nevertheless a sobering account of a Nazi antisemite who eventually “saw the light” and closed the door on a decades-long love affair with National Socialism and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Fūhmann was raised in a highly nationalistic pro-German village in the Sudetenland region of interwar Czechoslovakia. He was raised as a blindly loyal Nazi, swearing allegiance to his hero Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. 

The Sudetenland region

From SA member, he joined the Wehrmacht and ended up on the Eastern Front as a Private First Class, fighting the Soviets in the Ukraine. On his retreat back to central Europe, he was captured by Soviet troops while making his way to the American front lines. He spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp doing hard labor. He was eventually set free and settled down in the newly-minted German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where he spent the rest of his life, asserting himself as a prominent poet and writer. 

If you can set aside the fact that he lived in East Germany and was published by an East German publishing house, I highly recommend this short book which has the benefit of giving us a snapshot of the Third Reich as experienced by an unquestioning follower. Up to us to decide how sincere Fühmann is. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If there is a propagandistic aspect to his self-reflective novel, you can glimpse it at the very end and it does not detract from the historical value of his testimonial.

Sources:

The map of the Sudetenland comes from the following website:

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/10188/where-exactly-was-the-sudetenland

The cover for Fühmann's novel comes from AbeBooks.

Different shades of recovery

by Marc Masurovsky

The process of recovery of looted cultural, artistic and religious objects is daunting for several reasons:

If action is not taken right away to recover a looted object, it becomes exponentially difficult to identify its current location. In the case of losses during the Third Reich, “recovery” was an absurd notion since the perpetrators of the thefts controlled the reins of political, legal, and economic power. Hence, the process of tracing the object could only occur after a regime change and with rules in place that would facilitate such searches. Moreover, if the works confiscated or plundered by the Nazi regime ended up in neighboring countries, what rights did the claimants have to recover such works, since Nazi Germany was a recognized nation in the community of nations, for better or for worse? What rights do they have now? Since most of the domestic losses suffered by Jews living in Germany were State-sponsored, there was no mechanism in place in other nations to deem the actions of the Nazi state illegal and the confiscated property subject to restitution. Therefore, if you lost your property in 1934 and if you survived all of the subsequent events provoked by the Nazis’ fury against the Jews and others, you would have to wait for at least 12 years to assert a claim of restitution.

If your missing object is located in the hands of a new owner, regardless of how that person or institution acquired the victims’ property, the laws governing property rights and title to “legally acquired” property prevent the plundered owner from obtaining restitution of his/her looted property without going through a complex tangle of legal and political maneuvers. In the absence of explicit mechanisms put in place by the national governments of nations where such looted objects have ended up, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover them. This state of affairs endures to this day and has been a continual source of frustration for victims of plunder with minimal accommodations made by governments and courts to facilitate the process of recovery.

If the looted object is declared part of the cultural patrimony of the nation from where it ended up, the recovery process involves a direct negotiation with that nation’s government, a very laborious discussion which usually ends in utter failure. What is the word of a dispossessed Jewish owner against that of an official who upholds the notion of cultural patrimony and inalienability of art objects located in State collections, whether those objects were looted during genocidal acts? Culpable countries hiding behind such imperialistic arguments are: France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, to cite the worst, Eastern European nations, all of the nations that once formed the Soviet Union.

When source nations seek the return of their looted patrimony which usually consists of antiquities illegally extracted from archaeological sites or illegally removed from religious and other sacred edifices, the wait can last for an eternity; it can also be circumscribed to anywhere from a year to several decades if the aggrieved nation is willing to compromise, accept trade offs like offer commercial advantages to the withholding nation, or agree to symbolic returns with a promise never to come back and ask for anymore as in the case of South Korea and the shabby treatment it received from France over a set of priceless manuscripts.

Aggrieved source nations include but are not limited to Greece, Turkey, Italy, South Korea, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Mali.

In other words, we have not made much progress in the past several decades. As provenance continues to become optional in art market transactions and most nations do not encourage their cultural institutions to be more forthcoming in publicizing the history of the objects that are part of their “patrimony,” nothing short of a cultural revolution will sway them to change course and become, god forbid, ethical.

Prisoners of war

by Marc Masurovsky

In late January 2014, Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, declared that art objects stolen from Jews “are the last prisoners of WWII”. He asked that they be returned to their rightful owners.  Two years later, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2016 in support of the so-called HEAR Act, S.2763, Ronald Lauder emphasized, rightly or wrongly, that this proposed bill would help return looted works of art, “the final prisoners of World War II,” to their rightful owners.

This is not the first time that we’ve heard art objects being compared to prisoners of war. The analogy, wittingly or not, produces a misconception as to the nature of the thefts of art objects from Jews and distorts the chronology of events surrounding cultural plunder at the hands of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. It is a recent notion which may have its roots in the “Spoils of War” conference organized by Elizabeth Simpson in 1995 in collaboration with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative arts.”

The “Spoils of War” conference came on the heels of disclosures that important works of art thought to be missing at the end of WWII had resurfaced in the former Soviet Union. The trove which a shocked world discovered was described by some as the "last prisoners of World War II," citing Karl E. Meyer’s Editorial Notebook: Russia's Hidden Attic; Returning the Spoils of World WarII, (N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 1, 1995, p. A20). Meyer, a journalist for the New York Times, was referring to important French Impressionist paintings that had been deemed lost in the wreckage of WWII only to reappear in an exhibit at the Hermitage. In an unforgettable display of nationalistic and cultural arrogance, Soviet authorities flaunted their prized “takings”, the result of massive sweeps of works and objects of art by so-called Trophy Brigades operating in areas “liberated” by the Red Army in the months leading up to the end of WWII. The Soviets viewed these “treasures” as “reparations” for the staggering losses in lives, equipment, cultural objects and infrastructure that they had suffered at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. [Cited by Seth A. Stuhl, Spoils of War? A Solution to the Hermitage Trove Debate , 18 J. Int'l L. 409 (2014).

Since 1995, the expression has been re-appropriated time and time again mostly in the form of catchy titles as a mis-characterization of the full dimension and scope of cultural plunder during the Nazi era (1933-1945). Some of the many authors, mostly legal experts, who used the expression:

1997: Margaret M. Mastroberardino, The Last Prisoners of World War II, 9 Pace Int'l L. Rev. 315 (1997)

2002 Emily J. Henson, The Last Prisoners of War: Returning World War II Art to Its Rightful Owners— Can Moral Obligations Be Translated into Legal Duties?, 51 DEPAUL L. REV. 1103, 1105

2004, Geri J. Yonover, NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: The "Last Prisoners of War" 1: Unrestituted Nazi-Looted Art Fall, 2004 6 J.L. & Soc. Challenges 81

2006 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, "A Silesian Crossroads for Europe’s Displaced Books: Compensation or Prisoners of War?"  

A world-renown authority on Nazi looting of archives, libraries and books, Dr. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted has often referred to looted books and archives as “prisoners of WWII, held captive by recipient nations as “compensation” or “reparations.”

2010, Jessica Grimes, "Forgotten Prisoners of War: Returning Nazi-Looted Art by Relaxing the National Stolen Property Act ," Roger Williams University Law Review: Vol. 15: Iss. 2, Article 4.


2011, Maria Liberatrice Vicentini, manager of the Nucleo Conservazione Archivio Siviero, suggested that unrestituted works of art should be viewed as “prisoners of war.”

2014, Jessica Schubert, "Prisoners of War: Nazi-Era Looted Art and the Need for Reform in the United States," Touro Law Review: Vol. 30: No. 3, Article 10.

Although these “prisoners of WWII” are universally associated with the former Soviet Union, one can easily argue that they exist in most countries involved in the Second World War, which received untold numbers of cultural items with no provenance that they simply “hung on to”. They rationalized their presence in State collections and warehouses in the same manner as Soviet officials did and their successors in the newly independent nations forged out of the former Soviet Socialist Republics—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus—and their close neighbors in the rest of Eastern Europe. Proof being in the pudding, however, in the absence of coherent, systematic, inventories and audits of such holdings in the aforementioned nations, we can only continue to speculate wildly about the true numbers of these “prisoners.”

Summary:

Let’s give credit where credit is due. The late Elan Steinberg was a major force behind the WJC’s many advocacy campaigns of the 1990s In 1998, he called unrestituted looted art "the last prisoners of war."  In November 1998, the WJC reiterated its assertion that looted paintings by Matisse, Chagall and Fernand Léger residing in French museum collections as “orphans” waiting to be returned to “loving parents” were in fact “the last prisoners of war” and they should be “freed.” .

Unless anyone protests, we will award to Elan Steinberg paternity for the expression, which Ron Lauder must have adopted since then. Still, the expression is laden with misconceptions.

Prisoners of war are people, and like with “orphaned” works, we tend to give human shape to objects and assign them sentient qualities which allows us to compare with them with individuals who have been captured in combat or in a battle zone and subjected to forced internment, confinement, and imprisonment by a hostile force. A prisoner of war is usually a member of the military or an agency affiliated with the one of the branches of a country’s armed forces and taken into custody by the “enemy.”

Prisoners of war are usually released at the end of the conflict that provoked their capture. They can also be exchanged for enemy prisoners. In principle, they have rights covered by international agreements, like the Geneva Convention.

Not to be flip, but can all of the aforementioned be applied to cultural objects being held “against their will” by a country which has no designated right to hold them and whose responsibility, at least its ethical or moral responsibility, is to return them to their rightful owners?

Furthermore, a prisoner of war has to be captured during a period of active military conflict. The looting of art objects under Nazi rule began in 1933, six years before the eruption of military conflict on the European continent. Theoretically, the expression “prisoner of war” cannot apply to any art object which was misappropriated, confiscated, plundered or otherwise stolen from its rightful owner prior to the outbreak of war, in other words, during the six-year period of 1933-1939.

Mountain out of a mole hill? Historical accuracy is important and the use of rhetoric to score political points is so widespread as to constitute an epidemic of sorts and therefore cannot be controlled by conventional methods. Only through education and awareness raising can the record be corrected. Art objects, once again, are not people and do not share their characteristics. They have no will of their own. They might symbolize events that extend far beyond their intended purpose as a result of their twisted or disrupted ownership histories. But they cannot—and should not-- be compared to people held against their will behind bars or barbed wire. If people insist on analogizing unrestituted art objects with “prisoners of war”, then it would be more useful to compare them to US soldiers listed as “MIA-Missing in Action” whose return has been elusive since the end of the Vietnam War.





Where does that get us? Nowhere.

The day after…

by Marc Masurovsky
 
We just commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, at least that portion of the war being fought on the European continent. It took another three months of heavy fighting, two atomic bombs, and an invasion of Japan to bring the Empire of the Rising Sun to the table and sign an unconditional surrender in mid-August of the same year.

Let’s try and imagine what it must have been like to wake up the day after the surrender of the Reich and to think about all that had occurred since Hitler took power in January 1933.

With 60 million people dead, including six million Jews, men, women and children, five million others who perished in prisons and camps, a third of the male population of the Soviet Union destroyed, one third of Europe’s infrastructure in ruins. Basically a traumatized world. Not a pleasant morning on which to view a sunrise.

Let’s focus on the thefts and displacements of objects. With every act of physical aggression comes a theft especially during military conflicts, civil disorder, and wholesale extermination of one group by another. In this case, the backdrop of a war on culture decreed by National Socialism everywhere Nazis set foot provoked a systematic and systemic displacement of objects from homes, businesses, and public places.

Take a camera with a very wide angle lens and click. The snapshot you record should tell you where objects were located on May 10, 1945.

 In short, it was an utter mess. Displacement meant movement. Objects were removed from their original home and taken somewhere else, never to return again. Liberators, whether military or militia or resistance units, found “things” everywhere they went---barns, attics, basements, gyms, cellars, abandoned apartments and villas and farmhouses, barracks, everywhere someone with a gun showed up, there were objects strewn about or carefully stacked, no matter.


There was no system in place on May 10, 1945 to properly dispose of “found” objects. It was all improvised which led to massive abuses, naturally, like theft.

In most places, objects did not travel very far. They remained within the immediate geographic area and ended up mostly in other people’s homes, which means that those objects were never recovered unless someone denounced you after the war ended, neighbors stealing from their neighbors, communities cannibalizing themselves.

Those objects which traveled far were those taken either by people fleeing one area and getting as far away as possible from the scene of the crime, or by paramilitary or military units, resistance groups on the prowl. In that case, objects could travel long distances, ten, one hundred, even one thousand kilometers or more.

So, on May 10, 1945, you must imagine that most objects that were removed illegally from people’s homes by neighbors, strangers, policemen, thugs, agents, soldiers, officers, either stayed on your street, or moved to another neighborhood, or another city, or another country, ultimately another continent.

On May 10, 1945, Europe was a mess, like an attic through which a tornado had passed and objects blown out and falling wherever.

That is why “things” taken from Western Europe went as far as Kiev, Ukraine.

Soviet counteroffensive, 1943-44

That is why “things” taken out of the Soviet Union went as far as Germany and Austria.

That is why “things” taken out of Norway went “south.”

Norway

“Things” taken out of France went north, east, south, and west.

Northern France

   And so forth and so on.

Axis-occupied Europe

The problem of restitution on May 10, 1945, was a staggering mess with a crime scene engulfing 15 European countries.

Now, let’s finally get to the point.

How many objects were removed?

No number can adequately reflect the reality of the thefts.

But, governments and armies are in the business of releasing information which is supposed to be accepted as “official”, therefore not up for discussion.

When the French government says that 40,000 objects were removed from its territory, it’s because it recovered 40,000 objects from Germany, Austria and other places. Half of those objects presumably went through the Jeu de Paume in downtown Paris. That makes it easier to count. 

On December 1, 1998, American pundits announced that there were 125,000 works of art still missing which needed to be identified, recovered and returned to their rightful owners. No one bothered to ask: How did you come up with that figure?

Then, as recently as this year, another figure was proposed: 600,000 objects were still missing. And yet again, no one bothered to ask where that figure came from and what documents were used to tabulate a figure which had grown more than five-fold in less than two decades.

At the end of the movie, “Woman in Gold” a text appears indicating that there are 100,000 works of art still missing. Already people who have seen the film are quoting that figure as if it is manna from heaven. But here again, where did the filmmakers obtain that figure? Does it apply only to Austria or to Europe as a whole? That figure mysteriously coincides with one put forth by the London-based Art Loss Register (ALR) as the total number of all objects in its registry of stolen objects, including contemporary commercial thefts.

The short answer is: no one knows because no one has bothered to know. Simple. If you don’t bother to know how many objects were stolen, you don’t really have to focus on restitution issues. The missing objects are gone with the wind, just like in the wake of a storm. Poof! Disappeared. It would be simpler to consider WWII and the Holocaust as a natural disaster. It does not work that way. These were nightmares created by human beings against other human beings, a man-made disaster which implies accountability.

If you do come up with a number like 100,000 or 125,000, you might have something in mind. Could it be that those 100,000 works of art are worth something? Could it be that the numbers game is all about value? And not necessarily about individual losses? That the only way to interest someone in restitution is to place a monetary value on an object?

Maybe, for some people, the “restitution game” is just a global treasure hunt where we forget about the “why”, the ”where” and the “how” of the thefts committed in the context of genocide. People hunt for treasures from the Holocaust the same way they look for metal on beaches and dive for gold laying about on the ocean floor. With a little effort, you too can get rich. Or so you think.

Except that we have no idea how to define a “treasure” and, for the most part, we don’t really know what we are looking for, except for objects listed on online databases.

The only way to understand the reality of the thefts that took place across Europe is to collect all relevant information about what disappeared, sift through the evidence, sort it, and catalogue it. This exercise began but was never finished in the years that followed May 9, 1945, perhaps because it took too much time and the chances of finding anything were deemed to be close to zero. So why bother? Instead of recording everything that was lost, the focus was placed on registering losses of “culturally significant” items. No one really defined “culturally significant” except to suggest that the loss of the cultural item meant a loss for the nation. In other words, someone had to decide whether your objects had any “cultural” meaning as determined by the government of your country. That “someone” was usually an art historian, a museum curator or director, or an official in a government ministry. This is where the recording of cultural losses crossed over into cultural policy and esthetics.

If you were unfortunate to have owned objects deemed “insignificant”, chances are that your government was not going to assist you in locating them.

insignificant?

If, on the other hand, there was something “significant” about your collection, the government did take an interest and registered your claim.

significant?

Treasure?

unworthy?

It is difficult to pinpoint the difference between significant and insignificant. If we use French archival records as a point of reference, those containing information about cultural losses as an example, we can begin to understand the difference.

The members of the Art Restitution Commission, Commission de récupération artistique (CRA), were mostly museum curators and art historians. They devised, perhaps through trial and error, a ranking system using different colored pencils and a lettering system from A to H. Each letter stood for a type of object. Many lists of losses submitted by victims were hardly annotated, meaning that there was little chance that the objects that they contained would ever be registered as “worthy” or “significant.” [This question will be explored in greater detail in future articles on plundered art. Stay tuned…]

As an example, the “Répertoire des biens spoliés”, a central registry that the French government published in 1947, can be viewed as a central catalogue of “culturally significant” objects listed as still missing by that date. Similar lists were published in other countries using different formulas and presentation schemes. But the end result was the same: these official lists tended to summarize, encapsulate the universe of what was missing as “significant” and what was being sought by the governments of the nations which had suffered under the Nazi boot.

It’s time to understand, better late than never, that art restitution, the idea of cultural loss, was quickly subverted even before the ink had dried on the act of surrender of the Third Reich. It was not about what you lost but whether what you lost was important enough for the government to take heed of your loss. The principle of restitution was transformed into an arbitrary State-sponsored diktat which implicitly carried a judgment about the quality of your losses and how the government perceived your ownership of cultural assets.

A far cry from being the victim of an act of cultural plunder and genocide.

That explains in part why restitution efforts fell far short of their potential, because they quickly had very little to do with you as an individual victim. The idea of ‘recovery’ was intertwined with the interest of the nation, of the State. When the State decided: enough was enough, it meant that it was no longer interested in promoting location, identification and recovery of objects, even those that were deemed “significant.” It was easier to mourn them as a nation’s loss than to make the effort to “find” them.

The irony of this exercise is that many “mourned” objects ended up sitting in the museums of the nations that “stopped looking for them.” Hypocrisy? Double speak? Or sheer deceit?

So, we are back to where we started: a staggering mess. The only way to solve it is through citizens’ initiatives, publicizing the losses, identifying where lost objects are located especially if they sit in State collections and demanding their return.

It is up to each and everyone of us to document these crimes and to tell their stories, not necessarily for the sake of restitution but to teach a public lesson about the crime of cultural plunder, to restore the word “significant” to its proper context and to assert that an individual’s cultural tastes and losses are not subject to government whims and elitist conceptions of “Kultur.”

When the gloves come off, does this mean WAR?

by Marc Masurovsky

As we say in the United States, ‘them’s fightin’ words’! True, they are. Perhaps, they deliver more bang than bite. But they emerge from the deepest recesses of my fractured soul, enraged at the inability of our leaders, our representatives, our specialists, our experts, all of them, no exceptions made, to come up with solutions that make it possible for the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War and the Third Reich and the Axis powers in Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Asia, writ large, to find some measure of justice in the aftermath of global genocidal and ethnocidal conflict, to recover what was ripped from the bosom of so many as the extensions of their souls and likes. After all, it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If this is true, the loss of cultural assets feels like the forcible removal of light from the eyes of the victims to benefit those who feel anointed to possess what is not rightfully theirs. At a larger scale, one can argue that the rights of individuals are trumped by the arrogance of groups and the States that lend succor to their racial and expansionist ambitions by which they impose their ideological and political will through force of law and arms. In short, the victims of cultural plunder—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, e tutti quanti….—are united in theory and principle under a single banner. Unfortunately, the trauma of loss through confiscation, requisition, outright theft, incarceration, and exploitation, was not sufficient to bring the victims under one flag, regardless of origin, race, ethnicity, creed, and belief.

The cynics tell us that this is what makes us human, that division is a prelude to conquest. Divide and conquer has always been the motto of those who wage war against their own people and those of other nations. Divided, we were at the end of the Second World War, made to rely on our communal groups, political parties, and national governments, to “do the right thing” for us all. By the way, the “we” and the “us” are used symbolically since my parents had not even met at V-E Day while I was an errant molecule in search of a home. The “we” and the “us” reverberate across generations, starting with the unmarked graveyards and mass burial pits of the former Soviet Union, the ash piles of Birkenau, the burial mounds of Katyn, the massacred villages of Northern Italy, Yugoslavia, and the thousands of unnamed places of death and destruction that pockmark the map of a warring planet.

Divided…. Why should we be divided in the first place? That is my question to all of you who read these pages. What is the benefit of arguing from one’s narrow communitarian interest? Better, more effective representation? Some of you might feel that there is nothing else that can be done and we should simply move on. That is definitely an option. But, if moving on is an option, then we should shutter down these pages and no longer discuss restitution as a basic human right of the victims of cultural plunder. As some cocky military leaders have repeatedly stated on the battlefields of history, surrender is not an option.

Not surrendering is an acknowledgment of a will to fight, to struggle, to advocate, to press, for something as vague and ambiguous as “justice.” Is it to be justice for all ? Or will it be justice for me? How about justice for you? Or is it really justice for them? Should justice be meted out in equal measures or in proportionate measures? Justice that is proportionate to the crime? How much is too much? How much is too little? What does it take to sate a broken soul and allow it to “move on”, to “find closure”?

Reality is altogether different. As history shows us repeatedly, the scars of trauma induced by all forms of violence are transmitted from one generation to the next. The degree to which the successive generations absorb and internalize the legacies of abuse and cruelty wrought upon their parents and grand-parents can determine whether or not they will act to avenge them or “act out” these inherited scars—to wit: most internal civil conflicts can be linked to the absence of meaningful settlements between members of divided communities. This is as old as history. But does it have to continue to be that way?

Looking ahead at the advent of 2012, how do we ensure that the crime of cultural plunder is appropriately punished and its victims fairly treated, across the board, regardless of who they are and where they live and what they represent? Yes, indeed, regardless of social class, status, rank, socio-economic standing, color-blind, community-blind, religion-blind, idea-blind. Blind to division and schism, solutions that are for all, not for the few, or the select.

I must tell you that nothing will be accomplished without an explicit recognition that cultural thefts cut across all boundaries, because the end result is the same—the rape of culture, way beyond that of “Europa” as Lynn Nicholas has postulated. We have to recognize that cultural theft violates the basic rights of all human beings living in a social and cultural matrix. Once we can recognize this basic fact, we can actually get to the next level. Cultural crime is a universal crime against all peoples, it is a crime which drives deep stakes into the specificity of what makes us who we are, which targets our identity as members of specific groups. Depending on the severity of the crime, it can result in an outright attempt at genocide or ethnocide. To acknowledge and accept the specificities of these crimes as bounded by cultural, social, and oftentimes religious matrices, is vital to our ability to move forward if we are to unite under one flag and fight for what is legitimately ours, that is the right to culture, our cultural rights, our right to own and display cultural assets without the fear of taking, without fear of forcible removals, because of who we are and what we are and where we live and for whom we vote or do not vote and what we speak or pray to, especially during times of internal or external conflicts.

The next level consists in agreeing that cultural plunder is a crime against humanity, perpetrated against individuals and the groups to which they belong.

Once we reach this particular point, the big question emerges: what is to be done?

What next? In all cases, national governments will endorse but not enforce the explicit righting of cultural crimes against individual citizens, arguing that these are the facts of life, and their citizens should settle for what they can. Moreover, statutes of limitations, problems associated with current possession of stolen cultural assets which are condoned as inalienable aspects of life in a civilized society—to the current possessor go the spoils!—will prevent or forestall any possible semblance of justice.

Hence, the only conceivable strategy to address the crime of cultural plunder is the international community of nations and groups that have a vested interest in righting the wrongs wrought against their cultural rights and to press for restitution of ill-gotten cultural assets.

I will leave you with this thought. As the strategy for global redress unfurls, you will hear more in these pages. Stay tuned as 2012 might become a very interesting year. After all, we have not much to lose and everything to gain.