865 kilos of art flown into Barcelona

by Marc Masurovsky

There are historical documents that tend to capture the imagination and leave us dangling for answers and solutions. However, archives can be fickle, in that they are structured like labyrinths of clues, false leads, erroneous analyses and deductions, amongst which one finds pure gems. You just have to endure the pain of hitting your head against a brick wall one too many times until, at the last minute, when you are ready to throw in the towel, you read a document with a throw-away sentence or paragraph on page 20 and you have that aha moment. Yes!

Nothing like that has occurred so far—no aha moment—with the contents of a very strange headless document, unsigned and hiding in plain sight (others have already read it, but they seemed unable to digest it in any meaningful way!). This 11-sentence long document was drafted on 19 March 1945, with a handwritten indication that the intelligence actually dates to the period of 16-28 February 1945.

It speaks of 865 kilos or 1907 pounds (a truckload) of “objets d’art and pictures which have recently arrived in Barcelona on the Lufthansa airline in two consignments. The rest of the cargo was destined for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid courtesy of the Spanish Ambassador to Berlin, Ginès Vidal y Saura.

Apparently, another plane flew in carrying “5 crates of religious objets d’art” which were “consigned to the German Embassy in Madrid, courtesy of the German Reich." When the rats abandon ship, they usually take their loot with them or whatever they can grab at the last minute and leave Dodge City, in this case, Berlin, en route to “freedom” in Franco Spain.

This very brief raw intelligence note was tucked into a folder of the Roberts Commission (Record Group 239) regarding goings-on in Spain during WWII. The Roberts Commission collected raw information from US, British and other Allied agencies about the illicit movement of art works and objects as well as their handlers across Axis-occupied Europe flowing into so-called “neutral countries” like Spain and perhaps even ending up in the United States.

The preceding document was a report dated 20 August 1945 from the Art Unit of OSS to a member of the Blockade Division at the Foreign Economic Administration regarding art smuggling “in the Iberian peninsula.” The following document was handwritten by Theodore (Ted) Rousseau, Jr. (1912-1973), one of the key members of the MFA&A squad in Western Europe.  His jottings pertained to Lufthansa cargo flights landing in Barcelona in February 1945. One of them—dated 10 February 1945—contained unknown cargo. The others were filled with mail, newspapers and spare parts for Lufthansa planes.

And that’s it.

In order to confirm if this document related to an authentic, verifiable event, one would have to follow the trail in the bowels of the records of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services/Record Group 226) for Spain in 1945 and a deeper dive into the Roberts Commission records (Record Group 239) since not all of its records were digitized. There’s no other way. That requires a series of trips to the National Archives, College Park MD, where the OSS records and those of the Roberts Commission are kept.

If the document relates to an actual verifiable event, the prospect of nearly 1 ton of works and objects of art arriving in Barcelona in February 1945 is a symbolic reflection of the extent to which Franco Spain was used as a transit or destination point for looted art coming in from all over Europe.

Happy hunting!

Other relevant digital sources:

“The factual list of Nazis protected by Spain”

« Ginès Vidal y Saura, embajador español en Berlín y excelentísimo ordinario de arte expoliado por los Nazis »

Diplomatic highs and lows in Paris

by Marc Masurovsky

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, special envoy on Holocaust affairs for the US Department of State, was one of the most prominent speakers at the 20th anniversary colloquium of the CIVS in Paris on November 15, 2019.

The main point person since the Clinton era on matters pertaining to Holocaust-era claims, Mr. Eizenstat delivered an unusual speech regarding looted art, restitution, France’s treatment of looted art in State collections, and his own legacy.

From year to year, the Eizenstat narrative on looted art and restitution has morphed and been rewritten, not for stylistic reasons but perhaps because Mr. Eizenstat has had a decades-long love/hate relationship with the whole idea of restituting art objects to plundered victims of the Nazis. And he simply does not know how to address it. After all, you cannot package art the way you bundle insurance policies, gold bars and coins, bank accounts and so forth, something that he excels at, which has yielded billions of dollars worth of settlements for Jewish victims and their families. For that reason alone, Mr. Eizenstat's legacy as a reliable and devoted advocate and champion of Holocaust victims' rights is uncontested and admirable.

Here are some of his many statements which were oftentimes punctuated by occasional spurts of ire:

-“France is going from being a laggard to being a leader” on questions of art restitution. That elicited some giggles including from Mr. Eizenstat who appeared pleased by his joke which was not really a joke.

-The CIVS conference symbolized “our last opportunity”. Let’s recall that the Prague Conference on Holocaust-era Assets in June 2009 was also “our last opportunity.”

He reminded us of his infinite capacity to repeat “fake news” about cultural losses during WWII. Unverified, the numbers put forth by Eizenstat are the same ones he has repeated since 1998.
According to him, 600000 paintings were looted during WWII, of which 100000 are still missing. In 1997, Philip Saunders of Trace database had made this unfounded assertion.  (Mr. Eizenstat went on record with those numbers in 2006). The Polish government alone claims that half a million cultural objects were removed from its territory during WWII. Which irresponsible historian or advocacy group came up with these fictitious numbers? Not even the Monuments Men could be bothered to audit the cultural losses of each nation victim of Nazi aggression. The more accurate estimates situate cultural losses in the millions.

Speaking of the Monuments Men, Mr. Eizenstat delivered a paean in their honor, citing their bravery and courage (smoking pipes and sporting tweeds) in Munich and Wiesbaden, while recovering 5 million works of art! No kidding! He forgot to mention that this figure mostly accounts for books, decorative objects and State-owned art. Not much room left for Jews, is there? Moreover, 5 million might be just a tad exaggerated. But who’s counting? You get the idea. Lots of looted stuff was repatriated to countries of origin.

Mr. Eizenstat was on a roll. He posited that it was impossible to identify owners at the end of the war. If so, how did so many objects get returned? The heirless asset problem must be staggering.

Let us now enter fantasy land. In December 1997, Mr. Eizenstat came up with the brilliant idea for a conference on looted art or so he says. That’s really strange because he was firmly opposed to the inclusion of looted art in any international convening dealing with assets during the Holocaust. It was the seizure of the two Schiele paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1998 that provoked the inclusion of looted art in what became the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets.

Speaking of the 1998 conference, Mr. Eizenstat, since November 2018, has changed his tone regarding the 11 Washington Principles that he penned which were supposed to frame an international strategy to identify looted art in public collections (not private) and suggest ways for victims to settle their grievances with current possessors.

Well, as it turns out, these non-binding Principles were mostly based on a set of guidelines developed by American museums earlier in 1998 when faced with mounting criticism over their indifference to the presence of stolen objects in their collections. A funny way of helping claimants by seeking inspiration from the very institutions that are firmly opposed to any form of restitution.

Mr. Eizenstat went on to honor the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) for setting up a task force to address the question of looted art in their collections. To that end, the AAMD issued a set of guidelines in June 1998 which served as the benchmark for the Washington Principles, of which Mr. Eizenstat is the uncontested author.

Mr. Eizenstat proffered adoring words for Philippe de Montebello. The flamboyant former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a fierce opponent of restitution but a very savvy museum official who understood the value of pre-emptive strikes on issues of looted art and artifacts. To wit, he promoted the drawing up of guidelines for American museums to follow when confronted with objects in their collections that might be of dubious provenance and negotiated creative settlements with the Italian government over the presence of looted antiquities in the Met’s collections.

Mr. Eizenstat was particularly combative in upholding his legacy and defending his record against critics who have blasted him for “doing nothing” and uttering mere “words.”

Seizing the opportunity in a fiery tone, he shared a long list of recommendations and critiques in Uzi-like fashion. It was hard to keep up. Some of the more notable ones follow:

1/ he denounced the impossibility of de-accessioning restitutable objects from French museums as “a French problem.”

2/ He went on to skewer Dutch museums for having reneged on their commitment to the Washington Principles by equating the cohesiveness of their collections with the interests of Holocaust claimants—the notorious “balance of interest” doctrine approved by Dutch museums in 2016? Verify.

3/ he denounced the German Limbach commission and its 15 cases in 15 years.

4/ Once again, he congratulated the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for showing the way on how to handle looted objects in their collections.

5/ Quoting the AAMD and the AAM, he observed that the NEPIP portal was worthless and “outmoded”, in other words, unusable.

6/ He criticized US museums for being so aggressive towards claimants by resorting to technical legal defenses in order to dismiss their claims.

7/ He applauded the HEAR Act as the antidote to summary judgments petitioned by museum lawyers against claimants, whether meritorious or not.

8/ He thinks highly of the JUST Act which requires countries to publish annual reports on the state of restitution in their midst.

9/ he took partial credit for launching “provenance research as a new profession.” As if it was not performed prior to 1998.

10/ He congratulated France for acting as a coordinator between the five standing restitution committees.

Then, Mr. Eizenstat pulled out his foggy crystal ball and peered inside it, noting:

1/ Forced sales and flight sales (fluchtgut) are to be included as part of the Washington Principles (the former are mentioned explicitly in the Terezin Declaration and the latter are suggested implicitly therein);

2/ provenance research is expensive and requires resources.

3/ Public museums should publish on the Internet a detailed provenance for all of their objects.

4/ research should be conducted in all museums—private and public.

5/ De-accession laws need to be changed in order to accommodate restitution of looted objects.

6/ The Washington Principles apply to private collections

7/ Every country should designate a point of reference for claimants

8/ there should be no time limits on claims.

9/ he denounced the European Union as being “behind the curve.”

10/ with regards to so-called heirless assets, Eizenstat reiterated the need for “just and fair solutions” which amount to selling off these unclaimed assets after giving research one more try. Meanwhile, the institutions holding such objects should educate their public about how they ended up in their collections. As an aside, Eizenstat lauded the Austrian solution to the heirless assets question, embodied in the National Fund run by Hannah Lessing. In short, if Austrian federal museums identify objects in their midst for which there are no identifiable owners, they are transferred to the National Fund which follows up with its own research and posts the objects on its website. After a period of time has elapsed, the Fund sets aside those objects for sale, the proceeds of which are disbursed amongst needy families of survivors. Ms. Lessing begged to differ during the question and answer period.

That was enough for one day.

Teaching about looted art to ten to twelve year olds

Ten years ago, I was invited to teach a workshop in a Jewish Day School outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The average age of the students was eleven or twelve years old.

Where to begin? Where to end?

I thought to myself that it was best to adapt to the ways of my hosts and to deliver a message that would appear to be appropriate and simple. Theft is wrong, regardless of who commits it. Buying stolen property is wrong and it’s especially wrong if you are buying stolen property from people who are being victimized because of their faith, their ethnicity, their belief systems, and their lifestyles.

Judge me, call me names, but I dare anyone of you to do what I did.

Sometimes one has to reach for simplicity, even over-simplicity, as long as the outcome is clear and the message is left unscathed.

I leave it to you to judge but someone has to do this. And in this instance, I accepted the job.

Two days well spent with enthusiastic kids who learned about provenance research and how to detect faulty provenances in less than a day. I gave them all the equivalent of a gold star.

Time well spent.

Landscapes of cultural plunder revisited

Vue de la zone entre la porte de Clignancourt el la porte Montmarte, 1943-1944
Source: BHdv / Roger-Viollet / Direction technique de la voirie parisienne via  Patrimoine numérique via Bibliothèque de l´Hotel de Ville de Paris

Today’s truism: history is geographic. Every event can be broken down into an infinite number of particles that become data points which can be translated into a longitude and a latitude.

So what?

So what???

Viewed through another lens, the study of history is as complex as you want it to be. Depending on the scale at which you approach it, it can be lofty and very top-down, “small-scale” as geographers would put it, or extremely “granular”, from the ground up, or “large-scale” if described by our friends in geography departments.

When working with loot, plunder, and its inevitable yield, each looted or plundered item is a potential data point. How can that be?

If you ask the following questions, you might actually begin to understand:

1. Where was it when it was stolen?
    
2. How was it moved?
    
3. Where was it taken?
    
4. Where did it go from there?

Each one of these questions produces a location. Space separates each location. The stolen object moves from one location to another and, by so doing, evolves through space and across time. All of a sudden, the stolen object adopts a spatio-temporal personality.

Now what?

We have an object, which moves through space and time. Each movement can be assigned a longitude and a latitude. Each coordinate can be anchored in a time frame. Hence, we can see the object evolve across a time line and a landscape.

Within each location, there is granularity. For instance, was the seized object inside an apartment or a house? If so, what room? What floor? Where was it? On the wall? On the floor? Inside a drawer? The level of detail can be excruciating, but for each level of detail, there is a corresponding scale, which allows the geographer to produce a visualization.

Once the object is removed from its original location, it must reach another site, more often than not a storage facility. How does it reach that destination? The itinerary alone invites all sorts of questions which we can or cannot answer.

Is that useful?

It all depends on what you are looking for.

For example, let’s take the database of objects that transited through the Jeu de Paume. Link: www.errproject.org/jeudepaume.

You’ll notice that, in addition to object-based information, there are locations and dates assigned to it. That was a deliberate attempt to anchor each object in space and time.

One statistic might interest you: a random study of 18th century French furniture confiscated from apartments across Paris indicated, not too surprisingly, that more than half of this highly-prized period furniture came from five ‘arrondissements’ of Western and Central Paris. None came from lower middle class and working class neighbors. Again, it might seem obvious to you, but mapping taste can yield a fresh look at the historical and art-historical data.

In the future, whenever that moment might come, we will ‘visualize’ the peregrinations of stolen cultural objects by type, by author, by medium, throughout the wartime period and even the postwar era. What use does that have for us?

This intellectual exercise produces an instant snapshot of esthetic preferences, the geographic distribution of objects according to taste, the uses and disuses of specific locations for processing and storing looted art, the temporal incongruities by object type and by artist. The visualization of cultural plunder will open new vistas of research and understanding that will inform and revise the current state of research in this emerging field as well as promote new lines of inquiry.