Dangling participles

By Marc Masurovsky

There are so many mysteries and unresolved issues rooted in the twelve-year reign of the National Socialists (30 January 1933-9 May 1945) that we cannot keep up with them. The research is tedious and it involves searching for evidence in multiple archives on both sides of the Atlantic. Costs, time, resources often bring exciting research projects to a grinding halt. Maybe some enterprising and courageous historians and sleuths will resolve some of these open cases, sooner than later, so that we can close them for good for the sake of posterity and historical truth. 

Here are some of these “dangling participles” with a special focus on the Greater German Reich and the territories it occupied or annexed:

Generally speaking:

-where are the contents of the studios and residences of artists which were systematically ransacked and plundered across continental Europe? Who were they? Where did they live and work? It’s too easy to say that everything was destroyed or that they were unimportant. That’s the lame way of discouraging efforts to uncover their fate.

1940-1941

France

-where are the original inventories of objects looted in Paris from Jewish owners and then transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume? The earliest extant inventories begin in mid-1941. Their discovery will fill major gaps in our understanding of what was looted, where, when, by whom, and from whom in German-occupied France. One credible lead is that these inventories may be sitting in a London archive since British forces liberated Tanzenberg, the ERR depot that housed many libraries, archival materials, and administrative files produced by ERR officials in occupied countries. Inventories drawn up by the ERR in France were found at Tanzenberg.

1942

France

Jose Hessel, by Vuillard

-what happened to Jos Hessel’s collection? Although he and his wife died months apart between 1941 and 1942, there are no archival traces of the contents of the Hessel collection.

1943

France

Jeu de Paume, Paris

-how many “degenerate” works of art survived the purge at the Jeu de Paume in summer of 1943? We counted 676. None survived according to Rose Valland, although about 20 have been restituted since the end of WWII. Where are the others?

1944

France

Chateau de Rastignac, Dordogne, France

-were any works “rescued” from the Castle of Rastignac, country home of the Bernheim-Jeune family near Bordeaux before SS troops set the castle ablaze on 30 March 1944?

April-May 1945

Nikolsburg/Mikulov

Present-day castle of Nikolsburg/Mikulov

-how many looted objects were brought to the castle of Nikolsburg (now Mikulov) in north-central Czechoslovakia) between fall of 1943 and early 1945? How many survived the blaze of April 1945 triggered by severe fighting between Soviet and German troops? Of these, how many remained in postwar Czechoslovakia? How many went to the Soviet Union?




Munich

Inside the Führerbau, Munich

-where are the 1000+ looted paintings stored at the Führerbau in Munich which were stolen by unknown parties in the closing hours of April 1945 while American troops were liberating the city?

Berlin

Flakturm, Berlin

-did any items survive the fires at the Flakturm (Berlin zoo) in the early hours of May 1945? Did the Soviets take them?


Neuhaus am Schliersee (Southern Bavaria)

Hans Frank residence, Schoberhof, Neuhaus

-what exactly happened at the Hans Frank compound in early May 1945 at Neustadt south of Munich? We know that unknown parties spirited away the “Portrait of a Young Man” by Raphael and, since then, it was never to be seen again.

Austria

--what happened to the Judaica stored inside the so-called “Hungarian Gold Train” after US forces intercepted it in May 1945? The only credible lead is that the Judaica may have been transferred “erroneously” to Vienna.

Yugoslavia

Ante Topic Mimara

-is there a detailed inventory of the works and objects purloined by Ante Topic Mimara? where did these end up?

Soviet Union

-where are the inventories for the so-called “Trophy Art” removed by Soviet troops from the territories that they freed of Nazi/Fascist forces? Will the Russians ever share them? Will we ever see these objects? Or are they rotting away in dank cellars, mine shafts, monasteries, barracks and other improvised storage areas scattered across the former Soviet Union?

France

-what happened to the more than 4000 works of art abandoned by the Nazis at the Jeu de Paume shortly before Paris was liberated? Did the French authorities inventory them? How many of these works were produced by Jewish artists?

What is to be done?

by Marc Masurovsky

Locating looted art in public and private collections, auction houses, galleries, is one thing; recovering these plundered objects is quite another.

The search for looted cultural assets is extremely tedious. Some people get lucky with “low-hanging fruits” like well-defined provenance information for objects being offered for sale or being displayed in a museum, which contains critical information that might lead to a match between the object and a plundered owner.

Those instances are rare.

The tedium of research concerns all other objects—weeks, months, sometimes years of research, often led by one or two people, most of the time on a part-time basis because there is no reliable source of money to underwrite such an investigative and analytical effort.

If progress has been made on documenting cultural losses at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators over the past twenty years, there has been no progress in establishing a solid, long-term funding mechanism to ensure that research into the ownership histories of countless objects and their location is sustained over a long period of time.

To remedy this chronic shortage of funds for research into the looted cultural heritage of the Jewish people, historians, investigators, researchers, even curators, have tended to focus their attention on single collections and/or a small clutch of plundered objects. These efforts aim to clarify the history of objects coming from a single owner, or located in a single museum or collection. But even those efforts are lengthy, arduous, and end up yielding few fruits, for all sorts of reasons, the main ones being lack of capital and legal and logistical obstacles to gain access to relevant data.

How does one resolve this paltry state of affairs?

One cannot locate any looted object if one does not devote the needed resources to conduct solid, forensic, investigative research into its whereabouts, ensuring that it is the correct one, locating its potential owners, and if there are none, declaring the looted object to be heirless property.

What does one do with objects deemed heirless? Remember that heirless property is simply unclaimed property for which no owners have been found ---yet. Since there are no well-funded research organizations or institutions in the business of searching for these objects’ rightful owners, they remain to a large extent heirless, deprived of their history, their context and their identity.

For instance, Jewish museums are stocked with heirless objects, coming from communities that have been systematically erased from the face of the earth. But not all displaced objects in Jewish museums are heirless. The mission of Jewish museums is to safeguard these objects, not necessarily restitute them. Hence, when faced with a restitution claim, a Jewish museum is more likely to behave like most art museums by opposing the act of restitution which would require deaccessioning the claimed object from its collection.

Governments of nations that were subjected to the horrors of Nazi and Fascist policies and global war, hold untold numbers of objects which were “found” at war’s end.  So far, little to no information has been released which can help apprehend the true extent of this seventy-year old problem.

The Russian puzzle is the most egregious. So-called “trophy art” picked up by specialized Soviet military units in all territories that the Red Army “liberated” in the months before the end of WWII is stored in museums across the ex-Soviet Union. Most of the objects that the Red Army “repatriated” as compensation for Soviet losses are presumably concentrated in what is now the Russian Federation, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. But there is also looted cultural material belonging to exterminated Jewish communities in the custody of governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, to name a few.

In an ideal world, the most logical way to address the question of researching and documenting the complete history of cultural plunder between 1933 and 1945 is to orchestrate a massive inflow of research monies and establish an international research and documentation infrastructure. Only in this way can one address systematically the full scope of looted cultural heritage (outside of Judaica which has attracted significant attention over the past decades) of the Jewish people, identify the location of plundered objects, figure out which ones have still not been restituted, match them with their rightful owners. If there are none, then the question of heirless property comes into the picture.

A vast international, even transcontinental, network or infrastructure of research institutions facilitated and nurtured by a mix of government agencies, independent organizations, and academic centers across the Americas and Europe should coordinate this effort. This is not a one-or three-person job. In order to get a handle on what was stolen, where, when, by whom, sold and resold to whom and where and when, one needs a small army of intelligent, motivated, educated, trained, PAID, worker bees.

There is a strong likelihood that “heirless” objects having once belonged to Jewish owners before the Holocaust era ended up in the permanent collections of museums, be they State-controlled or privately owned.

How does one persuade these cultural institutions to deaccession heirless objects which they argue were acquired in good faith and have no owner?

How does one convince governments which control cultural institutions holding such objects to return them? And to whom? Even in Israel, this policy is controversial.

The solutions to the above have always been complicated and laced with political overtones. Art makes people irrational. For an institution to part with an object is fraught with strong emotions and potent defenses against such an act, even it is for a good cause, even if restitution through deaccession is meant to heal wounds and provide a small gesture towards an act of justice. It goes against the grain of museum practices worldwide to restitute.

To end on a less negative note, it is worth exploring the different ways that exist to restore a modicum of justice to the victims of cultural plunder. But those approaches need to be anchored in victims’ rights, not in private property law and antiquated notions of cultural patrimony. In and of itself, such an approach could open new doors on how to manage in a more ethical way tomorrow’s museums and the global art trade.

And above all, a massive amount of money is needed in order to rewrite the history of looted objects, return them to their rightful owners, and establish much better practices in the global art market, the museums that display objects, the galleries and auction houses that buy, display, and sell, and the collectors and dealers who do the same.

Higher ethics, stringent due diligence, thorough provenance research and true transparency, transparently clear (as opposed to less opaque), like a sheet of cellophane or saran wrap, your choice. That is the goal.

Why oppose the physical restitution of looted cultural objects?

by Marc Masurovsky

When a claim is filed for the return of an object that was allegedly misappropriated during the Nazi/Fascist era and especially as a result of anti-Jewish persecutions, the current possessor who receives the claim can either be an individual, a private entity, an entity controlled or owned by a public agency, and/or the public agency itself and its overseer (usually referred to as “the government”).

Individual possessors are mostly private collectors who have invested in the art market and whose main occupation is not necessarily the buying and selling of art. Objects in private collections are, by definition, the most difficult to trace because, unless there is a public record of all private transactions involving art objects of any kind, the chances are close to nil for a victim of cultural plunder or his/her heirs to locate the object unless several conditions are met:

1/ the person who took possession of the looted object dies and his/her estate is put up for sale. In this instance, the catalogue will list the item being claimed. If it is not deemed as important or “interesting” (whatever that actually means), there may not be a reproduction of the object in the sales catalogue, only a description. But if the object rises to the occasion and is worthy of being photographed, the process of identification is facilitated by the publication of a photograph. This does not mean that the claimant remembers what the object looked like but he/she might have a photo of it hanging or displayed in a room of the residence from which it was wrongly removed.

2/ the looted object is featured in a catalogue of a particular artist’s production. For instance, if you have lost a work by Degas, chances are that you will consult major publications pertaining to the artist who loved to paint young ballerinas and race horses. Catalogues raisonnés, exhibition brochures, specialized monographs, are all part of the arsenal of the claimant to locate the lost item. That does not imply that victims of cultural plunder spend eight hours a day, five days a week, looking for their stolen property. This should be a shared burden, whereby the current possessor should exercise reasonable multi-source due diligence before acquiring or displaying an art object.  In all cases, the onus is placed on the claimant to do her "homework" and search, and search.  Thankfully, judges have weighed in favor of victims when harassed by the current possessor's lawyers for not consulting art historical sources on a regular basis to prove that they were being diligent in the search for their lost property.

3/ the unimaginable: a claimant or a friend of hers walks into a residence, or a museum, or any building harboring works and objects of art, and recognizes (or thinks she recognizes) the lost item. It does happen, it has happened, and once over the shock, with some time elapsing from the initial (re)viewing of the lost object, the claimant initiates the process of confirming that it is in fact the same object and must decide whether to ask for its restitution. That can be the hardest decision to make. Since no statistics are kept about art claims resulting from Holocaust-era and Nazi/Fascist misappropriations, it is impossible to know how many individuals have mulled the idea of filing a claim and decided not to, in the end, because of financial and emotional cost associated with a long and burdensome legal entanglement.

Looted objects also end up with privately-held businesses whether or not these businesses base their commercial activity on the trade in cultural objects. Private entities that are most likely to hold and display works and objects of art are corporations, professional services firms which dispense legal, financial, and other types of specialized counsel for a fee and whose office spaces (including but not limited to hallways, lobbies, atria, enclosed gardens, and meeting rooms) are adorned with objects of art from all corners of the world. The theory goes that a visitor feels at ease in the presence of so much beauty on display and can only surmise that he/she will be encountering “cultured” individuals.

And of course, art and/or antiquities galleries, auction houses, flea markets, bric a brac stores, emporia.

Amazingly so, government offices do get decorated with important works of art and decorative objects either borrowed from state-owned museums or from government-run warehouses and storage depots where untold numbers of objects belonging to identifiable and heirless victims sit in limbo, the playthings of government-appointed civil servants and cultural officials.

When faced with a claim, there are numerous defensive postures that are used to repel the attempt to recover. What you will read below has been told to claimants more than once:

1/ you must be confused, it’s not the same object;

2/ do you have any proof that it is actually yours to claim?

3/ how dare you? I am insulted.

4/ I bought it fair and square.

5/ my parents gave it to me.

6/ I inherited it.

7/ I didn’t steal it. And in any case, even if it was stolen, it happened a long time ago. So go away…

8/ finders keepers losers weepers. In any event, we won the war. [the trophy art argument ad reductionem]

9/ It belongs to our museum. It will never leave.

and many more…

None of those responses are particularly inviting.  They discourage moral and ethical solutions leading to restitution so that the claimant can close the book on a very upsetting moment in history which affected her and her family very deeply. The knowledge of the presence of the un-restituted object reopens old wounds, brings back memories left to be forgotten, re-awakens ancient emotions that no one wanted to “feel” again. The process of restitution can be a very jarring emotional experience.

To make matters worse, most often, the claimant is forced to press her claim through a body of laws and legal theories that are better suited for recovering a stolen car. How do you compare a stolen car to a painting looted by Nazi henchmen? Unfortunately, the law is highly reductionist and lawyers retained to represent claimants or to defend against them, must take a traumatic historical event, shove it through a sieve, and reduce its complex components, to a simpler distillation of facts that can match one or more legal theories or strategies which were not designed to incorporate extraordinary human failures resulting in mass death and genocide.

After half a century of litigation involving Nazi thefts of art owned by Jewish victims, no country has frayed a clear path to aid victims and survivors of genocide recover their property without the humiliation and stress associated with years of litigation that might lead to defeat and huge costs.

It makes one wonder whether government officials, members of the art trade and their sycophantic allies would just wish "bad" history to go away so that they can enjoy the fruits of cultural plunder. and not have to incorporate THAT history into the retelling of the story of art. 

Or is that unfair?

In my view, they are the original revisionists, choosing to omit History from the history of art objects.

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.