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.

Belated open letter to the "New Republic"

Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of The New Republic, Source: Brandeis University

by Marc J. Masurovsky

Why did it take so long for the "New Republic" to write about cultural plunder and restitution of looted art? Is it really because of the incongruous convergence of the so-called “Gurlitt Affair” and the global release of that “trashy and supercilious film”—the Monuments Men? Or put differently, why the silence for so many decades despite the fact that “restitution [is] as much as the next child of the dispossessed”? There are probably no easy answers to those questions and perhaps they are best left alone. Still...

“The obsession with restitution” is an obsession with justice, as exemplified by restitution of lost cultural assets, those items, those objects, those artifacts, regardless of value or museum worthiness, those parts of ourselves that serve as our extensions and our means of expressing non-verbally our deepest sentiments, longings, loves, and aspirations.

It is not just about Fragonard, Bellini, Tintoretto, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Leonardo and countless other “masters”. It is not just about the finest silver and the finest gold and the finest stones set in the finest settings. It is not about those rarest of rarest of books and incunabulae, or textiles carefully woven with the most precious fabrics for that most precious person. Actually, we are talking about something that makes you and I and our friends, our children, our relatives, and those around us whom we do not know, it is what makes us human, it is about culture. And culture is what Hitler and his henchmen and collaborators across Europe sought to uproot wherever it was deemed to be “Jewish” and “degenerate”, in order to substitute something clean, tasteful, that was Judenrein.

A crime against humanity.

In order to proceed with the uprooting of culture and the mass of objects encapsulated under that moniker, Hitler’s henchmen and collaborators across Europe committed an act of genocide. That makes Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, an accessory to genocide, together with all other art dealers, collectors, museum officials and curators, art historians, auctioneers, and appraisers who found opportunity in State-sanctioned mass displacement of property that accompanied the slaughter of millions.

The dispossessed lost their homes, their property, their sense of self, the beauty around them was extinguished and they were only left to wonder why such horrors had befallen them.

There exists a significant emotional and spiritual linkage between people of all ages and backgrounds and ethnicities and creeds and the objects that surround them, that populate their lives. It could be a candelabra, it could be an incense burner, it could also be a small drawing by Edgar Degas, or a satirical piece by Georg Grosz or even a surrealistic painting by Felix Nussbaum, or a ditty scrawled on a napkin. It doesn’t matter what it is; it is the meaning that it embodies which is precious to us all. The crime consists in rending that object from our bosom, as if part of our soul had been ripped to shreds, and for what? For being Jewish, for being “different”? for being “unacceptable”? “undesirable”?

We certainly do not place objects above people. We place objects in the constellation of people, much like satellites circling planets. And when the satellite leaves its orbit, all hell breaks loose and we are released into the wilderness of space, aimless.

Fighting for restitution does not weaken our loss, it acts as a vital reminder of the world that was consumed in flames and gas, not completely, but almost. Obtaining restitution is but a small step to establish the cardinal principle that justice does exist and that with resolve and perseverance and belief in ourselves and in our kin and in higher principles, even if the outcome is hopeless much like it was for those young fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, my personal heroes, we can assert the value of justice and reaffirm our right to exist while honoring the loss of those who came before us and cannot be with us due to a crime against humanity.

For myself, I am the single child of two artists, two artists who sought out the famed “School of Paris” and bought a one-way boat ticket from New York to experience it all in the City of Lights, poor as could be, rich as could be. Miserable but filled with the soul and spirit of what they embraced and lived—art and culture. Breathing it, in and out, every day, as pure as the driven snow, which drove them into the ground, because, as you know, the art market is unforgiving, cruel, and indifferent to human plight. By the way, Lincoln Kirstein and his ilk are part and parcel of that market, that cultured elite which enjoys driving artists into the ground in the name of Kultur. I make no apologies for being so fiendish and cynical but that is the cold reality that artists must endure. By extension, the “Monuments Men” would not have given the time of day to most artists incinerated in the Nazi apocalypse. Sad but true.

Where are we now? Most people think that the excitement today is about money. It always has been. People are what they are. A cheap headline always includes money. Journalists do not write about a restituted collection if the word “million” is not included in the header. That state of affairs comes from ignorance and intellectual opportunism, the flip side of “pornographic journalism.” It is no different today than it was in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Yes, it is true that high-priced restitutions are good for the art market. There is a certain twisted logic in the way that the press, comforted by today’s elites, creates a perverse and distorted linkage between the restitution of looted art and the staggering values derived from those objects that have been returned to rightful owners. As if the only objects that were stolen by the Nazis were of museum quality and affordable only to the 1 per cent. Let's not forget that the 99 per cent are ignored by the press and whose clamor for justice is never heeded? Why then claimants to give up and simply “remember"?

Once again, it is not just about Gustav Klimt or Egon Schiele. It is about those thousands of artistic minds and creative spirits from dozens of nations who produced all kinds of works, in all sorts of media, as extensions of their spirit. It is up to us to appreciate them or ignore them, but their sum constitutes our cultural and artistic patrimony, like it or not. As to your quip about rescuing a piece by Damien Hirst, he occupies a space in our culture, even if we do agree here that his work might not be worth saving. But, if I did not save Hirst, why should anyone save my parents’ works? Who am I to judge what is worth saving and what is worth abandoning to a hellfire? Such flawed reasoning puts us square in the lap of the Monuments Men whose mission was to rescue the “cultural treasures” of Western civilization, worshipped in countless museum studies programs, institutes of art, and revered temples of culture, at the expense of the lesser-known, the lower tiers of cultural and artistic output. Cost-benefit analysis correlates with the rarefied air of high-priced recoveries and restitution of stolen art.

Miscellaneous thoughts about cultural plunder

Yellow badge made mandatory by the Nazis in France
Source: Wikipedia

There is a prevalent feeling that we trivialize the Holocaust if we emphasize material losses. We are told repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about property, it was about people and by seeking restitution of looted assets, whatever they may be, we end up reducing the Holocaust to a great train robbery. Well, my reply to this criticism is very simple. The Holocaust is far more than a wholesale continent-wide massacre of six million men, women, and children. It was an undertaking whose aim was to erase their culture, their religion, their faith, their aspirations, their ideas, their wants, their ambitions, their intellectual, economic, political, spiritual, social, presence on earth. The eradication of these six million men, women, and children led to a traumatic impoverishment of human society on a scale never seen before. To fully grasp the significance of the Holocaust, it was a gargantuan enterprise to remove their ideas, their visions, their opinions, their accomplishments, their friendships, their loves, their legacies, from human society. Most importantly, one of the prime features of the Holocaust was the vast and complex transfer of the property of these six million men, women, and children to non-Jewish Aryan possessors who found themselves enriched sometimes overnight by the illegal misappropriation of the personal, corporate, and intellectual assets of an entire group of individuals in 19 nations across Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Every object is but one infinitely small grain of sand on that beach of death called genocide on which we walk every day.

RE: H.R. 4292 Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act

April 23, 2014

VIA TELEFAX TRANSMISSION

All U.S. Representatives
U.S. House of Representatives

RE: H.R. 4292 Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act

Dear Representative:

Please be advised that the Ciric Law Firm, PLLC represents Ori Z. Soltes, Director and Co-Founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (“HARP”), in connection with the matter described below. HARP is a not-for-profit organization that disseminates information to the public and to claimants about cultural property stolen, confiscated, and misappropriated during the Nazi-era. Professor Ori Z. Soltes teaches at Georgetown University across a range of disciplines, from theology and art history to philosophy and political history. He is the former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated exhibitions on a variety of subjects such as archaeology, ethnography, and contemporary art. Professor Soltes has taught, lectured, and curated exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally. He is the author of over 230 articles, exhibition catalogues, essays, and books on a range of topics. Recent books include: The Ashen Rainbow: The Arts and the Holocaust; Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always Has Been. Professor Soltes was also involved in providing the historical research and background information in regard to Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” case, as well as the restitution of an Odalisque painting by Henri Matisse to the Rosenberg family.

In March 2012, my client and many others wrote to members of the U.S. House of Representatives calling for the immediate withdrawal of S. 2212/H.R. 4086, the “Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act.” At that time, my client argued that the bill would bar valid claims by true owners of looted artwork in U.S. courts, thereby eliminating one of the rare remaining deterrents to the illicit trafficking of looted artworks.

We write to you again with the same adamant plea – that H.R. 4292 not be permitted to go forward. Although it is the same plea, the circumstances under which we write could not be more different. Given the unbelievable discovery in Munich, Germany of the Gurlitt horde, the mere proposal of immunity from seizure is mystifying. If ever there were a time to plainly see the destructiveness of such a bill, it would be now, where there is concrete proof that looted art continues to make its way into the market. The effect of passing H.R. 4292 would be nothing short of disastrous for Holocaust survivors who may have looted art claims, as well as source countries with claims for the return of looted antiquities and other artworks.

Today, if a foreign institution provides, in the context of a cultural exchange program, such as a temporary exhibit, artworks to U.S. institutions, this foreign institution is subject to two statutes:

- Under the Immunity from Seizure Act (IFSA), 22 U.S.C. § 2459, foreign lenders are already shielded from seizure of those objects while they are present on U.S. soil. To enjoy this protection, foreign institutions must apply for the immunity order with the U.S. Department of State, which has complete discretion in issuing these orders.

- Under the Federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), 28 U.S.C. § 1605(a)(3), a government-related foreign institution which sends artworks to the U.S. may, under limited circumstances, be sued in the U.S. for either the return of the looted artworks or for related damages, when the looted artworks are the ones sent to U.S. for the exchange (Malewicz v. City of Amsterdam, 362 F.Supp.2d 298 (D.D.C.2005)) or if the looted artworks are still in Europe, but the institution has a commercial presence in the U.S. via other related activities (Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677 (2004)). This liability extends even though the artworks are protected from seizure under IFSA. Therefore, a government-related foreign entity is liable before U.S. courts if sufficient commercial activity is found in the U.S., whether directly or indirectly related to the looted objects being present in the U.S.

The following is a breakdown of the significant flaws in H.R. 4292.

1. The bill’s so-called “Nazi” exception is far too narrowly construed.

The bill only focuses the exception on "Nazi," but not on "Axis" related activities. Because the bill only covers governments occupied by Nazi Germany or governments that were allies of Nazi Germany, it eliminates claims involving objects from countries occupied, annexed or controlled by non-Nazi Axis powers, i.e. Japan and Italy. Therefore, all claims involving objects from the following countries would be excluded: British Somaliland, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, Albania, several regions of Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia-Slovenia, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), South Karafuto, Manchuria, several regions of mainland China, Portuguese Timor, Hong Kong, French Indochina, Thailand, Burma, British New Guinea, the Philippines, Malaya, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, several regions of Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei, British North Borneo, Nauru, the Dutch East Indies, Guam, Imphal, Wake Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Christmas Island, Attu, and Kiska. Such an effect cannot be considered acceptable.

The narrow focus of the bill to a Nazi-only exception mischaracterizes the Holocaust. By adopting this bill, Congress will crystallize the Holocaust as an event specifically Jewish or specifically European, enabling it and the public to ignore the larger human issue of Holocaust-like events which have taken place since World War II and the associated large-scale cultural plunder associated with those events. If Congress passes H.R. 4292, it recognizes that the Holocaust was nothing but a simple historical aberration, and enables us to no longer consider the consequences, costs, or risks of persecution, and the associated cultural plunder in other situations. In essence, Congress’ message in passing H.R. 4292 is as follows: Nazi looting is not okay, but cultural looting and plundering in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cyprus, is okay, protected, and shielded by the will of the U.S. Government.

In addition, the Nazi-era carve-out is restricted to State collections, and would therefore allow the illicit exchange of Nazi-looted artworks held by non-American private entities, or even municipalities.

Additionally, the same exception defines Nazi-plundered art far too narrowly. The so-called “Nazi” exception in the bill would exclude all objects obtained from forced sales or other forms of looting or plunder not executed directly by Nazi forces. It would also exclude all objects obtained from forced sales or other transactions apparently legal in form or purporting to be voluntarily effected, when in fact the intent was to deprive Holocaust victims of their property, rights and interests in artworks. Again, such an effect from this bill cannot be considered acceptable given that most of the recent looted art cases involve indirect acts of looting and dispossession. In essence, had such a bill been in place during the Gurlitt exhibit in New York in 1956, the art would have been immune from seizure.

2. The integrity of the FSIA would be substantially compromised.

H.R. 4292 removes the jurisdictional ground of commercial activity originating in the Federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), 28 U.S.C. § 1605(a)(3). Therefore, a U.S. judge may conclude that the Louvre Museum, for example, will be shielded from any liability for any artwork currently held, either in the U.S. or in France, by any claimant, whether the looted artwork is related directly or indirectly to the initial Exhibit. This would serve as a clear sign to the world that U.S. institutions may freely accept looted artwork into their exhibits, and promote the illicit exchange of looted artwork plaguing the U.S. market.

H.R. 4292 provides that the government-related foreign institution would be completely shielded from any liability, whether the looted artwork is related directly or indirectly to the cultural exchange. Both bills accomplish this by declaring that the cultural exchange in the U.S. does not constitute commercial activity (“any activity in the United States of such foreign state or any carrier associated with the temporary exhibit or display of such work shall not be considered to be commercial activity for purposes of subsection (a)(3)”).

The following example shows that this risk is very concrete: On June 20, 2012, the City of Paris merged all its municipal museums into a public corporation, called “Paris Musées.” This public corporation also owns the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which currently holds 10 paintings looted by the Nazis and flagged as “MNR” (“Musées Nationaux Récupération”). MNR artwork is already proven to be looted property. Now Assume the Musée des Beaux-Arts lends one of the MNR paintings to a U.S. institution. Under H.R. 4292, not only would any U.S.-based heirs to the painting be unable to sue for either the return of the painting or for related damages, but because the same legal entity which would loan this painting to a U.S. institution also owns other MNR artworks, the partial loan would shield the ENTIRE holdings of the Public Corporation from any suit in the U.S. Therefore, H.R. 4292 would bar claimants to file any suit in the United States against the city of Paris for the return of any MNR artwork or for any related damages under Austria v. Altmann, 541 U.S. 677 (2004).

This case would be similar to potential claims by either source countries, such as Turkey, Cambodia, or India, or individuals in the United States against third parties outside of the United States sending looted artworks in the United States. The recent Kapoor case, involving an American antiquities dealer who sold looted ancient Indian art to museums and private collectors around the world, illustrates that such a scenario, where the entire holdings of a non-US institution would be shielded by the loan of one object, will be very likely in the future.

Therefore, the vast majority of European cultural institutions and governments will be shielded from ANY suit in the U.S. for any looted artwork not falling in the narrow Nazi-era carve-out, whether or not the looted artwork is directly or indirectly related to a commercial presence in the U.S. of the European cultural institution. Therefore, source countries, or individual claimants outside of the narrow Nazi-era carve-out will no longer be able to sue in the U.S. European museums, which are vastly government-owned, for any claims related to artworks subject to pillage, plunder or illegal excavation.

In the end, the only effect of H.R. 4292 will be to bar potential and valid claims by the true owners of looted artworks in U.S. courts, and will eliminate one of the rare remaining deterrents to the illicit trafficking of looted artworks, as well as encouraging transactions involving such looted objects.

3. The impact of H.R. 4292 on the U.S. cultural policy would be disastrous.

The claim by museum representatives that the bill would promote the open and free exchange of cultural works among nations, thus enhancing diplomatic relations, is patently untrue. The bill would promote the open and free exchange of looted art. It would eliminate the incentive for museums and galleries to engage in minimum due diligence and provenance research. It would remove the main tool this country has for helping victims of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

Beyond the Nazi exception and its exceedingly narrow definition of Nazi-plundered art, this bill will result in making the coming of all other kinds of plundered art into the United States immune not just from seizure, but from being recognized as plundered. In fact, in its most disastrous effect, the bill will allow every archaeological artifact originally looted, as well as the foreign government entity attempting to profit from its exhibition in the United States, to be completely protected from any damage or suit.

4. The impact of H.R. 4292 on public perception of cultural institutions would be disastrous.

In being encouraged to preserve their holdings of looted artworks, U.S. and European museums, as well as foreign European governments, continue to aid and abet the absence of justice for war crimes committed by the Nazi government and their allies, by constantly refusing to confront this past, by denying any measure of resolution or restitution for Holocaust victims and their heirs, and by refusing to provide for reasonable restitution procedures.

My client is also appalled at the missteps in public policy regarding restitution of artworks on the part of lawmakers, as well as museums. I am sure you remember the promises made by the museum directors in the House of Representatives 1998 Hearings, under then Chair of Banking Committee Jim Leach, to perform do in-depth research of provenance for their entire collections.

My client is also surprised that, rather than delivering on those empty promises, museums are lobbying you and are continuing the tragedy of the Holocaust, by asking you to ensure that theft from owners in times of war and dictatorship and the greed resulting from its commercial exploitation would be officially protected from justice.

How can Congress, which recognized the Holocaust and its effect by passing the Holocaust Victims Redress Act in 1998, claiming the right to protect Holocaust victims, then turn and attempt to redefine, restrict and change the definition of theft and victims, for the simple purpose of protecting the largest grand theft of art ever perpetrated on humanity?

You must abandon H.R. 4292, because its effects would be nothing short of disastrous for Holocaust survivors who may have looted art claims, as well as source countries with claims for the return of looted antiquities and other artworks.

For the above-mentioned reasons, my client urges you to withdraw H.R. 4292 from any further consideration, review, amendments or vote.

Thank you for your leadership on this important issue and for your support. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. On behalf of my client, I thank you for your consideration.

Truly yours,

__________________________________
Pierre Ciric
Member of the Firm

Cc: Ori Z. Soltes
Director, Holocaust Art Restitution Project, Inc.