Stolen Art Poetry Literature and Music of the Holocaust
Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) inspects stolen artwork in a common salt mine in Merkers,
accompanied by Omar Bradley (left) and George S. Patton (center)
During World War II, Nazi Germany led a systematic campaign to boodle and plunder art from Jews and others in the occupied countries. Much of the stolen art was recovered by the Allies in the immediate aftermath of the state of war, however, thousands of valuable art pieces were not returned to their rightful owners or were never relocated. In the decades post-obit the Holocaust, a concerted international try was undertaken to place Nazi plunder that nevertheless remains unaccounted for with the aim of ultimately returning the items to the rightful owners or their families.
The Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork - worth billions of dollars - and stored them throughout Germany. Other pieces deemed "degenerate" were legally banned from entering Frg then Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels tasked a number of approved dealers with liquidating these assets overseas and passing the funds dorsum for the Nazi war effort.
At the stop of World War II, the Allies found plundered artwork in more than 1,000 repositories across Germany and Austria. Under the direction of the U.S. Ground forces, nearly 700,000 pieces were identified and restituted to the countries from which they were taken, whose governments were then supposed to locate the original owners and return the art. Unfortunately, thousands of pieces either never made their mode back to the rightful owners or the owners could not be tracked down.
In 1985, European countries began to release inventory lists of works of fine art "that were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis during World War Ii, and announced the details of a process for returning the works to their owners and rightful heirs."
The recovery of stolen art took a more than international calibration in 1998. On June 30, thirty-nine countries signed a articulation pledge to identify art stolen from Holocaust victims and to recoup their heirs. Well-nigh every European country - in addition to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Russia and State of israel - signed the understanding. Presently after, an Austrian advisory panel recommended the return of half-dozen,292 fine art objects to their legal owners, most of whom were Jews.
In November 1998, the U.S. Section of State and the U.South. Holocaust Memorial Museum co-hosted the Washington Briefing on Holocaust-Era Assets in whcih delegations from forty-4 governments and thirteen non-governmental organizations participated. Though the conference addressed various problems related to the confiscation of avails by the Nazis during the Holocaust, the principal issue was looted art and the briefing achieved a substantial degree of consensus on a fix of principles dealing with looted fine art. These principles include encouraging research into the provenance and identification of art, calling for these findings to be publicized, urging the establishment of a primal computerized registry linking all Holocaust-era art-loss databases and encouraging alternative dispute-resolution strategies.
Following the Washington Conference, the Association of Art Museum Directors developed guidelines requiring museums to review the provenance of their art collections, focusing on art looted by the Nazis. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, for example, identified more than 400 European paintings with gaps in their provenance during World War Two era while New York Urban center's Museum of Modern Art told Congress that they were "not aware of a unmarried Nazi-tainted work of fine art in our collection of more than than 100,000."
In Germany, the authorities subsequently established the Lost Fine art Database to serve as a central office for the documentation of lost cultural property which as a consequence of Nazi persecution were relocated, moved or seized, especially from Jewish owners.
In January 2006, a court ruling stated that Austria must return five paintings by world renowned artist Gustav Klimt to the heirs of a Jewish family from whom the paintings were stolen during the Nazi occupation in Republic of austria. The paintings had been housed and displayed for decades in the Belvedere castle gallery in Vienna.
In November 2013, German language regime announced the discovery of a trove of about 1,500 artworks confiscated past the Nazis. The art was unearthed virtually two years prior in a Munich apartment belonging to the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, ane of Goering's specially approved fine art dealers commissioned to liquidate degenerate art, only was not announced at the fourth dimension to allow for the building of a provenance investigation. The works, by artists including Picasso, Matisse and Chagall, are estimated to be worth near $i.35 billion, though determining their rightful could take years.
The Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference) and the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) appear on September eleven, 2014, that there has been extremely minimal endeavor put forth by private countries since The Washington Conference to return Jewish artwork stolen past the Nazis. The two organizations had been studying the identification of Jewish artwork and historical artifacts stolen past the Nazis for the past 15 years and have come to the conclusion that the bulk (2/three) of countries who had signed on to Jewish art reparration agreements have done "picayune or zero" to implement the requirements of these agreements. In order to ensure that all fine art makes its style back to the rightful owners, as a part of the report the Claims Conference and the WJRO suggested that an "International Association of Provenance Researchers" be formed in guild to help museums in evaluating their collections and making certain that no stolen art is included. The implementation of this clan will allow standards to be created for stolen art evaluation, provide help and preparation for art professionals, and more often than not provide some other artery for effective communication and cooperation betwixt museum staff around the world.
A partnership between university researchers, the German Lost Art Foundation, and the descendants of Rudolf Mosse was appear in March 2017 in back up of the Mosse Art Research Initiative. The project aimed to locate the expansive lost fine art collection of prominent publisher Rudolf Mosse, who fled to France in 1933 shortly after the Nazis rise to ability. Although this was the first fourth dimension that the German language Lost Art Foundation had financed a plan to track down a detail family's heirlooms, a spokesperson for the Foundation stated that theypromise that more projects of this diversity volition apply for funding in the future.
Eleven German language museums and archives have agreed to participate in the Mosse Art Research Initiative. The initiative had been agile for five years before the 2017 collaboration was appear, and several institutions housing stolen Mosse fine art take already been identified. Altogether, researchers believe that the Nazis looted approximately 4,000 works from the Mosse drove.
Max Liebermann's Two Riders On The Beach discovered in the Gurlitt Collection and subsequently restituted to the descendants of the original Jewish possessor
north June 2018, a stolen sculpture discovered in the Bode Museum in Berlin, Germany was returned to the heirs of the original owners and then sold back to the museum. The sculpture, which depicts three angels floating on clouds surrounding a sleeping infant Jesus, had once belonged to German Jewish Industrialist Ernst Saulmann and his wife Agathe. The couple fled Germany in 1935 and their state, businesses and property were confiscated by the Nazis. The Saulmanns were captured by Nazis in French republic and were sent to internment camps. Although they survived the camps and were rescued, they both died shortly after the war. Descendants of the Saulmanns hired researchers to find their families stolen art, and take been able to observe eleven works out of the hundreds that were stolen.
In 2019, Berlin's Gemäldegalerie returned two panels dating from about 1455 by the Italian artist Giovanni di Paolo depicting two scenes of the life of St. Clare of Assisi to the heirs of Harry Fuld Sr. In by years the Fuld'south received other possessions looted by the Nazis. Fuld, who died in 1932, owned a Frankfurt-based company that produced and sold telephones, which was expropriated from his wife and sons who subsequently fled the country.
In January 2020, the German authorities returned 3 works of art stolen during the Nazi occupation of France to descendants of their original owner, the collector and Jewish lawyer Armand Dorville who died in 1941. The iii items were amongst the roughly i,500 discovered in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt in 2013. Gurlitt's father had been given the chore of selling art taken from Jewish owners. Only 13 works have been returned to the families of the original owners.
Sources: Lost Art Net Database;
Wikipedia;
National Gallery of Art Provenance Enquiry;
Associated Press (June 30, 1998);
Washington Mail (January eighteen, 2006);
Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress for the U.South. Firm International Relations Committee;
The Claims Briefing;
Colin Moynihan.German Foundation to Help Jewish Heirs in Search for Nazi Looted Fine art
, New York Times (March 7, 2017);
Berlin Museum Returns Nazi-Looted Sculpture To Jewish Heirs,
JTA, (June 29, 2018);
Marcy Oster, "Nazi-looted art returned to heirs of German language-Jewish art collector," JTA, (September 4, 2019);
"Deutschland returns artwork stolen by Nazis to French Jewish family," AFP, (January 22, 2020).
Photos: Eisenhower - Lt. Moore, U.S. Army, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Max Liebermann, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/recovering-stolen-art-from-the-holocaust