Looted Art (Second World War)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From 1945 to 1955 in Moscow: Raphael's Sistine Madonna from the Dresden Gallery of the Old Masters

Looted art in the Second World War includes the theft of cultural property during and after the end of the Second World War by the Allied forces and occupying powers. The extensive art theft of National Socialist Germany in all areas occupied by the Germans is also to be classified under international law as looted art , defined as "cultural goods brought in during the war" and is referred to as a specific form of looted art or Nazi-looted art .

Nazi looted art

From 1939 to 1944, National Socialist organizations plundered castles, libraries, museums and private collections in the areas occupied by the German Wehrmacht . In particular, the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg , under Alfred Rosenberg , the Sonderkommando Künsberg and the research and teaching group Ahnenerbe , which was subordinate to Heinrich Himmler , competed in the tracking down and removal of works of art and archives.

Some of the looted art objects were to be exhibited in a “ Führer Museum ” to be founded in Linz , and the looted libraries were to be used for ideological research and teaching. In order to acquire foreign currency, parts of the looted art were offered on the international art market, especially via Switzerland . A not inconsiderable number of valuable works of art found their way into Hermann Göring's private collection .

In the years 1943 to 1948, significant parts of the looted art stolen by National Socialist organizations from all over Europe were in the Altaussee salt mine near Altaussee in the Liezen district in Styria . From 1945 the Allies brought them in trucks to the Central Collecting Point in Munich , which was located in the Führerbau and in the administration building of the NSDAP .

Large parts of Hermann Göring's private collection remained in the representative rooms of his Carinhall residence in the Schorfheide northwest of Berlin until shortly before the end of the war . In January 1945 Göring had the art collection brought to Berchtesgaden in special trains and stored there in tunnels. The art treasures were then unloaded and taken to air raid shelters; Some of the paintings and tapestries were stolen from the trains of looters in the last days of the war.

Art theft in France

After the capitulation of France , Adolf Hitler gave the order on June 30, 1940 to secure works of art from the French state and from private individuals, especially Jews . Three institutions became active in this regard: the art protection of the Wehrmacht, headed by the art historian Franz Wolff-Metternich (1893-1978), the German embassy in Paris , namely the ambassador Otto Abetz , who was commissioned by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop , and the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). Thus, in the far-reaching and extensive seizures in France, there was competition between the various responsible parties. Wolff-Metternich, who took his task of protecting art seriously, pointed out several times that the confiscation violated the Hague Convention . He was given leave of absence from Hitler in 1942 and released in October 1943. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg rejected the validity of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations of 1907, according to which private property is protected, on the grounds that this did not apply to Jews and their goods.

Before the war, a large part of the French art collection was in collections and art dealerships of Jewish families, such as the Rothschilds and the Bernheim-Jeune brothers , Levy de Benzion (1873–1943), Alphonse Kann , David David-Weill , Marguerite Stern, and Alphonse Schloss , Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg . Many of them had fled the German invasion, but had to leave their collections behind. From July to September 1940 the ambassador Abetz confiscated mainly the art treasures of the French state and the museums, but also from Jewish citizens. From November 1940 the galleries, apartments, warehouses and art depots of “wealthy French Jews” were systematically searched by the Rosenberg task force. In total, the task force in France confiscated over 21,000 art objects.

Thanks to the personal efforts of Rose Valland , the stolen objects were inventoried. In the case of France, therefore, the confiscation of 21,902 art objects from 203 art collections could be reconstructed. The value of the works of art collected by March 1941 was estimated by the Berlin management of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg task force at more than one billion Reichsmarks. Between April 1941 and July 1944, the Rosenberg Task Force sent 4,174 boxes of cultural goods in 29 shipments to Germany . In addition, furniture and household effects from formerly Jewish property were looted in an “ Aktion M ”: more than a million cubic meters of goods in 29,436 railroad cars were transported from France to Germany from 71,619 apartments.

According to a Führer order of November 18, 1940, the confiscated works of art were available to Hitler for his special order in Linz . They were deposited in the castles of Neuschwanstein , Chiemsee , Buxheim ( Bavaria ), Kogl im Attergau and Seisenegg ( Austria ) and Nikolsburg ( Czechoslovakia ).

In 2013 Götz Aly describes another variant of art theft using the example of Walter Bornheim, Munich. In the process, works of art were "acquired" with French foreign exchange, which were invoiced directly to the occupied state through the Reichsbank's booking tricks via the Reichskreditkasse Paris .

Art theft in Eastern Europe

While the National Socialists in Western Europe basically still differentiated between “useful” and “ degenerate ” (i.e. modern art ) and tried to convey the impression that the confiscated works of art were being bought, in the occupied eastern territories they dropped all inhibitions and pursued systematic looting .

Works of art that had been created by Germans or that seemed somehow salable were spared. The works of art by Russian or Polish artists, on the other hand, were systematically destroyed because the National Socialists regarded them as "worthless", since, according to National Socialist ideology, they came from " sub-humans ".

In the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, museums and galleries were systematically looted, private houses robbed, Orthodox churches , synagogues and mosques in southern Russia destroyed.

The best-known case of National Socialist art theft is probably the Amber Room , which was transported from the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin) near Saint Petersburg in October 1941 . A few months later, the Neptune Fountain was moved from the park of the Tsar's residence to Nuremberg .

Returns after the end of the war

From 1945 on, the looted art was brought by the Allies from the salvage locations to various central collecting points in Munich , Wiesbaden and Marburg , photographed, cataloged, checked for origin and returned to the rightful owners. In 1949 the Collecting Point ceased operations and transferred its tasks to the German Restitution Committee . In 1952 this was replaced by the German Treuhandverwaltung für Kulturgut , which was affiliated with the Foreign Office .

On January 1, 1963, the Munich Regional Tax Office took over all documents and the art objects that were still there. According to Article 134, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law , the Federal Republic becomes the owner of the remaining 3,500 inventory numbers, which, however, cover a far larger number of objects. Documents and files that can provide information about the origin of the works of art are located in the Federal Archives in Koblenz.

In German archives, cultural institutions and museums there are still cultural assets illegally appropriated during the Nazi era , especially those that were formerly Jewish . According to estimates by the looted art researcher Günter Wermusch , three to five million art objects were stolen from the conquered areas by the National Socialists. By the mid-1960s, around 80 percent of the works of art had been returned. After that there were only a few returns. If you start from the numbers below, this means that 500,000 works of art have not (yet) been returned to the owners or their heirs. These numbers concern the confiscations from the occupied territories. Added to this is the number of internal German “ Aryanization ” of Jewish property now subsumed under looted art, as well as the confiscation from public collections in the course of the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign.

In the Washington Declaration in 1998 (see below), the Federal Republic of Germany declared its readiness to return works of art , even if there is no international or civil law obligation to do so.

Restitution by Austria

After the end of the Second World War , numerous works of art were in the possession of Austrian collections and museums. Reclaims from victims or their heirs and legal successors have been rejected or ignored for decades by the art owners, mostly state museums or collections, and lawsuits have been dragged out by the defense, the Republic of Austria and mostly canceled or rejected without any result. It was not until 1998 that a separate law was created that is supposed to allow the return of expropriated art to its rightful owner or heir: the Restitution Act .

But even since then, returns have mostly not gone smoothly. A particularly persistent case, for example, is that of Egon Schiele's portrait of Wally . The painting in the possession of the Austrian art collector Rudolf Leopold was confiscated at an exhibition in New York in 1998 ; the process continued in March 2008 and cost 2.9 million euros so far. In 2008, at an exhibition of Albin Egger-Lienz 's paintings at the Leopold Museum in Vienna , weaknesses in the restitution law were again revealed . 14 paintings are suspected of being Nazi-looted art. The origin of some is proven through Nazi expropriation from Jewish property (for example "Waldinneres", taken from Georg and Erna Duschinsky by the Gestapo in 1939 ), but since the paintings are now owned by a private foundation, the law does not apply. The case led to great media coverage after the collector Rudolf Leopold denied any guilt and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde spoke of a "mockery of the Nazi victims" and demanded the closure of the Leopold Museum.

Allied looted art

Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg , watercolor by Albrecht Dürer , Kunsthalle Bremen , as an example of looted art from the Allies

Looted art in the USA

Sol Chaneles, an art theft researcher and professor of criminal law at Rutgers University , New Jersey , who died in 1990 , reported on a large transport aircraft crammed with German cultural assets that flew from Munich to the USA in the summer of 1945 - what happened to it is still unclear today. Chaneles also reported the disappearance of the Schloss Collection , a collection of Dutch masters of the 17th century, whose holdings are now supposed to be in the depot of the National Gallery in Washington after a true mistake between Vichy France and the National Socialists . On other points, Chaneles judgment of the failure of the US efforts to return so-called Nazi art to their rightful owners is considered excessive. In other cases it was precisely he who uncovered the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of works of art from former Jewish property in American collections. It often happened that Allied soldiers personally enriched themselves with pieces or took them as “souvenirs”.

Looted art in Russia

Priam's treasure
The Bronze Age gold treasure from Eberswalde , now a looted art in Moscow

From 1945 to 1947 numerous German cultural assets were confiscated by the Soviet “ trophy commissions ” in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany and brought to the Soviet Union. Although the pictures stored in the Soviet Union were returned to the Dresden Gemäldegalerie in 1955 , it was not until 1992 that the Russian government lifted the decades of strict secrecy of the looted art holdings hidden in secret magazines. In a German-Russian contract it was agreed to return "illegally brought cultural goods to the owner". In the period that followed, the treatment of the looted art problem in Russia led to massive internal political disputes. Against President Boris Yeltsin's opposition , the Duma repeatedly declared the looted art permanent property of Russia. The looted art question is considered to be an essential, currently still unsolved problem in German-Russian relations.

In the 1990s, the Pushkin Museum and the Historical Museum in Moscow, as well as the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, began to fetch looted art from the secret camps and to show them publicly in exhibitions. In 1995 the Hermitage showed French paintings from the 19th century from the collections of Friedrich Carl Siemens (1877–1952), Eduard von der Heydt , Alice Meyer (widow of Eduard Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer ), Otto Gerstenberg , Otto Krebs , Bernhard Koehler and Monica Sachse (widow of Paul Sachse ). A year later the exhibition with master drawings from German private collections followed. In 1996 the Pushkin Museum showed the so-called treasure of Priam and in 2007 the Merovingian finds from the Berlin Museum of Prehistory and Early History , including Gutenstein's sword scabbard . Other significant objects of looted art in Russia are the extensive holdings of the Kunsthalle Bremen (including the so-called Baldin Collection), extensive holdings of the East Asian Collection of the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, the estates of Ferdinand Lassalle and Walther Rathenau , the holdings of the Gotha Library and the princely library in Wernigerode and the armory of the Wartburg . In 2008 it became known that 87 paintings from the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum Aachen are being exhibited in the museum of the Ukrainian city of Simferopol , which were thought to be lost until 2005.

The Bronze Age Eberswalde gold treasure was shown in 2013 as part of the exhibition "Bronze Age - Europe without Borders" in Saint Petersburg . In a short speech at the opening of the exhibition on June 21, 2013, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on the Russian government to return the stolen German cultural assets.

In 2016, 59 statues that were formerly in the Bode Museum in Berlin were found in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Looted art in Poland

As Berlinka ( Polish for "coming from Berlin"), also Pruski skarb ("Prussian treasure"), Poland has the most extensive collection of German cultural assets and the like. a. inscribed from valuable original manuscripts, including letters from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven , which is now in Polish possession. After these had been moved from the Prussian State Library in Berlin to a Silesian monastery at the end of the Second World War , they were removed from there in the spring of 1945. For four decades they were considered a war loss. Specialists preserved the holdings from possible deterioration; today they are kept in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow . The Polish Aviation Museum in Krakow also counts pieces from the former “Göring Collection” among its treasures.

Provenance research

The so-called Washington Declaration ( Washington Principles ) of December 3, 1998 - actually "Principles of the Washington Conference in relation to works of art that were confiscated by the National Socialists" - is a legally non-binding agreement of the signatory states, to which during the time of National Socialism Identify confiscated works of art, locate their pre-war owners or heirs and find a “just and fair solution”. In Germany, the coordination office for the loss of cultural property in Bremen was founded in 1994 , which was given expanded responsibility in 1998 and was relocated to Magdeburg.

Repatriation after the end of the war

Numerous works of art were returned to the GDR by the Soviet government. Julius Troschel's “The Sleeping Spinner” came to the Alte Nationalgalerie in what was then East Berlin as early as 1958 .

See also

literature

  • Konstantin Akinscha, Grigori Koslow: booty art. On a treasure hunt in Russian secret depots . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag , Munich 1995, ISBN 3-423-30526-6 .
  • Thomas Armbruster: Reimbursement of the Nazi booty. The search, recovery and restitution of cultural goods by the western allies after the Second World War . De Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89949-542-3 , ( Writings on the Protection of Cultural Property ), (At the same time: Zurich, Univ., Diss., 2007).
  • Thomas Buomberger: Looted art-art theft. Switzerland and the trade in stolen cultural goods during the Second World War . Orell Füssli, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-280-02807-8 .
  • Peter Bruhn : looted art. Bibliography of international literature on the fate of the cultural property captured by the Red Army in Germany during World War II (museum, archive and library holdings) . 2 volumes. 4th completely revised edition with extensive register part. Sagner, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87690-835-3 , ( Berlin State Library - Prussian Cultural Heritage - Publications of the Eastern Europe Department 30, 1–2), ( References to current Russia topics 30, 1–2).
  • Wilfried Fiedler : The negotiations between Germany and Russia about the repatriation of the cultural assets relocated during and after World War II . In: Yearbook of Public Law of the Present NF 56, 2008, ISSN  0075-2517 , pp. 217–227.
  • Michael Franz: Museums, Looted Art and Nazi Looted Art , Parliament. With the supplement “From Politics and Contemporary History”, Federal Agency for Civic Education, No. 49 / December 3, 2007; as a pdf at: www.bpb.de/system/files/pdf/UC6WTM.pdf
  • Cay Friemuth: The stolen art. The dramatic race to save the cultural treasures after the Second World War. Kidnapping, recovery and restitution of European cultural assets 1939–1948 . Westermann, Braunschweig 1989, ISBN 3-07-500060-4 .
  • Frank Grelka: Looted art and art theft . Soviet restitution practice in the Soviet Zone. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Issue 1, 2019, pp. 73-105.
  • Ulf Häder, Katja Terlau , Ute Haug: Museums in Twilight - Acquisition Policy 1933 - 1945 . Colloquium on December 11 and 12, 2001, Cologne. Your own story. Provenance research at German art museums in an international comparison. Conference February 20-22, 2002, Hamburg. Publications of the Coordination Office for the Loss of Cultural Property, 2nd Magdeburg 2002 ISBN 3-00-010235-3 .
  • Anja Heuss : Art and cultural property theft. A comparative study on the occupation policy of the National Socialists in France and the Soviet Union . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-0994-0 . At the same time: Diss. Phil. University of Frankfurt / Main 1999
  • Tatiana Ilatovskaya: Master Drawings in the Hermitage. Rediscovered works from German private collections . Kindler, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-463-40300-5 .
  • Albert Kostenewitsch: From the Hermitage. Lost masterpieces in German private collections . Kindler, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-463-40278-5 .
  • Michael J. Kurtz: America and the Return of Nazi Contraband. The Recovery of Europe's Cultural Treasures . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge u. a. 2006, ISBN 0-521-84982-9 .
  • Hanns Christian Löhr: The Brown House of Art, Hitler and the "Special Order Linz". Visions, crimes, losses. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-05-004156-0 , 424 pp. (2nd edition Berlin 2016 ISBN 978-3-7861-2736-9 ).
  • Hanns Christian Löhr: Art as a weapon - The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Ideology and art theft in the “Third Reich” , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-7861-2806-9 , 208 pp.
  • Melissa Müller , Monika Tatzkow: Lost pictures, lost lives - Jewish collectors and what became of their works of art. Elisabeth-Sandmann-Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-938045-30-5 , 256 pp.
  • Lynn H. Nicholas: The Rape of Europa. The fate of European works of art in the Third Reich. Kindler, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-463-40248-3 . 1997 also as paperback by Knaur.
  • Waldemar Ritter : cultural heritage as spoil? The repatriation due to the war from Germany verbrachter cultural assets - the need and opportunities for the solution of a historic problem (Scientific Beibände to the indicator of the Germanic National Museum Volume 13) , published by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 1997, ISBN 3-926982-49-7 .
  • Susanne Schoen, Andrea Baresel-Brand: In the labyrinth of law? - Ways to protect cultural property . A conference of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media from October 9-10, 2006 in Bonn. Coordination Center for the Loss of Cultural Property , Magdeburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-9811367-2-2 , ( publications of the Coordination Center for the Loss of Cultural Property 5).
  • Elizabeth Simpson (Ed.): The Spoils of War. World War II and Its Aftermath. The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property . Abrams, New York NY 1997, ISBN 0-8109-4469-3 .
  • Birgit Schwarz: Hitler's Museum. The photo albums “Gemäldegalerie Linz”. Documents on the “Führer Museum”. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 2004, ISBN 3-205-77054-4 .
  • Nancy H. Yeide: Beyond Dreams of Avarice. The Hermann Goering Collection. . With an introduction by Robert M. Edsel. Laurel Publishing, Dallas TX 2009, ISBN 978-0-9774349-1-6 , (English).

Web links

Commons : Nazi Looted Art (World War II)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Michael J. Kurtz: America and the return of Nazi contraband. The recovery of europe's cultural treasures, page 26
  2. ^ Art magazine: Hitler's stolen masterpieces ( Memento from January 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Hanns Christian Löhr: Art as a weapon. The task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg. , Berlin 2018, p. 114.
  4. ^ Thomas Buomberger: Looted art art theft . Zurich 1998, p. 27 ff.
  5. ↑ Birgit Schwarz: Special order Linz and "Führermuseum" , in: Robbery and Restitution. Jewish property from 1933 to the present day. Edited by Inka Bertz and Michael Dorrmann, Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0361-4 .
  6. ↑ Götz Aly: Hitler's willing art dealers. In DIE ZEIT, Nov. 21, 2013 No. 48, p. 57. He draws conclusions from this for the current art discovery in Munich.
  7. ^ Günter Wermusch: The circumstances of the incident (un) known. Art theft under the eyes of the Allies, Braunschweig 1991
  8. ^ A b Paul Jandl: In good faith - Nazi-looted art in the Vienna Leopold Museum? , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , March 6, 2008, p. 45.
  9. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ Hannes Hartung: Art theft in war and persecution: The restitution of looted and looted art in collision law and international law , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2005, p. 43, ISBN 978-3-89949-210-1 .
  12. ↑ Sol Chaneles: The Great Betrayal , in: Art and Antiques, Dec. 1987, p 93rd
  13. ^ Walter I. Farmer and Klaus Goldmann : The Preservers of the Heritage: The Fate of German Cultural Assets at the End of the Second World War , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2002, p. 119 f., ISBN 978-3-89949-010-7 .
  14. ↑ New York Times, November 24, 1987: Met Painting Traced to Nazis and: Hanns Christian Löhr: The Brown House of Art, Hitler and the “Special Order Linz”. Visions, crimes, losses. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-05-004156-0 , pp. 82-93.
  15. ^ Agreement between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Government of the Russian Federation on cultural cooperation . In: Federal Law Gazette, Part II, 1993 . S. 1256-1260 .
  16. ^ Looted art: Back to Childhood , spiegel.de, April 3, 1995
  17. ↑ [1]
  18. ↑ faz.net: Chancellor Merkel demands return of the looted art
  19. ^ Welt.de: Sculptures from Berlin appeared in Moscow
  20. ↑ Destroyed, hidden, abducted, found
  21. ^ Sculpture "The Sleeping Spinner" back in the orangery berliner-zeitung.de, accessed on June 13, 2014.