Operations staff Reichsleiter Rosenberg

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Area of ​​activity of the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was a robbery organization of the NSDAP for cultural goods from the countries occupied during the Second World War , which was under the direction of the Nazi party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and the foreign policy office of the NSDAP (APA) led by him .

Emergence

ERR book store, Riga, November 1943

The official starting point of the ERR was the project of the "High School" , which was planned as the "central location for National Socialist research". Rosenberg wanted to fill his research institute with the material of the opponents of the National Socialist worldview, which he hoped to find in the libraries and archives of Jewish, Masonic , Communist and democratic organizations in the occupied countries. For this reason, the "Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg" was established in Paris in July 1940 with the establishment of the West Office . This organization was divided into different staff according to areas of responsibility. Only then did the management organization in Berlin emerge as a subdivision of Office III of the APA .

After the Western campaign in 1940, while searching for books and archival material, especially in France and the Benelux countries, ERR employees came across huge stocks of works of art owned by people of Jewish descent. Immediately after the occupation, the German embassy in Paris and SS- Einsatzkommandos of the Secret Field Police began to steal the most valuable pictures from well-known collections and galleries. Rosenberg and his organization wanted to be involved in these raids. Rosenberg succeeded in obtaining the power of attorney from Hitler to act as the only art theft organization in the occupied countries. The National Socialists were so fixated on appropriating valuable works of art that Nazi art theft became the ERR's most important field of work. In addition, many libraries that were supposed to serve the studies mentioned were robbed, for example for the institute to be set up to research the Jewish question in Frankfurt am Main , but above all for the library of the "High School".

Between 1940 and 1945 the ERR was active first in France, the Benelux countries, then in Poland and Greece , in the Baltic States , in the Soviet Union in the Reichskommissariat Ostland , Reichskommissariat Ukraine and Italy . The task force had eight regional main task forces and initially five professionally structured "special forces" (music, visual arts, prehistory, libraries, churches). The raids of the ERR were connected with the deportation of the robbed people to concentration camps , which mostly led to their death.

Goering's appearance

The ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was a poor manager who had little power. When the ERR had confiscated the first large collections and Rosenberg wanted to have them transported to Germany, the French military commander in Paris refused to allow this and unceremoniously forbade Rosenberg to transport the pictures. Sprang Hermann Goering one as a helper. The second most powerful man in the Third Reich had enough power to pursue his goals and was determined to share in the booty in the occupied countries. Goering had an air force command in Paris and thus soldiers, transport capacities and foreign exchange protection commandos . So he helped the ERR with the loot and transport, but claimed the first selection of the stolen images. That is why he secretly brought personnel to his side on the task force. The head of the ERR in France and the special staff for fine arts in France, Kurt von Behr , always tried to fulfill Göring's every wish. In return, Goering supported him on many occasions against his boss Rosenberg.

The Berlin head of all special staffs , Gerhard Utikal , tried to fulfill Göring's every request and, in case of doubt, preferred to act against his own boss. Göring also provided other staff such as photographers, art historians and the like. a. for the task force by transferring members of the army to the air force and then to Paris. The art historian Günther Schiedlausky and the photographer Karl Kress came to the task force in Paris instead of to the Eastern Front. These people, too, were loyal to Goering. Its greatest coup was the installation by the art historian Bruno Lohse in the direction of the special staff visual arts in Paris. Lohse, a young art historian and art dealer from Berlin, was a private with the tank destroyers in East Prussia when he was seconded to the ERR in Paris for a month. At the end of the period, at a presentation of stolen pictures, he met Göring, who was impressed by Lohse's expertise in Dutch 17th century painters. According to Lohse's account, Göring made him an offer the day after to be permanently assigned to the task force as his confidante. Lohse should represent his interests there. He then became deputy head of the special staff fine arts in Paris. Lohse also switched to the Air Force based in Paris. He then regularly prepared exhibitions of the looted property for Göring when he came to Paris. Göring traveled around 20 times in his special train to Paris in 1941 and 1942 and took the stolen goods with him in attached wagons. Lohse was also given the job of finding pictures for Göring on the art market. Lohse was fully occupied with the work for Göring and was not obliged to follow the instructions of the ERR management, but only to Göring.

timeline

Marking stamp of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg

With the Fuehrer's order of July 5, 1940, Adolf Hitler authorized the ERR:

  • to register and confiscate all cultural assets of the so-called "ownerless Jewish property" that appear to be valuable,
  • to search the state libraries and archives for writings that are valuable for National Socialist Germany,
  • to search the offices of church authorities and lodges for incidents directed against Germany and to secure the material.

On September 17, 1940, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel authorized the ERR on behalf of Hitler to “secure all abandoned cultural property”.

In July 1940, ERR France, West Department, was set up under Kurt von Behr in Paris . The central office of the ERR was located next to the Rosenberg office and the NSDAP's foreign policy office at Margaretenstrasse 18 in Berlin . The ERR was not a state institution, but a sub-organization of the NSDAP .

Rosenberg was commissioned to found and set up the party's 'high school'. It was to become the central location for Nazi research, teaching and education. This included the establishment of libraries. Rosenberg therefore had Jewish and Masonic libraries confiscated in order to gain knowledge about the enemy. When the seizure squads were on the move in France, those responsible discovered that there were very large amounts of art that could be got hold of. Therefore, the area of ​​competence of the ERR command was extended to the confiscation of all art and cultural property. From April 1941 to July 1944, 29 transports brought seized works from Paris to Germany, where the ERR maintained its main depot in Neuschwanstein Castle .

Country activities

France (from 1940)

Plaque at Jeu de Paume in Paris, which served the West Office of the ERR from autumn 1940 to summer 1944 as an interim storage facility and exhibition building

Art objects were confiscated at over 50 different locations and shown in seven exhibitions at the Museum Jeu de Paume : mainly to provide an overview of the most valuable objects to Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, with whom the ERR worked closely in Paris. The confiscated libraries , including the “Polish Library”, the “ Turgenev Library ” and the libraries of numerous Paris lodges , were intended to benefit the central library of the “ High School of the NSDAP ”. According to the work report, the seizures include 21,903 objects from 203 collections. Günther Schiedlausky , Hans Ulrich Wirth, Karl Heinz Esser , Heinrich Jerchel, Bruno Lohse , Friedrich Franz Kuntze and the photographer Karl Kress, who documented looted property in photos, were the main scientific workers involved in the robbery.

Greece (from 1941)

Immediately after the German invasion of Greece , a division of the Rosenberg Special Command, which was attached to the 12th Army of the Wehrmacht, arrived in Athens in early May 1941, under the direction of Lieutenant Hermann von Ingram . In Thessaloniki alone, more than 50 raids, interrogations of Jewish personalities and searches were carried out in cooperation with the Wehrmacht's secret field police . The population data obtained were later used for the deportation of the Jews. Historically valuable documents, cultural assets and liturgical objects, including around 100,000 books from the Jewish libraries in Thessaloniki , were stolen.

Eastern Europe (from 1941)

Shortly after arriving from Kiev : ERR employees in the streets of the Ukrainian city of Kharkov , November 1942

The art theft in the east began soon after the war began in 1939/40 in Poland under the responsibility of the SS Himmler and in the Generalgouvernement of Poland under the commissioner Kajetan Mühlmann . The ERR only became active in Eastern Europe with the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, when Rosenberg became Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories . The ERR soon had numerous branch offices; three main working groups (HAG) were formed with the attack: Ostland (Baltic States), Central ( Belarus , Western Russia), Ukraine . The task force was in competition with other National Socialist institutions operating there, in particular the Künsberg special command and the Ahnenerbe research and teaching group , which were subordinate to Heinrich Himmler . In cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the SS, all three organizations were tasked with tracking down, classifying and transporting or destroying works of art, libraries and archives. As a rule, the previous owners of the booty were killed immediately on the spot or taken to a concentration camp for later murder . From 1942 on, the books captured in the east were placed in the "Ostbücherei Rosenberg" in Berlin.

Structure of the ERR

Central Office Berlin

The Central Office in Berlin , a department of the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP , headed by Georg Ebert (until 1941), later by Gerhard Utikal , was divided into three departments:

Headquarters West Office of the ERR from 1941 to 1942/43, Avenue d'Iéna No. 54 in Paris (right door, behind the Egyptian Embassy)

The West Office of the ERR, based in Paris, responsible for France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, was founded in July 1940. The chief was Georg Ebert, and from autumn his deputy DRK field leader Kurt von Behr. Ebert was also head of all special staff in these countries and head of the special staff fine arts. At the beginning of 1941, Gerhard Utikal, based in Berlin, became Ebert's successor, responsible for task forces in all countries. Thereupon von Behr, meanwhile DRK-Oberfeldführer, became head of the ERR France (west office, also responsible for the Benelux countries) and thus had the supervision of all special staffs. Behr was also head of the special staff for the fine arts. Ebert was assigned to the embassy as Rosenberg's representative and stayed in Paris. On March 25, 1942, von Behr also took over the coordination of the " M-Aktion ", the confiscation of furniture for German purposes that had been taken from the apartments of prisoners and displaced persons.

Seven special forces coordinated the operations of the task force in Western Europe from Paris:

Then came the

In January 1943, the ERR staff management had 350 employees. According to Utikal, the ERR was a war institution of Reichsleiter Rosenberg . The activity was seen as important to the war effort, which was evident from the fact that the members of the Wehrmacht were included in the army . The employees wore special uniforms.

Branch offices and depots

Branch offices : In the spring of 1943, the Berlin headquarters of the ERR were badly hit by bombs. A branch office as a book control center (set up by Herbert Lommatzsch ; sp. Head: Ulrich Cruse ), especially for library holdings from the east, was set up in Ratibor in September 1943 under Gerd Wunder . The books were stored u. a. in Pless Castle . Some of them were redistributed by Ratibor. The special science staff also resided in Racibórz. In January 1945 the location had to be abandoned, whereby the transport capacity was insufficient to take the stocks with them.

The task force had other branches in Amsterdam, Brussels, Belgrade, Riga, Reval, Vilnius, Dorpat, Minsk, Gorky, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Simferopol and Hohenschwangau.

Depots for the looted property:

Organizations to investigate art and culture theft

Already during the war and a short time afterwards, organizations were founded within the Allied sphere of influence to investigate the robbery of art and culture by the ERR and other National Socialist organizations:

  • Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section (MFA & A) - As early as 1942, the MFA & A was created by the Allied armed forces, which specializes in the protection of art.
  • Central Collecting Point Munich (CCP) - The collection point of the US armed forces was created on June 17, 1945 in Munich. Works of art came here from over 600 German and Austrian relocations. In September 1949, the management of the art treasures was transferred to the German authorities. Around 700,000 cultural assets were restituted between 1945 and 1951 . In 1962 this resulted in the trust administration for cultural property (TVK)
  • Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA) - The French return commission for works of art was founded in September 1944.
  • Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (CEJRC), founded in 1944 by Salo Baron and Morris Cohen, among others . Other employees were Hannah Arendt , Aron Freimann and Max Weinreich . The prevailing opinion was that most of the books should be brought to Israel, since at that time it was difficult to imagine a new Jewish-cultural life in Europe.
  • Jewish Cultural Reconstruction , Inc. (JCR), actual name "American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee", often abbreviated to "Joint". The sub-organization for the cultural reconstruction of Jewish life was created in 1947. From 1949 it was a trust company vis-à-vis US authorities.
  • Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) - The organization for the search for cultural property without heirs and their transfer to Jewish institutions was launched in 1948.
  • Offenbach Archival Depot (OAD) - The OAD was the main collection point of the US authorities for recovered holdings of stolen Jewish libraries, archives and ritual objects.

In the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany, the discussion about the return and restitution was mainly conducted under the catchphrase reparation .

literature

Sources / documents

  • Günther Haase: Art theft and art protection. A documentation. Hildesheim 1991, ISBN 3-487-09539-4 (published by Books on Demand in 2008: Volume I and Volume II).
  • Günther Haase: The art collection of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring . Documentation with facsimiles and a document attachment. Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86124-520-5 .
  • Günther Haase: The Art Collection Adolf Hitler '. Documentation with facsimiles and a document attachment. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86124-552-3 .
  • Elizabeth Simpson (Ed.): The Spoils of War - World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. New York 1997.
  • Nancy H. Yeide: Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: the Hermann Göring Collection . Dallas 2009, ISBN 978-0-9774349-1-6 .

General representations

  • Jacob Kurz: Art theft in Europe 1938–1945. Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-926827-25-4 .
  • 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 .
  • Lynn H. Nicholas: The Rape of Europa. The fate of European works of art in the Third Reich. From the American. Munich 1997, ISBN 3-426-77260-4 .
    • First version: The rape of Europa. The fate of Europe's treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. London 1994.
  • Peter M. Manasse: Deported Archives and Libraries. The activity of the task force Rosenberg during the Second World War. St. Ingbert 1997, ISBN 3-86110-131-9 .
  • 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 .
  • Hector Feliciano: The Lost Museum. About art theft by the Nazis. From the English by Chris Hirte. Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-351-02475-4 .
  • Jonathan Petropoulos: Art theft and collecting mania. Art and Politics in the Third Reich. Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-549-05594-3 .
  • Jonathan Petropoulos: The Faustian Bargain. The Art World in Nazi Germany. London 2000, ISBN 0-7139-9438-X .
  • Wilhelm Treue : The Bargatzky Report. In Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 1965, p. 285 ( online ).
  • Inka Bertz, Michael Dorrmann (Ed.): Robbery and Restitution. Jewish property from 1933 to the present day. Edited on behalf of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main. Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0361-4 (also the exhibition catalog for the 2008/2009 exhibition of the same name).

France, Belgium and the Netherlands

  • Matila Simon: The Battle of the Louvre. The Struggle to Save French Art in World War 2. New York 1971.
  • Willem de Vries: Art theft in the West 1940-1945. Alfred Rosenberg and the special staff for music. Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-596-14768-9 .
  • Anja Heuss : Art and cultural property theft. Study on the occupation policy of the National Socialists in France and the Soviet Union. Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-0994-0 .
  • Frits J. Hoogewoud, Sabine Arndt: “On Transport!” German stations of “seized” Jewish and Masonic libraries from France and the Netherlands (1940–1949). Edited by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library . CW Niemeyer , Hameln 2005, ISBN 3-8271-8818-0 , ISSN  1610-4439 (exhibition catalog, detailed references).
  • Anthonie Johannes van der Leeuw: Withdrawal of public and private libraries in the occupied western areas and their transfer to Germany. Rijksinstitut voor oorlogsdocumentatie , Amsterdam 1961.

Ostland, Ukraine and Generalgouvernement

  • Anja Heuss: art and cultural property theft. Study on the occupation policy of the National Socialists in France and the Soviet Union. Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-0994-0 .
  • Stefan Lehr: An almost forgotten "Eastern insert". German archivists in the Generalgouvernement and in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 3-7700-1624-6 .
  • Gutsul Nazarii: The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and his activities in the Ukraine 1941–1944 ( online , Persistent Identifier ; also accepted diss. Phil. University of Gießen 2013).

Special research

  • Esther Tisa Francini et al. a .: Refugee property - looted property. The transfer of cultural goods in and via Switzerland 1933–1945 and the question of restitution. Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-0340-0601-2 .
  • Rainer Strzolka: Destruction of Jewish identity through the National Socialist robbery of word and writing . In: AKMB news 9.3003.1, pp. 3–7.
  • Rainer Strzolka: Jewish book possession as booty. On the symposium in the Lower Saxony state parliament on November 14, 2002. In: AKMB news 9.2003.1, pp. 7–13.
  • Rainer Strzolka: The exhibition "Seligmanns books" . In: AKMB news 9.2003.1, pp. 14–15.
  • Rainer Strzolka: Contributions to provenance research . Vienna symposium on robbery and restitution in libraries. In: Book and Library 55.2003.10 / 11, pp. 650–651.
  • Rainer Strzolka: Jewish book ownership as looted property . New research contributions on the restitution of Jewish libraries. A report on the 2nd Hanover Symposium. In: Buch und Bibliothek 57.2005.7 / 8, 530-532 (reprint in: L.Aktiv. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek NF 4.2005.28, pp. 2-4).
  • Michael J. Kurtz: America and the Return of Nazi Contraband. The Recovery of Europe's Cultural Treasures. New York 2006.

Offenbach Archival Depot

  • History workshop Offenbach: almost forgotten. The American book depot in Offenbach am Main from 1945 to 1949 . Offenbacher Editions, Offenbach 2011, ISBN 978-3-939537-14-4 .

Impact history

exhibition

  • 2012: almost forgotten. The American book depot in Offenbach am Main from 1945 to 1949. Offenbach am Main City Library.

See also

Web links

Commons : Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg - the prophet of the war of the soul. The devout Nazi in the ruling elite of the National Socialist state. In: Michael Ley, Julius H. Schoeps (ed.): National Socialism as a political religion . Bodenheim near Mainz 1997, ISBN 3-8257-0032-1 , p. 122.
  2. ↑ A member of the American Art Looting Investigation Unit , which cleared up the art theft for the Nuremberg Trial, described the task force in 1946 with the sentence “A Goering Show under the Rosenberg Flag”. The investigator of the American Art Looting Investigation Unit in Atlantic Monthly 1946 p. under Web links James Plaut: Loot for the Master Race in Atlantic Monthly September 1946 Accessed on November 14, 2009.
  3. ↑ Jonathan Petropoulos: Art theft and collecting mania. Art and Politics in the Third Reich. Berlin 1999, p. 168.
  4. ^ Ernst Piper: Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler's chief ideologist. Munich 2005, p. 489.
  5. ↑ Deviating from this, however, a West German ordinance of 1965 names the Reich Ministry, i.e. a state body, as the sponsor of the West Department , whereby other “Reich” agencies than DW were involved in the art and furniture theft (so-called M-Action ) ( Source ).
  6. ↑ See the Führer order of July 5, 1940.
  7. ↑ See also Keitel order of September 17, 1940.
  8. ^ Greg Bradsher: Karl Kress: Photographer for the ERR and the Third Army MFA & A Special Evacuation Team. The National Archives Text Message, August 21, 2014 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945 , accessed April 18, 2016
  10. ↑ Final report of the special command Rosenberg in Greece ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , November 15, 1941 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.argus.bstu.bundesarchiv.de
  11. ↑ see: Nazarii Gutsul: The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and his activities in the Ukraine 1941–1944. Diss. Phil. University of Giessen , 2013 ( full text ).
  12. ^ Hanns Christian Löhr: Art as a weapon. The task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-7861-2806-9 , p. 79.
  13. ↑ Willem de Vries: Art theft in the west 1940-1945. Alfred Rosenberg and the special staff for music . Frankfurt a. M. 2000, ISBN 3-596-14768-9 , pp. 35-39.
  14. ↑ s. James Plaut: Loot for the Masterrace. Atlantic Monthly Sept. 1946, accessible under the web links, as well as the Consolidated Interrogation Report 1, ERR in France. There is also much recent evidence to support this. One comes from Anne Rotfeld, who wrote a dissertation on the administrative history of art theft, in her lecture at the annual meeting of the American Historians' Association entitled Building Hermann Göring's Art Collection in the series “Recovering Hidden Primary Resources: Harnessing the power of new technologies for a new generation of History scholarship, "American Historical Association 2002 Meeting, San Francisco, January 3-6, 2002.
  15. ↑ See web links Federal Archives, Introduction
  16. ↑ Willem de Vries: Art theft in the west 1940-1945. Alfred Rosenberg and the special staff for music. Frankfurt a. M. 2000, p. 38 f.
  17. ↑ See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted: Roads to Ratibor. Library to Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19/3 (2005), pp. 390–458 ( online PDF version ).
  18. ^ Regine Dehnel: Jewish book ownership as looted property. 2nd Hanover Symposium. Klostermann, Frankfurt 2006, p. 82. Readable online; Arendt in her report from Germany , published as a visit to D. Rotbuch, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-88022-797-7 (94 pages, also in several collective works).
  19. ↑ Where is your ashes now? In: FAZ of April 2, 2012, p. 36.
  20. ↑ 15 case studies, e.g. B. Alfred Hess , Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer , Paul Westheim , Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers , Max Steinthal and Alma Mahler-Werfel