feature story
Decades After the Holocaust,
Efforts to Return Nazi-Looted Art
Are Slow, Steady
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
German soldiers in Naples, Italy, in 1944, pose with a painting
taken from the National Museum of Naples Picture Gallery.

I T’S NEVER JUST AS SIMPLE AS “fi nders keep-
ers, losers weepers.”
In June, the Philadelphia Museum of Art
returned a 16th-century marksman’s shield in its pos-
session since the 1950s to the Dresden City Museum.

Th e shield — in the Dresden City Museum’s posses-
sion until 1945, when it went missing — was a trophy
from a Dresden bird-shooting competition, a prac-
tice common since the 1440s. Awarded to crossbow
shooter Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony in 1618, the
shield was donated to the city by the victor a year later.

In the 1880s, it became part of Dresden’s Council trea-
sury, and when the Dresden City Museum opened up
shortly thereaft er, a part of the museum’s collection.

At the end of World War II, the shield, kept in the
museum’s basement, went missing along with the
museum’s Council treasury collection. In 1956, the
object, having reemerged, was auctioned off at a Swiss
art trade. Th e owner, a resident of New York, donated
the shield to the PMA 20 years later.

In 2016, however, the PMA realized it could no lon-
ger ethically possess the marksman’s shield. Th rough
the museum’s provenance research — an ongoing
curatorial practice of discovering an object’s origin
20 AUGUST 25, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
— museum staff , led by PMA Director Emeritus
Tim Rub, arranged for the return of the shield to
Dresden. On July 2, the shield rejoined the Dresden
City Museum’s collection on display.

As tangled as the restitution was, it’s hardly the only
example. Since 2001, the PMA has returned several
objects from its collection to the rightful owners. Th e
museum continues to conduct extensive research on
objects created before 1946 and acquired aft er 1932.

Th ose years are intentional. Since the beginning
of the Th ird Reich, Nazi offi cials looted the art and
historical objects of hundreds of thousands of private
homes — particularly Jewish homes — and museums
to assert dominance and destroy the livelihoods of
the targeted population. Almost a century aft er the
looting began, eff orts to restitute and repatriate the
stolen objects have just begun.

“Th e vast majority of people who lost everything that
they had or much of what they had during the Shoah
have never been able to reclaim any of their property,
or very little,” said Lauren Levitt, a Temple University
professor of religion, Jewish studies and gender.

Now, museums follow a set of standards to guide
their provenance and restitution practices, keeping
Archer’s Trophy (Artist/maker unknown; German,
1619), was returned to the Dresden City Museum
from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in June.

Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
in mind the rippling eff ects the Holocaust still has on
many families, who now have little evidence of their
relatives’ existence in Europe before the Shoah.

“It’s a testimony to the sort of values and respect
that those professionals have in relation to these
really valuable pieces of artwork that were looted, and
otherwise taken and redistributed both during and
aft er the war,” Levitt said of the guidelines.

Artwork, in addition to having great monetary value
to museums and collectors, also has profound and sen-
timental meanings to Jewish families. In the early 20th