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



Courtesy of Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons
Captain H.H. Davies of Birkenhead looks through
a collection of paintings found in a house in
Hanover, Germany, belonging to an SS member
who had looted the pieces from Holland.

century, European Jews were beginning to assimilate
and acculturate into mainstream European culture.

Wesley Fisher, the director of research for the
Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against
Germany and World Jewish Restitution Organization,
head of the Claims Conference-WJRO Looted Art
and Cultural Property Initiative and former execu-
tive director of the Weitzman National Museum of
American Jewish History, explained that art collection
was a way for Jews to attain a more elite status, made
appealing for those emerging from the shtetl period.

Jewish art collectors and artists joined many other
Jewish elite in making their mark on European culture.

As World War II approached, however, arts and culture
became the target of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorial rule.

“Hitler had himself been an artist, a rejected artist,
but still,” Fisher said. “Th ere was the general recog-
nition, as there very oft en is in dictatorships, that art
plays a role in control of the population.”
Hitler created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter
Rosenberg, a Nazi agency designed for looting Jewish
cultural objects, including art and Judaica. In addi-
tion to becoming the property of Nazi offi cers who
aspired to join Hitler in the practice of art apprecia-
tion, the pieces were stored. Th ere is speculation that
Hitler, upon being victorious, would have created a
museum to an extinct race, which would memorial-
ize the Jewish mass genocide. Th e fi nest pieces would
go to the Führermuseum, an unrealized art museum
in Hitler’s Austrian hometown on Linz, Fisher said.

Th e ERR was far from the only group designed to
loot Jewish-owned artwork. Th e Gestapo also took
part in the robberies. In Western Europe, the looting
eff orts were organized, with France and Italy creating
similar initiatives. In the Soviet Union, the govern-
ment had already nationalized Bolshevik (which
also crudely included Jews) cultural items before the
Nazis’ arrival there. Artwork was state property.

Despite the inherent value of the art pieces to the
Nazis, documentation of the artworks was sloppy.

“Th e Nazis, for the most part, certainly in large parts
of what they were doing, were not recording where
these paintings were coming from,” Fisher said.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme
Allied Commander, sorts through pieces of
art looted by the Nazis that were kept in a
German salt mine in 1945.

While Nazis tracked the prominent pieces from
Paris’ Jeu de Paume museum, they did not document
the locations of other works. Furniture and less-mov-
able pieces never made it to the databases.

To make matters muddier, art auctions, sales under
duress and enforced sales sent these objects all over the
world. Fisher said that 15,000 artworks were auctioned
off in Paris aft er the Western Allies had returned them
from the Munich Central Collecting Point, which was
created as a repository for art stolen by Nazis.

In the decades aft er the war, the Claims Conference
worked to create a database for the stolen art. Th ere
are an estimated 600,000 objects stolen from Nazis
and their allies during the war; the database contains
only a fraction of that fi gure.

“Th at still is pretty much the only database that shows
what was taken, from whom the items were taken and
what the state of the objects have been,” Fisher said.

For museums such as the Dresden City Museum,
the lack of organized data surrounding looted objects
makes the process of retrieving stolen items from the
collection even harder.

Andrea Rudolph, the curator of cultural history
of the museum, said that 80% of its cultural history
collection has been returned.

Dresden City Museum lost its database in the war
and relies on others to triangulate and identify the
lost objects and their locations. Th e museum has had
a cup and drinking vessel returned in 2019 and 2017,
respectively, along with a few other objects since 2002.

“Th e problem is, we don’t have any capacity to do
specialty research on this topic,” Rudolph said. “We
would need ... researchers and especially fi nancial
resources to pay someone to do this research.”
Th ough the Claims Conference was created in 1951
to address reparations to Jewish people following
the Holocaust, art repatriation was not its primary
focus. Moreover, art restitution and repatriation
more broadly did not gain an international spotlight
until about 20 years ago.

For the 50 years following the creation of the
Claims Conference, eff orts were focused elsewhere,
on providing monetary reparations to survivors and
Published in the “Report on the Year 1943,
Council of Elders of the Jews,” a group of men
sort through the confi scated possessions of
Jews in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

memorializing the history of the Holocaust.

In the 1990s, however, a renewed interest in art
restitution emerged following the opening of the
archives in the Soviet Union aft er the fall of com-
munism, which allowed access to records that would
help in provenance eff orts, Fisher said.

Around the same time, documentaries such as
“Th e Rape of Europa” and books such as “Beautiful
Loot: Th e Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures”
by Konstantin Akinsha elucidated the Nazi history
of looting art.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted the Washington
Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, in which 44
governments committed to the work of provenance
and art restitution and developed the Washington
Conference Principles on Nazi-Confi scated Art.

Th e American Association (now Alliance) of
Museums, in response to the growing conversa-
tions around provenance, put out its own standards
of self-regulation. In 2003, it created the Nazi Era
Provenance Internet Portal, where 179 museums have
opted into uploading information about objects in their
collections that changed hands during the Nazi era.

Th ough representative of the world coming to terms
with and working to correct the sustained impact of
Nazi rule, the return and survival of artworks to their
home cities is a reminder of the individual loss Jewish
families experienced during the Shoah.

Levitt asserted that associated with each piece of
art, in addition to its monetary value, is a story. For
some families, a piece of art was a treasured object
passed down from generations. By looking at it, one
could feel connections to their ancestors. Th e physi-
cal pieces of art are a tether to the past generations of
Jews lost to the horrors of the Shoah.

“As survivors are aging and becoming more frail,
and many of them are no longer with us, there’s
something about objects in the ways in which they
take up space,” she said. “We know that they were
there then, and they’re here now.” JE
srogelberg@miadatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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