The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Special Task Force of Reich Leader Rosenberg, was the office Alfred Rosenberg ran from July 1940 onwards to confiscate Jewish-owned art, books and cultural property across occupied Europe. The ERR was the largest single looting operation of the war. By the time of the German collapse in May 1945, the ERR had processed property from around seventy nine thousand Jewish households across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Italy and the eastern occupied territories. The ERR’s operations in France alone yielded an estimated forty thousand works of art and one hundred thousand books. The total European tally has never been firmly established and continues to be the subject of restitution research eighty years on.
Rosenberg himself was the Reich’s chief ideologist, the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, the author of the racial-mystical tract The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and from 1941 the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The looting operation began as an offshoot of his Hohe Schule project, the planned post-war Nazi university for which he was assembling a research library on Judaism, Freemasonry and Bolshevism. The pretext was that the confiscated material was research evidence on the Reich’s ideological enemies. The reality was that the operation rapidly became a transmission belt for Hitler’s Führermuseum project at Linz, for Göring’s personal collection at Carinhall, and for the redistribution of Jewish cultural property to senior Reich officials.
The Paris operation was the centrepiece. The ERR took possession of the Jeu de Paume museum on the Place de la Concorde in November 1940 and turned it into a sorting and exhibition centre. Confiscated works from the apartments of Jewish collectors across France, including the Rothschild, David-Weill, Kann, Veil-Picard, Fould-Springer and Schloss collections, were trucked to the Jeu de Paume, photographed, catalogued, and either shipped to Germany or held for selection by senior Reich figures. Göring visited the museum twenty times between 1940 and 1942 and made personal selections from each visit. The ERR shipped the selected works east in dedicated railway carriages. The lower-grade material was sold or auctioned to fund the operation.
The French museum curator Rose Valland, who continued to work at the Jeu de Paume throughout the occupation while secretly maintaining the museum’s old role as the depot for foreign-owned art, kept clandestine records of every transaction. She noted the dates of arrivals, the names of the original owners where she could identify them, the destinations of departures, and the railway carriage numbers. She passed information to the French resistance and after the liberation handed her records to the French authorities. Her notebooks are the central document of the postwar French restitution effort. The 1964 film The Train, starring Burt Lancaster, dramatised the events of the August 1944 ERR train shipment that Valland helped redirect. The historical record is in her own postwar memoir, Le front de l’art, published in 1961.
The eastern operations, in occupied Poland, the Baltic states, Belorussia and Ukraine, were larger by volume and have been less reconstructed because most of the records were destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944, 1945. The ERR confiscated the libraries of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, the Mendele Library in Vilna, the Strashun Library, the Polish-Jewish historical archives at Warsaw and Łódź, and the synagogue libraries of hundreds of small communities across Belorussia and Ukraine. The material was sent to Frankfurt for the Hohe Schule project. After the German collapse, the surviving portion of these holdings was found by American forces at the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt and partially restituted to Jewish institutions, with the YIVO collections going to YIVO’s New York reorganisation and many of the Polish materials going to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Alfred Rosenberg was tried at Nuremberg, convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, conspiracy and crimes against peace, and hanged on 16 October 1946. He was the principal architect of the cultural looting and the only one of the senior figures responsible to be put on trial. The men who had run the field operations, including Kurt von Behr, who had directed the Paris operation, did not face Allied prosecution; von Behr killed himself in May 1945. The deeper architecture of the operation, the close cooperation between the ERR and the Reich Foreign Office, the Reich Ministry of Finance, the Reichsbahn, the German art trade, and the senior beneficiaries Göring and Hitler, has been documented in steady increments over the past thirty years through the work of the various national restitution commissions, the Holocaust-Era Assets Conference of Prague in 2009 and the dedicated provenance research now under way at the major American, German, French, Austrian and Dutch museums.
See also
- Hermann Göring
- Adolf Hitler
- Alfred Rosenberg
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- Goering Personal Art Collection
- The Salt Mines at Altaussee
- The Monuments Men
Sources
- Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, Knopf, 1994
- Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Survey of the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), IISH and IOS, 2011
- Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, Oxford University Press, 2000
- Rose Valland, Le front de l’art, Plon, 1961
- Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, Basic Books, 1997
- ERR Project, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, online database of looted property