The Nazi state stole property on a scale without precedent. It stole bank accounts, factories, farms, shops, houses, furniture, jewellery, life policies, gold teeth, hair, clothing and art. The art is the most visible part of the theft because it can be tracked, named, photographed and in some cases recovered. The rest is mostly gone.
The looting of Jewish-owned art collections began with the Aryanisation laws of the mid-1930s, which forced Jewish owners in Germany to sell at sums far below market value. It accelerated with the annexation of Austria in 1938. It became industrial during the war as German forces occupied France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Italy and the Soviet Union. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, set up under Alfred Rosenberg in 1940, ran the systematic confiscation of Jewish-owned art from occupied western Europe. Hermann Göring took for himself works from the Schloss collection, the Rothschild collections and many others. Hitler had a personal collecting agent, Hans Posse, who built a Reich collection intended for the Führermuseum in Linz. The total looted is estimated at around six hundred and fifty thousand works.
Restitution has been slow, partial and contested. The Allied Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, the Monuments Men, recovered around five million cultural objects from German repositories at the end of the war and worked to return them. Most went back to their countries of origin, but the question of whether they then reached the actual owners or their heirs was left to national governments, many of which had no interest in pursuing the matter. The 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art finally produced an international consensus that looted works should be returned. In practice that consensus has not been universal.
The pages in this section cover the named cases that have shaped the field. Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, returned to Maria Altmann after a long American court case. The Schiele drawings returned to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum. The Rothschild collection. The Goudstikker case in the Netherlands. The Gurlitt hoard, found in a Munich apartment in 2012. The cases are not closed. They will not be closed in the lifetime of any reader of this site.
The art that has come back is a fraction of what was taken. Most of what was stolen from ordinary Jewish families, the family albums, the menorahs, the Sabbath candlesticks, the jewellery passed down through generations, is gone. The pages in this section deal with what can be tracked. They are also, by implication, a memorial to what cannot.
What is here
- Goering Personal Art Collection
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
- Hair Gold Teeth and Industrial Looting
- The Salt Mines at Altaussee
- The Monuments Men
- The Washington Principles 1998
- The Gurlitt Collection
- The Klimt Paintings and Woman in Gold
- Books Manuscripts and Libraries
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards