The Washington Principles 1998

The Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, signed at the State Department in December 1998 by representatives of forty four governments, were the first international agreement on the restitution of Holocaust-looted art since the postwar Allied agreements of 1946, 1949. The Principles were not legally binding. They were a set of voluntary commitments. The signing governments undertook to identify Nazi-confiscated art in their public collections, to make the information available to potential claimants, and to seek just and fair solutions when claims were brought. The Principles became, in the years that followed, the framework for almost all serious art restitution work in Europe and North America.

The conference at which the Principles were drafted, the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, ran from 30 November to 3 December 1998 at the State Department under the chairmanship of the Under Secretary for Economic, Business and Agricultural Affairs, Stuart Eizenstat. Eizenstat had spent the previous five years pressing the governments of Switzerland, France, Sweden, Germany and Argentina to open their wartime banking and insurance records and to settle the outstanding restitution claims. The Swiss banks had paid the class action settlement of one and a quarter billion dollars in August 1998. The German government had begun the process that would lead to the German Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, which paid five billion dollars in compensation to surviving slave labourers between 2001 and 2007. The Washington Conference brought the various national efforts together in a single framework and added the art question to the agenda.

The eleven Principles, as published, were brief. The signatories agreed: that art confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted should be identified; that records and archives should be opened and made accessible; that resources and personnel should be made available for identification; that consideration should be given to the unavoidable gaps and ambiguities in provenance research because of the lapse of time and the war damage to records; that pre-war owners and their heirs should be encouraged to come forward; that pre-war owners or their heirs should be assisted in establishing claims; that just and fair solutions should be sought when art was identified as having been confiscated and not subsequently restituted; that the same standards should apply to museums, governments and private institutions; that nations should develop national processes to implement the Principles; and that international conferences and resources should support the work.

The Principles produced different results in different countries. The German government established the Limbach Commission, the Beratende Kommission, in 2003, with a panel of senior German jurists, art historians and former cabinet ministers, to mediate disputed restitution claims. The commission had heard around twenty cases by 2024 and made restitution recommendations in around half. The Dutch Restitutions Committee, established in 2002, had heard around two hundred cases by 2024 and recommended restitution in around half. The Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board, established in 1998, had reviewed several hundred works in Austrian state collections and recommended restitution of around three hundred. The French CIVS, the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation, established in 1999, had handled tens of thousands of claims, mostly for compensation rather than for the return of specific works. The British Spoliation Advisory Panel, established in 2000, had heard around twenty cases.

The American record under the Principles was mixed. The major American museums, including the Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery and the Getty, undertook substantial provenance research projects in the 2000s and posted partial results online. The American Association of Museums published Standards for Museums and the Nazi-Era in 2001. American restitution to identifiable Jewish heirs proceeded steadily through the 2000s and 2010s but slowed in the 2020s as the easier cases were settled and as some museums took adversarial positions on the harder ones, particularly when the works had high market value. The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, the HEAR Act, gave Holocaust-era art claimants in American courts six years from the date of discovery of identifying information to bring a federal claim, suspending the various state laws of limitations that had been used by museums to defeat claims on procedural grounds. The HEAR Act expired in 2026 and was not renewed; its expiry has reopened the procedural debate.

The Principles’ twentieth anniversary in 2018 produced an unwelcome assessment. The signatory governments held a follow-up conference in Berlin in November 2018 and concluded, in the closing communique, that the work was incomplete, that the rate of restitutions had slowed, and that the harder cases, those involving works of high market value held by major museums and those involving the so-called flight goods, the works sold under duress at deflated prices in the late 1930s, were producing a falling restitution rate. The principal restitution research agencies, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe in London, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the various national commissions, have continued the work; but the politics of restitution has hardened, and the assumption of 1998 that the work would be substantially complete within two decades has proved wrong.

The work continues. As of 2024, around two hundred thousand works of art looted during the Holocaust are still listed in the various international databases as missing or as held in collections without restitution. The number is approximate. The actual figure is probably higher because much of the looting was never recorded.

See also

Sources

  • Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, December 1998, full text from the State Department
  • Stuart Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, PublicAffairs, 2003
  • Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, archives and ongoing reporting
  • Commission for Looted Art in Europe, London, restitution database and case reports
  • Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, US Public Law 114-308
  • Marie Cronin and Wesley A. Fisher, Nazi Plunder: Great Treasures Lost, Westview, 2024