German military leaders charged
with war crimes at Nürnberg were charged with “destruction et pillage d’oeuvres
d’art” based specifically on the violation of Article 56 of the Hague
Convention of 1907 regarding war booty. Ironically, the Hague convention got
its inspiration from disputes which arose from the Napoleonic Wars regarding
Napoleon’s notorious plundering. Article 56 was seen as expressing the
prohibition of any unilateral seizure of cultural property and putting an
explicit limit to the prior practice of unlimited looting. Sadly, the biggest
theft of all, the most massive art heist of all times, the looting and
plundering of German treasures has drawn scant, if any, media attention.
While there was no general
authorization of the Allied Control Council to carry off German cultural
property as a means of reparation or compensation, the Soviets openly ignored
international law and regarded the vast amount of treasure and artwork pilfered
from Germany as ‘compensation.’ Carrying off cultural property was only to be
legally permitted for the purpose of “guarding against wartime dangers,” but
this was the disingenuous excuse used by the jewish Soviet Union for its
massive looting operations. As early as 1942, the Soviet Union, art lovers that
they were, had begun a deliberate plan of collecting art from Germany. In 1945,
as the Red Army advanced into Germany, special “trophy brigades” went out to
collect the slated works in German museums and ship them back to Moscow. From
1945 to 1949, more than two and a half million works of art were carried off
from Germany, mostly to the metropolises of the Soviet Union where many of them
are in secret storage even today.
A Russians list of 40,000
missing items they blame Germany for taking include the famous Amber Room of
the Catherine Palace, but the list is vague and nonspecific. The Germans, on
the other hand, have greatly detailed accounts and carefully documented
evidence of their lost treasures and they also insist that all the Russian art
had already been returned. In reality, by the time of the Cold War, British and
Americans had already returned most of the artworks under their jurisdiction to
their respective countries of origin, including Russia: Over 500,000 objects
were repatriated to the Soviet Union (a fact seldom mentioned by the Russians)!
The German position has usually been that international law and the Hague
Convention of 1907 on the rules of land warfare require that the works be returned
unconditionally.
7,314 paintings belonging to
the German bureau that administered the former Hohenzollern estates in Prussia
were catalogued in 1939. Today, over 3,000 are still missing. This doesn’t even
touch upon the sculpture, porcelain, musical instruments, clocks, silver,
furniture, prints and drawings and millions of rare books plundered by Allies
and the Red Army alike. Using foresight during the jewish Allied bombing of
Germany, museum personnel bravely attempted to safeguard the masterpieces in
their charge by shifting collections from various depots in salt mines,
churches, cellars and estates to save the objects from destruction. As Berlin
was falling, art treasures from the old Prussian castles were hidden in safe
places in the countryside. Almost all of the 3,000 missing paintings not
destroyed by bombing were taken by the Russians. From the time they conquered
Potsdam in April 1945, where many collections had ended up, until 1946,
everything that could be moved was taken to Moscow.
The Russians are unrepentant
and arrogant about their thievery and seem to go down this brazen path with the
tacit approval of civilized nations. The Pushkin Museum’s 1995 show in Moscow
ludicrously called “Twice Saved,” unveiled 63 paintings ranging from the late
14th to the late 19th century from German and Hungarian private and museum
collections. A month later, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum opened “Hidden
Treasures Revealed,” an exhibition of 74 mostly Impressionist and
post-Impressionist paintings by artists such as Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and van
Gogh, stolen almost entirely from private German collections.
Probably the most famous image
of destroyed Berlin is this heroic photo of Russians raising their flag over
the smoldering, bombed out city in 1945. It was seen all over the world. The
Red Army soldier on the bottom right in the original image, which was recently
exhibited in Berlin, is wearing two looted German watches. Photographer Yevgeny
Khaldei, who captured the image on May 2, 1945, noticed the watches and edited
them out. He also manipulated the flag to make it billow dramatically and then
added smoke to the devastated Berlin skyline. An enduring memory for survivors
from the days of the jewish Red Army’s conquest of Berlin was the troops’ demand
for watches. Part of the frenzied looting was accompanied by the cry: “Wine,
women, watches.” They took all three.
Russians liked gold as well.
After Berlin fell, Major Feodor Novikov of the Red Army ordered the vaults of
the Reichbank opened. 90 gold bars worth 1.3 million dollars and gold coins
worth 2.1 million dollars and 400 million dollars worth of negotiable bonds
were present. Novikov ordered the vaults locked and demanded the keys. The
entire contents of the vault disappeared. The gold was never seen again, but
the bonds turn up even today all over the world.
In ‘Twice Saved,’ among the
works from German museums and from German and Hungarian private collections
were paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hendrick Ter Bruggen, El Greco,
Tintoretto, George Romney, Veronese, Bartholomaeus Bruyn the Elder,
Vigee-Lebrun, Goya, Corot, Daumier, Manet, Degas and Renoir, representing
approximately one sixth of the disputed paintings remaining in its collection.
The prewar provenances of only 37 works were listed and more than half were
from German museums, including 11 from the Schlossmuseum in Gotha and two from
the Dresden Gallery that the Pushkin acquired from Soviet thieves in 1973 and
1984.
Over a dozen paintings came
from private collections; the remainder were described as “collection unknown.”
Goya’s Portrait of a Woman is a painting clearly visible in pre-war photographs
taken at the home of the well-known German collector Otto Gerstenberg, whose
daughter inherited the works after his death in 1935. It was among the works
that were stored at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie for safekeeping in 1943 and stolen
by the Soviet Union. Additional family art in the Pushkin show included works
of Renoir, Daumier, and Renoir. Among other notable paintings from private
parties were collections of Otto Krebs and German industrialist Bernhard
Koehler, including Tintorettos, Corots and El Grecos.
In another Pushkin exhibition
which opened on April 29, 2006 and was entitled “Archeology of War: Return from
Nonbeing,” pieces featured from the ancient world were largely based on
Russia’s collection of looted German art from World War II. The German based
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation was not invited to be involved in the
project and was refused access to Russian’s depots of German art treasures.
Some 350 of the antiques
displayed in this one show originally came from Berlin collections stolen by
the Soviet “trophy brigades” who raped, pillaged and pilfered their way through
the ruins of Germany. The Pushkin Museum shamelessly insists, incorrectly and
in violation of international law, that all looted art belongs to Russia
because it should not go to “those who started the war.”
Prime targets of the looters
were the treasures of the German kings, including those of Friedrich the Great,
who maintained strict rules against any plundering by his army and inflicted
severe punishment for any soldier found looting. The great paintings he
collected, his writings and music and even portraits of him and his family were
snatched and taken to Russia.
Joseph Stalin’s minions
emptied nearly all museums, collections, archives, and sheltering depots in his
zone of occupation and for over four decades his successors hid many of these
objects from the world, treasures representing the entire German history. In
1955, Soviet officials publicly staged a return of some major works, including
Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, stolen from the Dresden Picture Gallery, distracting
from the fact that they still had thousands more works. A 1990 treaty concluded
with the Soviet Union stipulated the return of cultural property that had been
moved due to the war. However, Russia reneged and decided that German cultural
property was “legally transferred.”
Berlin was fair game for
thieves and vandals. In 1945, the Red Army stole Schliemann’s golden Troy
collection from its safe keeping space in a concrete bunker at the destroyed
Berlin Zoo and it was not until 1993 that they even acknowledged that the
treasure was in Russia. In the towns and villages of East Germany, stained
glass windows were ripped out of churches and sent to the Soviet Union, bronze
monuments were dissolved for their face value and documents dating from
centuries past were destroyed or scattered.
450,000 freight-train wagon
loads were received in Moscow in 1945 alone, along with ancient printing
presses, antique musical instruments, pianos and wine. There were also air
cargo planes for transporting loot such as the Troy gold from Berlin and a
Gutenberg Bible from Leipzig’s Book Museum. The “trophy brigades” also stole,
among the manuscripts, incunabula, Oriental manuscripts and films and folklore
recordings from German collections and German medieval Hanseatic archives from
Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck which were then scattered haphazardly throughout
the USSR.
Thousands of rare drawings
from the Kunsthalle Bremen were put in a castle for safe keeping only to vanish
under Soviet occupation until some resurfaced on the New York art market in the
1990’s, taking a lawsuit to get them returned. From the same castle, Victor
Baldin, then a Soviet Army officer, “rescued” two paintings and 362 drawings
which are presently being held by Russian officials.
The cultural property that
Russian authorities and soldiers removed from Germany in 1945 included not only
works of German art, but two million books and files that if placed end to end
would stretch three kilometers, or almost two miles.
The Soviet looting was so
sloppy that rare old master paintings were used as table tops and age-old nude
paintings were sliced from their frames and plastered on Red Army trucks just
for chuckles. Unheated trains carried uncushioned cargoes of precious
Rembrandts and DaVincis through freezing weather to Moscow. Other masterpieces
were ripped off their stretchers so their frames could be burned for fuel by
campfires of drunk soldiers. By the time the treasures made it to Russia, they
were left out in the cold and rain in vacant courtyards and alleys until thrown
away or stored in attics or basements in awful conditions. Antique furniture
was chopped up and burned, rare china smashed, glass broken and ancient
metalwork disfigured or melted down.
The Rüstkammer, or armory, of
the Wartburg castle used to contain a priceless collection of over 800 pieces
from the magnificent period of armour from King Henry II of France, to the
items of Friedrich the Wise, Pope Julius II and Bernhard von Weimar. The Soviet
Occupation Army stole the collection in 1946 and it has since “disappeared” in
the Soviet Union. Only five small pieces were given back by the USSR in the
1960s.
Others played a role in
plundering Germany. In 1805, Baron von Hüpsch left his “Kunst und
Naturalienkabinett ” (Cabinet of Art and Curiosities) to Hessian Landgraf
Ludwig X. Among the Hüpsch collection in Darmstadt were valuable 12th-century
ivory sculptures, apostle reliefs and the symbols of the four evangelists. On
September 11th, 1944, the museum was destroyed by bombs but the most precious
collections of the museum had already been evacuated to Bavaria and stored at
castle Weihenzell near Immenstadt.
On April 30th, 1945 the 2nd
Moroccan Infantry Division of the French troops occupied Immenstadt and its
officers moved into the castle Rauhenzell and the medieval ivory pieces
disappeared. In 1983, the Louvre had already bought two of the pieces, and in
1993, the Louvre was offered two more. It turned out that one of these pieces
matched the group the Louvre had already bought in 1983. Germany and France did
another trade for a partial return of the German treasures. In September 1993,
five more pieces of the same lot which vanished from the castle Rauhenzell came
up for auction in Paris. The “Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt” reported this
to the French police and tried to withdraw the artworks from the auction, but
French law allows the possession of stolen goods if the owner can prove he
bought it unknowingly. Nevertheless, the auction house was put under pressure
and the private owner was eventually thwarted. Finally, five pieces were
returned to Germany in 1994.
Among German state treasures
stolen by the jewish Red Army was the Treasure of Priamus, an important
collection of Etruscan sculptures, vases, terra cotta and other items dating
back to ancient Greece. In 1992, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the
German and Russian governments made another agreement of cultural cooperation,
but after Germany cooperated fully, the Russians again reneged on most of the
agreement. In 1997, an alliance of nationalists and Communists in the Duma, or
Russian Parliament, passed legislation indefinitely banning the return of
Germany’s art to Germany!
In Austria, works of art used
or loaned for use by the Third Reich almost all went missing at the hands of
the Allies after war’s end: paintings by Breughel, Michelangelo, 73 engravings
by Ghisi, c.1650, gobelin upholsteries of tables and chairs and very valuable
antique Austrian furniture vanished. The “Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien”
(Museum of Art History Vienna) is still missing several valuable 17th century
tapestries which were lost at the end of war without a trace as were 9
tapestries which were loaned to the country house of Hermann Göring. Six of
these were hunting scenes woven around the middle of the 17th century after
sketches by Peter Paul Rubens and three others dated back to the middle of the
18th century. Two were later found in the National Museum of Warsaw/Poland and
returned to Germany.
Paintings by Angelika Kaufmann
and others that were acquired by Emperor Joseph II are among losses suffered by
the Austrian Museum for Applied Arts and by the Austrian Gallery in Belvedere.
Properties of the Austrian National Library have been discovered in the
Hermitage of St. Petersburg, but Russian bureaucracy has prevented their
return. Castles, mansions, universities, convents and churches were targeted by
looters all over Austria. 30 boxes with manuscripts and books belonging to the
University Library of Graz were stolen by troops from ex-Yugoslavia, and at the
Castle Grafenegg/Lower Austria, Soviet soldiers transported all of its artwork
and furniture by the wagon load, leaving behind an empty castle. All in all,
however, Austria’s Germanic cultural losses were smaller than those of Germany.
A great void has also been
left in the cultural literary heritage of Germany since the lion’s share of
pilfered German collections were once complete collections. Sometimes thieves
only selected the pieces of highest value, breaking up historical series and
sets. The great libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where many plundered
books and manuscripts ended up, simply integrated them into the existing stock
with no attempts to keep collections intact. In 1990, it was revealed that
millions of antiquarian German books ranging from aeronautic designs to files
on military operations during the Napoleonic wars had been left to rot under
pigeon droppings in an abandoned church outside of Moscow. Displaced archival
fragments of cultural heritage, so meticulously organized through the ages in
Germany, were scattered so widely they will never all be found and identified
even if they survived the abysmal storage conditions.
On December 3rd, 1996, the
Ukraine returned three precious albums to Germany: albums of lithographs and
engravings which had been missing since 1945, including one volume with 57
lithographs after renowned Saxon artist Franz Gareis (1775-1803), a second
album with 69 colour etchings of the 18th and 19th century and 95 engravings by
Johann Blaeu which dated to 1700 depicting scenes of festivities, ceremonies and
the residences of the Dukes of Savoy. In return, the Ukraine received generous
donations of art from Germany.
Today, one German museum’s
department of prints and drawings still lacks about 640 anthologies, albums and
illustrated albums as well as books containing thousands of engravings,
woodcuts and lithographs. Also missing are approximately 10,400 prints from the
Renaissance to the 20th century, 3,300 drawings in albums and sketching books,
the whole art historical library and valuable archival material. Most of all,
due to the war, the museum further lost 1,500 mainly unique drawings of
exceptional quality by artists such as Dürer, Cranach, Rubens, Kollwitz and
Menzel.
Germans regard other items as
an integral part of their country’s heritage, including about 5,800 ancient
books from the famous Gotha library, two Gutenberg Bibles printed in 1454 and
several important paintings. By 1580, this Library was a reference library
containing books on theology, history, medicine, surgery, law, mathematics,
philosophy, mining, architecture, astronomy, warfare, tournaments and
festivals, numismatics, mineralogy, biology and agriculture. The collection
also included engravings, maps and illustrations of court life. Needless to
say, those treasures fortunate enough to survive the firebombing were greatly
plundered and stolen by the Soviets.
The Saxon State Library began
in Dresden 440 years ago first under the auspices of Saxony’s ruling nobility
and then to administrators and scholars who carefully selected and purchased
the collection. Since Saxony had become one of the most powerful territorial
states in German by the mid-16th century, many books were collected by Elector
Augustus, 1553-1585, and included manuscripts from the middle ages and also
those pertaining to local industry and the professional trades, many of which
were uniformly bound by Dresden bookbinders in 1556. By the end of World War
II, the Saxon State Library had 2,384 surviving incunabula. Today more than
half of these are in Russia.
In the summer of 1999, over
5,100 predominantly manuscript music scores (including a major part of the Bach
family archive) once stolen by a Ukrainian trophy brigade from the
Sing-Akademie in Berlin were discovered in Kyiv. A cantata by Carl Philip
Emanuel Bach which had not been heard in 225 years since its initial premiere
in 1785 was among them. Rare printed books and correspondence files from the
collection are still missing, and as yet no trace of them have been found.
In 2007, European gold
jewellery from between the 5th and 8th centuries A.D. went on show in Moscow
for the first time since it was seized by the jewish Red Army from a Berlin
museum in 1945. In May and June, 1945, Red Army soldiers plundered three boxes
with 1,538 artifacts of jewellery and other objects from the Merovingian era
that a Berlin museum had hidden for safety in a bunker in Berlin to protect them
from bombing. These are objects from the era of Germanic kings from 482 to 714,
an era that has yielded fewer artifacts than any other in European history,
such as a German 7th-century iron sword sheath from Sigmaringen-Gutenstein.
700 items of the 1,300 which
emerged from their dingy hiding place to be displayed were stolen from Germany.
Russia calls the looted trophy art “art stored in conditions of war.” What was
modern Germany’s reaction? At the same time the Russian officials were crudely
reiterating their official refusal to return cultural loot to Germany, the
German Culture Minister attended the official opening and said the exhibition
marks “a special event in German-Russian cultural relations” and loaned more
than 200 objects to complement the show whose exhibition catalogue was printed
in Germany!
In a nauseating display of
arrogance, spite, greed… and violation of the Hague Convention, Poland has
stubbornly clung to one of its looted German treasures. For decades, Germany
has asked Poland to return a vast, priceless collection of original German
manuscripts of writing and music once part of the Prussian Library collection
which form an integral part of German history. The treasure was hidden in
castles and monasteries for safety during the war, mostly in the Benedictine
Abbey and its two churches in the German city of Grussau in Silesia, which at
the time was still part of Germany.
The collections were found,
taken as loot and stored at Jagiellonian University in Krakow since the end of
the war. The tens of thousands of documents, now re-named the “Berlinka
Collection” by Poland, include composer Robert Schumann’s archives, a letter
written by Martin Luther in 1530; a decree signed by Louis XIV dated 1664 and
even some correspondence from George Washington. The collection also contains
original works of such world-famous German writers and composers as Goethe,
Schiller, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, all a crucial part of German history and
culture. In this blatantly criminal theft, Poland has been obdurate in its
refusal to show good will and do the right thing. Poland feels that they
deserve it in return for wartime damage done to Poland by Germany, despite
having already received a huge, free chunk of Germany at war’s end, including
thousands of German businesses, mines, factories, homes (furnished down to the
smallest child’s toy left behind by expelled civilians) and hundreds of intact
medieval cities now passed off as part of THEIR cultural legacy, as well as
parks, railroads, highways, bridges, forests, rivers, bridges and lakes.
The Americans and Others
Saxon king Heinrich I and his
successors had long ago given various treasures to the church at Quedlinburg.
These treasures included an intricately carved ivory comb, two manuscripts in
jeweled covers, one of which was written entirely in gold ink, and small rock
crystal and gold relics embedded with bits of cloth and wood said to be from
the Virgin’s robe and the true Cross. Pilgrims from all over Germany once
visited the church to view them. During World War Two, the treasures were
hidden for safekeeping in a cave near the town.
As World War Two was drawing
to a close in 1945, the US Army arrived and briefly occupied sleepy
Quedlinburg, one of the lucky hamlets spared destruction by bombing. Twelve of
the most precious treasures disappeared, but before an investigation could
commence, Quedlinburg was turned over to the Red Army.
In 1983, rumors surfaced which
led to an investigation by a German agency dedicated to recovering looted national
treasures. The trail led to the State of Texas and to an oddball thief by the
name of Joe Tom Meador, once a forward observer for an artillery unit and one
of many men who made an advanced art out of thievery during their service in
Germany. Although two of the works are still unaccounted for, Germany, managed
to buy back the treasures for an outrageous price of 3 million dollars from
Meador’s estate. This scene has been often repeated through the years.
Castles were gravely damaged.
In the Rhineland, Rimburg Castle’s furniture and artwork was scattered, broken
and thrown into the moat, and the locked rooms broken into and rifled. There
were slashed pictures, and cases of books from the Aachen library broken open
and their contents strewn about by souvenir hunters. At Augustusburg in Bruehl,
Allied troops bivouacked in the bomb damaged castle and caused even more
destruction. Police had no authority over (or incentive) to control US soldiers
who continued to go in and out, looting as they pleased. Two Durer portraits
were stolen from the Castle Schwarzburg, which were returned later only after a
court battle. The castle Schloß Rurich near Hückelhoven dating in part from the
13th century survived the immense destruction caused by “Operation Queen” on November
16, 1944 which laid waste to several nearby towns and cities only to be hit by
a grenade attack on Christmas of 1944, which caused immense, and in part
irreparable damage. The valuable castle library of over 18,000 volumes was
thoroughly looted by American GIs.
The family treasures of the
duchy of Hessen were stored for safekeeping at the palace of Kronberg. In 1945,
the US army confiscated the palace for use as an Officer’s Club and they
discovered the treasures hidden in the cellar and parceled them out. Some went
to the US and some were sold to Switzerland. In 1946, the theft was discovered
but it was too late.
British troops stole the
jewels of the Duke of Mecklenburg from the palace Gluckenburg in 1945. They
also broke open the Sarcophagi in the palace crypt, throwing aside the mummies
while rooting for valuables. Palaces in Schleswig Holstein and Buckeburg lost
their treasures and antique furniture, which British troops sent home to
Britain. It was not only the foot soldier who looted. British General Staff
Field Marshall Sir Alan Brook personally removed valuable books and artwork
from the Potsdam library of Cecilienhof. His partners in this crime included
none other than the Duke of Cummingham, fleet admiral of the Royal Navy, and Sir
Charles Portal, the Marshall of the Royal Air Force who so zealously crusaded
for the total destruction of Germany by bombing.
Waldenburg in
Baden-Württemberg was first mentioned as the home of a castle, a fief of the
noble family Hohenlohe, in the year 1253, and it was designated as a city in
1330. In the 16th century, the old castle was converted into a residence of the
Prince of the Dukes of Württemberg. In the 19th Century, it was extensively
renovated by a line of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg. By 1944, the city of Stuttgart,
decided to move its impressive art collection at the Staatsgalerie of
Baden-Württemberg, to a safer location. Never dreaming a sleepy old castle
would be a target of Allied bombs, they sent many of the treasures to the tiny
hilltop town of Waldenburg, 40 miles away. It is said that the citizens of
Waldenburg formed a human chain to carefully transport the books and artworks,
one at a time, up the steep hill to the castle, shown in the photo before and
after 1945, below.
The city of Stuttgart was
indeed absolutely levelled by jewish Allied bombing, and in April 1945, on the
flimsy pretext that “Nazis were hiding in Waldenburg,” Allied forces pounded
the hilltop until the little village and ancient castle were almost totally
destroyed by American artillery units. One version of the story goes that
“homeless and desperate villagers burned anything they could find in order to
stay warm, including the treasures” (the same villagers who made a tremendous
effort to get the objects to safety a short time earlier). The other version is
that it was thrown into one of numerous bonfires lit by Allied soldiers in the
aftermath of their carnage. In any case, after the war, curators assumed that
the entire collection was burned. A bound collection of 53 prints showing
Augsburg nobles in various states of ornate dress and armor called the
“Augsburger Geschlechterbuch” was among the evacuated treasures presumed lost.
Created in the first part of the 16th century, it was a very important
artifact.
Descendants of an American
Army officer who was there in 1945 at the time the 63rd Infantry laid waste to
Waldenburg ended up with the book. They were told that he salvaged the book
from fires started by Allied soldiers. For most of the next 50 years, it sat on
his book shelf, and when he died, the book was sold and resold. After a
protracted battle, a New York court ordered a book collector to return the book
to its rightful owners, a Stuttgart museum, over six decades after it was
stolen.
Throughout Germany, priceless
art, religious and secular treasures, were violently torn from church-altars,
wretched from museum walls or even stolen from private collections and homes by
Allied soldiers. The coffins of Schiller and Goethe were looted by US soldiers
who took six of Goethe’s medals. While officially America and Britain were not
“seizing” any artwork as war booty, whole squads of Allied thieves were busy
personally “liberating” rare books, illuminated manuscripts, gold and silver
religious objects, sculpture and paintings as well as bullying German civilians
into forking over their few valuables.
The “Salzburg of the
Kapuzinerberg,” a 1565 woodcut, was one the oldest portraits of Salzburg.
During the bombings, it was hidden for safety in a salt mine nearby. In 1945,
soldiers of the US Forces in Austria (USFA) overtook the guarding and
restitution of art, and during their watch countless valuables were stolen,
including this priceless work of art. It has never been recovered. US troops in
Salzburg and Upper Austria under the US General Harry Collins, 42nd US division
stole various art treasures from Austria, including a Salzburg gold coin
collection hidden in Hallein.
Seven valuable paintings
including a Rubens and a van Dyck, and seven valuable prints, including four
Dürers, were stolen from the salt main of Alt-Aussee while under supervision of
US personnel with the full knowledge of the Allied authorities. Members of the
83st US infantry division plundered St. Florian Monastery in Austria in 1945,
freely taking paintings, antique furniture and Celtic gold treasure which they
removed with 5 army trucks.
Six and a half tons of gold
worth over seven million dollars in 1945 was recovered from Ribbentrop’s castle
‘Schloss Fuschl’ near Salzburg and turned over to the US Army on June 15, 1945.
It totally disappeared and there are no records of it being received at the
Frankfurt US Foreign Exchange Depository. Much of the gold “recovered” by the
Americans was re-smelted, hence erasing any and all identification marks and numbers.
In the same manner by which
panels painted by Albrecht Dürer ended up in Brooklyn and a manuscript of
Friedrich the Great’s was brought to the USA by an American G.I., millions of
rare books, artworks and other treasures were pilfered, some by means other
than theft. The thousands of cameras, antique swords, knives and antique guns
which German civilians were required to surrender at war’s end ended up in the
states, usually with a bogus provenance. On internet auction sites today, there
are pages and pages of “souvenirs” lifted or extorted from pitiful victims of
the war by Allied soldiers, even toys, family bibles and photographs.
On a tip that 7 miniature
16th-century paintings stolen from Germany by American GIs at the end of the
War were resold in the USA, the German government asked for their return. The
new “owner” refused and instead engaged Germany in a protracted legal battle.
He was a museum curator who claims he bought them “thinking they were
reproductions.”
In the “confusion” of the last
days of the War, as forces of the 66th U.S. Infantry Reserve and the 71st U.S.
Infantry Divisions occupied bombed out Pirmasens, paintings belonging to the
town which had been stored in the air-raid shelter during the war were stolen
sometime in March of 1945, while the townspeople were burying their dead. In
the year 2003, through the American FBI’s Art Theft Program, three of the fifty
paintings by the German painter Heinrich Bürkel were recovered and have since
been returned to their rightful owner, the Pirmasens City Museum. But this is
rare.
Some loot found its way home.
A lovely Baroque ivory figure crafted by Balthasar Permoser in 1700 depicting
Omphale and Hercules was last seen on a train-load of art headed for
“safekeeping” in Kassel in March 1945. It turned up in 2006 at Sotheby’s
auctions in New York, via a collector in California. After proving its
provenance, it was returned to Berlin’s Museum of Decorative Arts. US army
personnel also stole three original writings from Martin Luther which were
found and returned in 1996. A rare manuscript of Robert Schumann was found at
an auction in London in the 1990s. 200 famous paintings taken from the
Kaiser-Fridrich-Museum in Berlin by American soldiers had to be returned in
March 1948 under public pressure.
It wasn’t just the American
foot soldier who looted, either. US officers stole an original writing of
Aristotle, a Gutenberg bible and 250 original letters to Erasmus of Rotterdam
from the University library in Leipzig before turning the city over to the
communists. Even US High Commissioner Lucius D. Clay tried to confiscate the
stamp collection of the Reich Post Museum for the US but his plan was rebuffed
by the higher courts. Eight of the most valuable stamps of the collection,
however, were taken.
Das Hildebrandslied is the
oldest heroic poem in German literature and the only surviving example in
German of its genre. The codex itself was written in the first quarter of the
9th century. The codex was looted by a US army officer in 1945 and sold to a
book dealer. It was discovered in California and returned to Germany in
1955, but in greatly damaged condition. The first sheet, which had been cut out
and disfigured to avoid identification, wasn’t found until 1972 in
Philadelphia. The manuscript is now home, in the Murhardsche Bibliothek in
Kassel.
The real estate and whole
households of the millions of expelled ethnic Germans provided loot for years
to come in those areas. The German books, including some rare manuscripts,
banned by the Soviets and Allies alike during ‘re-education,’ while generally
burned, often vanished with no accountability. Not only was there was unbridled
theft of German patents, copyrights, music, research data, scientific and
educational studies, there was massive, unjustified requisitioning of German-owned
property in just about every part of the world, often done on the flimsiest of
pretexts.
In some areas of eastern
Europe where ethnic German property was stolen, there have been some attempts
to compensate. In Romania, 90 percent of 128,000 attempts at claiming back
confiscated property have failed to produce results so far, but there is
progress.
In Bulgaria, former monarch
Simeon Saxe-Coburg, who fled his homeland as a child in 1946 after communists
took over, returned from exile to his home. He became prime minister from 2001
to 2005. Bulgarian law now allows restitution of nationalized royal property.
In 1991, Hungary became the first post-communist country in the region to pass
laws on partial compensation for expropriated property. There were 817,811
claims submitted for compensation of property taken away during communism by
2005. In the Czech Republic, having German blood makes it nearly impossible to
reclaim one’s rightful property, and it has only very rarely taken place.
Poland is the only post-communist country in the region that has not passed a
restitution or compensation law.
Another lucrative plunder was
scientific. At the end of World War II, both Allied and Soviet scientific
intelligence experts accompanied the invading forces into Germany to plunder as
much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble, and they were
delighted and shocked at the advanced German technical achievements they found.
German cultural institutions
recently issued a catalogue (2008) detailing thousands of objects of art that
disappeared from Berlin at the end of the war in the hope that foreign
governments will return the stolen art to them. Over 180,000 items disappeared
from itemized and inventoried German collections alone along with thousands of
other cultural treasures which have never been recovered.
Lastly, at this point in time,
many individuals whose families had willingly sold artwork even before the war
and were paid for that work are today suing for art supposedly looted by
“Nazis,” claiming that their families must have been “under duress.” It has
evolved into nothing more than a lucrative racket for some, and is emptying
German and Austrian museums of what precious little art they have left. To make
matters worse, Germany has paid dearly in compensation for art actually
pilfered by the Soviets or destroyed by the Allies in bombing runs. Thanks
jews.
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