Germany
The age of miracles has not passed. Germany became one nation overnight. Her sovereignty has been restored by the occupying powers. And now priceless national treasures, apparently lost since the end of the war in 1945, are emerging from safes and strongrooms. Last month it was announced that the Dean and Chapter of St Servatius in Quedlinburg were getting back their medieval cathedral treasures, stolen by an American officer.
The Kunsthalle in Bremen is expecting the return of more than 360 prints by Old and modern Masters, including twenty-two valuable drawings and watercolours by Albrecht Dürer; they were salvaged by a Russian officer who donated them to a museum in Moscow.
From Stassfurt comes the optimistic news that the contents of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Magdeburg may not have been destroyed by fire and the famous van Gogh painting “The artist on his way to work” may have survived.
The Sächsische Landesbibliotek in Dresden is looking forward to the return of 200,000 books. They were presumed to have been destroyed by fire bombs but were in the safekeeping of the Lenin Library in Moscow.
Under the terms of a treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow in September last year, “lost or illegally removed art treasures ... will be returned”. Since then, directors of museums, archives and libraries throughout the German states have been expecting the reappearance and return to their rightful home of great cultural possessions. These include Schliemann’s gold “Treasury of Priam”; the 1646 Charter of the Freedom of the Realm from Bremen’s municipal archive; the elephant’s tusk from the Lüneburg city silver collection; the Eberswalde gold treasures; the world-famous Berlin Museum collection of East Asian art; the sceptre from the Hohenzollern treasury; Menzel’s “Tafelrunde” and many other masterpieces of European painting, drawing and sculpture; archaeological rarities, exquisite tapestries and millions of books.
In their search for lost art treasures, some researchers in both parts of Germany were not content with official statements about the fate of the works. It was alleged that entire collections were destroyed in the final chaotic stages of the war.
Another explanation was that works of art were burnt in bunkers, mines caves or castles in the early post-war months. Klaus Goldmann, senior curator of pre- and early history at the Berliner Museum and an expert on the movement of art treasures in the last days of the war, was commissioned by the Preussischer Kulturbesitz Foundation many years ago to establish the whereabouts of art treasures lost from Berlin’s museums and from castles in Prussia. His final report with supporting evidence was presented two years ago — at that time the Berlin authorities did not wish to pick a quarrel with their American protectors, since too many trails led across the Atlantic.
In East Germany it was Paul Enke, a former official of the municipal archive administration, who refused to give up the quest for hidden treasures. After Enke’s death, the political journalist Günter Wermusch continued his research. But their hands were also tied — the Politburo were wary of their “friends” from the East.
So far art historians have paid little attention to the subject. In 1990, young post-graduate student Cay Friemuth presented a detailed study (“Die geraubte Kunst”, published by Westermann). Among the documents he examined were the diary and records of a British arts protection officer.
Friemuth and other researchers reached three conclusions: First, that it must be assumed that a large number of missing works of art are overseas, some of them in the care of the American authorities, museums and collections; second, that other works are obviously still in state-run museums, galleries and libraries in the Soviet Union; third, that an indefinite quantity of cultural possessions may have been hidden by German museum officials, army officers or state authorities, in order to keep them out of the hands of the occupying powers until such time as a peace conference took place.
In time of war, the victors have always assumed the right to seize art treasures, historical memorabilia and documents, valuable furniture, books, jewellery, gold and silver. Looting by the Nazis during the World War II reached epic proportions. European countries occupied by the Germans were systematically plundered, starting with the Soviet Union, France and the Netherlands, and, towards the end of the war, the former ally, Italy. Hitler was hoarding works of art for the Reichsmuseum he was planning to found at Linz. His henchman Goering (“I am a real Renaissance man”) was building up his own art empire. The task force set up by senior Party man Rosenberg combed museums, libraries, stately homes and the villas of rich Jews. Even the Reich’s Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had his own special battalion devoted to art robbery.
Their looting was euphemistically called art conservation — they allegedly wanted to protect Europe’s art treasures from war damage. Decent Wehrmacht officers were appointed to take on this task. Among them was the State Curator for the Rheinland, Count Franziskus Wolff Metternich. In the final years of the war, when squadrons of British and American bombers reduced German cities to rubble, the booty was stored in mines, in the cellars of old castles and in underground arms and ammunition factories.
In the wake of the Allied armies, which stormed Germany from East and West in the spring of 1945, came special commandos whose job was to protect art treasures. In a desperate race against time, they set out to save the stolen treasures both from destruction by the Nazis and from the damage caused by poor storage conditions. Their intention was to return them safe and sound to their countries of origin. But they also had to take care of the German works of art.
In August 1943 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a “Commission for the Protection and Recovery of Artistic and Historical Monuments in Europe” (Roberts Commission for short). By the time U.S. and British forces invaded in June 1944, a joint art preservation organisation (M.F.A.&A. = Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives) was standing by ready for action. With the help of scholarly literature, emigré art experts and the Secret Service, they drew maps and compiled lists and indexes. They built up an astonishingly accurate picture of the contents and staff of museums, libraries and archives. They even knew about the underground storerooms.
The M.F.A.&A. officers — scholars, museum directors and architects — knew what they were looking for. However, they found to their amazement that somebody else — officers of the C.I.C., the American Counter Intelligence Corps — had got there first. They had broken into and rummaged through the crates and taken the inventory lists. They were followed by the special commandos. So the “looters” had beaten the “protectors” to it. The word “looting” is not too strong a term, even though the Germans, conscious of their own misdemeanours, took pains to put their friends’ and protectors’ interests first. According to The Hague Convention “any confiscation ... of historical monuments or artistic and scientific works is forbidden and will be punished”. But towards the end of the conflict, when the extent of German war crimes emerged and brought a backlash of hate and revenge against the losers, the Allies were less scrupulous in their application of the rules.
Official American policy on the recovery of European and German works of art was based on the resolutions passed at the Yalta Conference. Both the Russians and the Western Powers wanted to create an international body which would hold all German cultural possessions in trust. Its task would be to strike a balance between claims for compensation by European countries which had suffered at the hands of the Germans against the cultural needs of the defeated state.
Under conditions similar to those of the Treaty of Versailles, the victors wanted German works of art as compensation for art treasures destroyed or lost without trace during the German occupation. Reparations experts spoke of restitution in kind.
It was only on detail that they could not agree. The French and the smaller nations demanded that each work of art be replaced by an item of the same value. However, the Russians and Americans were prepared to accept more unusual objects. General Lucius Clay, at that time Deputy Military Governor of the American-occupied zone gave precise details of what should be taken into account as compensation: works of art, objects of an historical, scientific or cultural kind , libraries, scientific equipment or or other laboratory and research material.
Church treasures were, however, soon struck off the list. From his research, Cay Friemuth concludes that the Roberts Commission did not want such items included in the reparation arrangements. Through Army Bishop, later Cardinal, Spellman of New York, who was a member of the Commission, the Vatican was called upon to intervene.
The Soviet Union came to realise that they had twice been cheated out of their share: first by the Germans and second by the Western Allies. The Americans had got their hands on eighty per cent of the treasures, the remainder had to be shared by the Russians, the British and the rest of the Allies.
During the last weeks of the war, the German authorities had moved vast quantities of works of art by train, lorry and barge to potash mines in central Germany, west of the River Elbe. This was to protect them from attack by the Red Army. (It was already known that Germany was to be divided into zones.) When American and British troops withdrew from those parts of the Soviet Zone which they had temporarily occupied, the Russians discovered that their allies had not only removed gold and platinum, industrial plant, blueprints, patents and skilled workers. They had also taken most of the art treasures to the western zone. A list of grievances was compiled by Marshal Zhukov for Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. From this we learn that the Americans took 250 extremely valuable paintings, forty-eight tapestries and three crates containing the Prussian crown jewels from the Bernterode potash mine in the Harz Mountains. All the paintings from museums in Berlin, hundreds of tons of gold from the Reichsbank and three wagonloads of currency disappeared from the Merkers mine in Thuringen.
The Merkers mine hit the headlines of the world’s press. Although fighting continued in central Germany, General Eisenhower and other officers of the High Command rushed over to take a look at the Eldorado. In the mine were stored the Reichsbank gold; the Guelph treasures; Nefertiti, “the most beautiful woman in Berlin”; and countless pictures. Bernhard Bernstein, on assignment from the U.S. Treasury as financial adviser to the Allied High Command recalls: “I will never forget how I stood in that cold damp salt mine surrounded by all those Renoirs, Dürers, Van Dycks and Rembrandts”.
War correspondents reported that it was French women workers who had drawn the liberators’ attention to the gold in the mine. This news can confidently be regarded as a cover-up, since Professor Rave, who escorted the consignment, and senior Reichsbank official Viek had quite correctly handed over their treasures to the Americans, whose art protection officer immediately decided that the works of art and the gold should not remain in the salt mine. In the middle of April, it was all taken in heavily guarded lorries to Frankfurt. There it was piled into the vaults of the Reichsbank’s local office while awaiting shipment to the Wiesbaden storehouse which was still being built.
By 7 April l945, a total of 9000 crates from fifteen departments of Berlin’s museums had been brought to the West. Not everything got back safely; some crates arrived considerably lighter than at the beginning of their journey. Klaus Goldman, who kept a close watch on the transport operation, observed: “In many cases it was the most unusual, valuable and irreplaceable pieces” that got lost. The British Military Government confirmed: “There is evidence of more or less serious losses from parts of the Berlin collections arriving in the British and American zones”.
The British had good reason to be annoyed. The Americans had removed tons of art treasures from the largest storage depot of all at the Grasleben salt works near Helmstedt before the British had even taken over the zone allotted to them. The goods had been shipped to Frankfurt. The situation in Grasleben four months later is described by British arts protection officer Robert Lonsdale Charles. Accompanied by the Brunswick State Curator Kurt Seeleke, he walked around the 430 square metre floor area. “Crates, crates and yet more crates with files from the archives of Hanover, Bremen, Brunswick, Düsseldorf, Danzig, Reval, Königsberg, Elbing — especially from North and East Germany.” Some crates had been broken into — papers, cards, bundles of manuscripts and books were lying about. Charles had been told that they had been looted by former forced labourers. Since the capitulation, these people had been wandering, homeless and aimless, around the western zone. But this is only one of many recorded examples of subterfuge. Grasleben was the most heavily guarded depot of all, the Americans had the place surrounded with tanks.
Charles and Seelake found that things were no better in the case of the main part of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, the priceless Wolfenbüttel Library. They discovered “theatre and opera records from Hanover, photographic records from Brunswick, most of them ransacked or stolen; many archives, propaganda and travel books, as well as private property, tea services, furniture and books, some of them damaged beyond repair and in a state of confusion. Others were untouched, simply broken open”.
What happened at Grasleben between 12 April 1945, the day of the occupation, and 26 June 1945 when the British lifted the blockade? Cay Freimuth has meticulously recorded the facts. On 14 April, C.I.C. agents uncovered the Reich’s film archive, took away all the inventories and arrested five people. Even now, no-one knows their names or what happened to them. It can be assumed that they were staff involved in the surrender operation. So we reach the point where Germans (presumably some of them card-carrying Nazis) crop up in the grey area of the transfer of works of art. After the Secret Service, a special commando came and took away the archive, records for which today’s film makers would give a great deal. Some of these records are still in the Library of Congress in Washington. Well may we ask by what right.
Then, at the end of April, American art protection officer Lamont Moore appeared in Grasleben. There he counted eighty-nine national archives, a number of libraries, Polish church treasures and 2000 crates containing items from Berlin’s museums. In May he took around 140 cases on three lorries to Frankfurt. But he did not see the paintings from the Nationalgalerie.
An Anglo-American team came from “Operation Gold Cup”, whose assignment was to find the personal records of Nazi Party members and the Reich’s government archives, which later ended up at the Berlin Document Centre. They found no paintings, but they did find crates which had been broken into.
In June, with the salt works now under British guard, a fire broke out. Apparently, during clearing up operations, a lamp had fallen on to some films. Since the rolls of film were stored in metal cans, this must have been a rumour spread deliberately. However, Robert Charles did not find anything suspicious when confronted with the “terrible sight”. “Stacked all over the place in a corner, some of them covered with cardboard, were hundreds of paintings from the Nationalgalerie in Berlin ... Only a few of them were under glass and their outsides were damaged beyond repair by the heat, smoke and salt. Poor Seeleke wandered wandered around, close to tears of rage and grief. “It is a disaster. The fire would hardly have done any damage if they had been stored properly — in crates or in brown paper, or something similar.”
So the pictures from the Nationalgalerie had to be removed and later returned to Grasleben. Since one cannot believe that Berlin museum officials would be capable of stacking their most valuable paintings just anyhow in a corner, it has to be assumed that this was the work of some other unauthorised individuals. “A large part of the items in store had been removed or even looted by some other department. We have been told that American soldiers had taken a good ten per cent of the pictures away with them.” Years later, two other British art protection officers declared: “Of the 6,800 crates at Celle (the British art collection depot), more than half were open when they were collected from Grasleben.”
Friemuth assumes that the British may have staged the fire in order to provide cover for the theft by their American allies of 109 pictures. They got hold of a storage inventory compiled by the restorer Werner Tschirch, who disappeared without trace in 1945. According to the inventory, 393 pictures from the Nationalgalerie had arrived at Merkers and 226 had reached Grasleben. But 109 pictures were missing from Berlin. They were reported to have been burnt at the anti-aircraft base at Friedrichshainer. Thus Professor Carl Weickert who was then in charge of the transport operation had to accept, on the basis of the information available to him in October 1945, that the entire contents of the Nationalgalerie had been brought to the West. But where was the rest of it? Where were Menzel’s gigantic “Schlacht bei Hochkirch” and the “Tafelrunde” from the palace of Sanssouci?
At the anti-aircraft base at Freidrichshainer, Soviet troops watched as fire raged through every floor in May 1945. Another 417 of the finest paintings from Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum were said to have been destroyed. But according to Professor Weickert these also reached the West. In November 1945, Otto Kümmel, Director General of State Museums, was making claims to the contrary. The Russians claimed to have found a series of incendiary devices in the burnt-out bunker. As Friemuth had in the case of Grasleben, British art preservation experts surmised that the fire “may have been intended to conceal a previous robbery”.
It was not just in Grasleben and Friedrichshain that fires broke out during that fine, terrible spring.
In Shaft 8 of the Stassfurt salt works, where the works stored included around 400 paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Magdeburg, there were two fires in April after the arrival of the Americans. Researcher Günter Wermusch found an eighty-two year old witness who provided interesting evidence. After the fire no German was allowed to go down the shaft. Photos taken at the time show plenty of evidence of fire. Many cardboard boxes lie among the fallen debris and packing material from broken crates. In recent years several items from the Magdeburg collection have turned up on the art market. One painting was sold to Denmark. The then director of the Magdeburg Museum took himself off to the West with the British.
A fire smouldered for months at the Ransbach-Heimboldhausen salt works, where valuable items from the Prussian State Library were hidden. Company records reveal that card indexes were regularly “removed” from the crates. As there are no inventories, nobody knows what disappeared.
At the end of September 1945 in the village of Volpriehausen in Hesse, the Wittekind underground store exploded following a fire. The store contained not only ammunition but also the library of the University of Göttingen and around 360,000 books were thought to have been destroyed. Private investigator Georg Stein believes that behind the impenetrable mass of debris lay the Amber Rooms removed by the Nazis from the Czar’s Palace at Pushkin.
The manor house of Sofienhof near Waren on Lake Müritz was captured by the Russians in May. The works of art from Berlin housed there, including the Humboldt Archive from Tegel Castle, libraries, paintings and carpets, were all intact. However, three months later it was all destroyed by fire.
No better than the Germans
The cause of these fires has never been convincingly explained. There was talk of carelessness and foreign workers were accused. But the question remains: who had anything to hide? Klaus Goldman also came across obvious backdating and a conspicuous lack of clarity in the lists of items moved from Berlin.
As late as September 1948 the Council of Allied Foreign Ministers were told that German museum curators had managed to hide art treasures to prevent them falling into the hands of the victors: “Some of them are still hidden.” Today the situation is still unchanged. Now that the Allies have renounced their rights and there is no risk of negotiations of a peace treaty whereby former hostile nations might present fresh demands, the odd treasure might emerge from a depot, storeroom or an obscure corner of some monastery.
In the case of many unique collections and art treasures, suspicion falls on the Americans and the Russians. There are indications that some Germans entrusted with the safekeeping of works of art passed them on to the Allies. In the four weeks preceding the German surrender, the Americans confiscated all major art collections, libraries and archives and ordered the booty to be assembled in a common pool.
But no sooner had the Potsdam Conference decided, on 30 July 1945, that Germany should be divided into two reparation zones (East and West), than Deputy Military Governor Clay received what he had long been waiting for. He was given permission to ship German works of art to the U.S.A. as fast as possible. There they would be shared among appropriate museums. Reparations representative Edwin Pauley suggested that no more be said about the ultimate fate of the works. As far as the outside world was concerned, they were being removed to a place of safety where proper care could be taken of them. This was the gist of the information given by American Secretary of State James Byrnes on 1 August to his Moscow and London counterparts, Molotov and Bevin: he said that in Germany there was not at that time adequate accommodation for cultural possessions.
This was a bare-faced lie. True, German cities had been reduced to rubble. Nevertheless, American art preservation officers had cared devotedly for the works of art entrusted to them. They had repaired large houses to accommodate them, kept them in well-ventilated rooms and even gone to the trouble of finding coal so that they could be kept at the correct temperature in winter. So they were shocked when, at the beginning of November, General Eisenhower at the behest of President Truman ordered 200 pictures to be collected and shipped immediately to America. The Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor had already chosen the paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum’s catalogue. He added two from the Nationalgalerie. This was to please General Eisenhower, who, on 12 April, had stood for hours transfixed before Manet’s “Winter garden”. Art preservation officer Lamont Moore had to accompany the shipment via Paris and Le Havre to New York.
It now became clear what can happen in a free society when those in power abuse the dictates of law and common decency. Art preservation officer Walter Farmer, then thirty-four years old, was enraged by the euphemistic use of the word “safekeeping” — the very term applied by the Nazi Minister Rosenberg to his series of art robberies all over Europe.
“We are no better and no worse than the Germans. The fact is we have learned a lot from them — about dishonourable behaviour”, he wrote to his wife. Through his efforts the “Wiesbaden Manifesto” was drawn up and signed on 7 November 1945 by twenty-four of the thirty-two art protection officers stationed north of the Alps. It was an honourable and courageous protest which would be passed through the proper channels.
According to the manifesto, President Truman’s order to remove 200 pictures was “a precedent which cannot be justified either morally or intellectually.” The signatories recalled that in Nuremberg some members of the Nazi High Command also stood accused of the theft of works of art, because they had not refused to obey orders “in the name of a higher moral law”. The U.S. officers were “no less guilty”. The words which followed still deserve to be handed down to posterity:
“No historical affront is so lasting nor provokes so much justified embitterment as the removal, for whatever reason, of a nation’s cultural heritage, even when it is regarded as a trophy of war ... It is our duty, both individually and collectively to protest ... Together with the obligation to our homeland, to whom we owe obedience, there is among civilised nations the universal obligation towards justice and decency, to the rule of law, not the rule of force.”
The text did not appear in the American press until three months later. A storm of indignation broke out in the United States. On 9 May 1946, ninety-five museum directors, academics and collectors demanded that President Truman order the immediate return of the pictures to Germany. The President was overruled by Congress. The paintings, including works by Baldung, Grien, Bosch, Breugel, Cranach, Holbein, Memling, fifteen Rembrandts and six Rubens were immediately put on show in Washington and then spent a year touring the whole of the USA in horseboxes.
The proceeds went to relief organisations for German children.
Publicity from the Crown Prince’s silver
In spring 1948, General Clay changed his tune completely. Suddenly German art treasures became a weapon in the Cold War against the Russians. The Americans handed the paintings back to Germany. Because of the Berlin Blockade they had first to be taken to Wiesbaden.
General Clay then thought up a special token of thanks to the brave citizens of Berlin: the Americans would make them a gift of Watteau’s famous painting “The Dance”. The German Crown Prince had sold the picture to Hitler for DM900,000. The price was paid off in farm and forest land. The picture had been salvaged by the Americans along with the collection for the Reichsmuseum in Linz. It was said that the Eisenhowers hung it above their fireplace and that Mamie Eisenhower had been reluctant to part with it.
The attempted theft of the 200 plus two pictures was only the most spectacular case. Treasure of a quite different kind also disappeared unnoticed across the Atlantic. Some of it, both public and private property, was unobtrusively returned. When the U.S. Justice Department became worried that the return of the works of art might damage the nation’s reputation, it was noted that, apart from the 202 pictures, “twenty lots” of art treasures had already been quietly sent back.
At the time of the Berlin Airlift, the Mayor, Ernst Reuter, asked Clay to persuade the U.S. Treasury, who were responsible for the spoils of war, to return the seven tons of the Crown Prince’s silver. “It would be good publicity for us.” The silver had been kept, together with the contents of the Brandenburg Museum, on Count Königsmarck’s estate at Lenzen an der Elbe. American troops had confiscated it at the end of April 1945. In 1946 it was already on show at the National Gallery.
The Americans conjured up still more — in 1950 they produced the copy of the American Declaration of Independence with Benjamin Franklin’s own handwriting. A gift to Frederick the Great, it had disappeared from the strongroom of the Secret State Archives of Prussia at Schönebeck near Magdeburg. In 1950 it was put up for auction in the U.S.A. and then disappeared again. It has yet to be returned to the Preussischer Kulturbesitz Foundation’s secret archive.
Cathedral treasure in Texas
In a telegram to the Pentagon in 1946, Clay himself suggested that collections and libraries “should be sold”. Originally he wanted to make off with the entire stamp collection from the Reichspostmuseum — but they were still in the American Zone. About 1000 crates were stored at Eisleben. Only 600 were delivered to the Marburg depot. The Americans soon realised that a steel case containing eight valuable stamps, including the Blue Mauritius worth $500,000 (£263,000), had never arrived at Marburg. At the end of the 1970s the Blue Mauritius was offered for sale in Philadelphia. The owner, a former captain, said that it had been a gift from a German friend. The Customs Investigation Department soon made it clear to him that he was handling stolen goods. The stamp is still in the hands of the U.S. Treasury, since its ownership continues to be a bone of contention between East and West Germany.
A limited success was scored between 1948 and 1949 with the World War Library in Stuttgart. Six hundred and eighty-seven crates of books and 120 tons of other material had disappeared without trace from the Kockendorf saltmine. It emerged that just after it was confiscated, part of the library was incorporated by the Americans into the Library of Congress and so became the property of the American people. The State Department finally authorised the return of 200 crates. The rest are presumed lost.
Excuses about “continuing misunderstanding” have been made to the present private foundation of the Contemporary History Library. But where is the Trojan gold? Where is the internationally-famous collection of antique glass from the Berlin Antiquarium being kept? (As far back as 1960 it was valued at DM22.4 million.) What has happened to the coin collection of the Royal Prussian Mint? Where was the Royal Porcelain Works collection taken to? And who has hidden the priceless collection from the private Freiherr von Oppenheim Foundation’s Tell-Halaf Museum? It was sent from Berlin to the West in 1946.
Who owns the irreplaceable Zahn-Biblioteck’s collection of antique jewellery in precious metal? It was confiscated by the Russians for the Americans at the Schönebeck salt works and has not been seen since 1946. There are rumours that the Russians used such art reparations to repay their war debts under the American Lease-Lend programme.
In common with the United States, the Soviet Union decided to regard works of art as reparations. They had more justification than the Americans, whose country was left unscathed by the war. Soviet troops shrewdly waited until the 202 Berlin paintings arrived in America before removing anything from their zone. Between December 1945 and April 1946 they cleared the Berlin Museum Island. The Pergamon Altar was taken from the Berlin Zoo Bunker to the U.S.S.R., as were 1,250 works of art from the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. Naturally it was only for their “care” and “safekeeping”.
The Russians have taken excellent care of the works entrusted to them. They have all been kept together and damaged works have been restored. The Altar and the Dresden pictures were handed back to the East Germans with due pomp and ceremony in 1955 as a gesture of friendship following the debacle of 17 June 1953. By 1958, one and a half million art treasures were returned to the G.D.R., including items from Potsdam, Gotha, Leipzig, Wörlitz and Dessau.
But no-one yet knows the full extent of the Soviet loot. The U.S.S.R. is not afraid to keep art treasures taken to Germany by the Nazis. In October 1986, Russian journalist Victor Louis presented a drawing of a young man to the British Museum for examination. The Kremlin often sent Louis to the West as a “sniffer-dog”. The drawing turned out to be a Holbein dating from 1515. The real sensation was that it belonged to the £50 million ($95 million) collection of German banker Franz Koenig, which after the world economic crisis ended up in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam. In 1941 Hitler’s buyers forced the museum to sell 526 pictures — for much less than the going rate, of course. The collection was stacked into Weesenstein Castle near Dresden and there it stayed until the Red Army marched in. Since then it was believed lost: when questioned about it the Russians remained silent. Now, however, following a plea by the Dutch government, the Soviet Ministry of Culture has allowed a search to take place for more works in the Hermitage in Leningrad and Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. Not only governments but also individual officers and other ranks helped themselves to art treasures. For several years the jewel-encrusted Carolingian Samuhel Gospel (valued at $60 million, £31.5 million), which disappeared from the Cathedral Treasury in Quedlinburg, was on the market for $9 million (£4.7 million). Since the Americans themselves had been searching for it up till 1948, connoisseurs knew it had been stolen. Finally, last spring the German States’ Cultural Foundation acquired the hot property in Switzerland — paying a “reward” of $3 million (£1.57 million). They wanted to prevent this rarity disappearing to Japan.
The Cathedral Treasure is itself regarded as one of the world’s most significant and “holy” church collections. Meanwhile, resourceful individuals were able to trace it to a small town in Texas. All the treasure, including King Henry I’s reliquary and other precious objects of the medieval period, belonged to an ironmonger by the name of Jack Meadow. They were left to him by his late brother who, as a first lieutenant, was present when Quedlinburg was captured. It seems he wrapped the individual pieces of the treasure in brown paper and sent them home through the post without making any customs declaration. It is also possible that he was a member of Special Commando 35, which both in Quedlinburg and Graslingen, made off with a number of items.
In the East, valuable drawings from the Kunsthalle in Bremen were rediscovered last year. During the war, the drawings lay in the cellar of Karnsow Castle north-west of Berlin. In May 1945, the castle was looted by Russian soldiers. Some prints have since reappeared from time to time in the West. Then seventy-two-year-old Viktor Baldin came to Bremen. The former Russian captain and art lover recovered 364 prints. He packed in a trunk not only the Dürer drawings but also works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael,Veronese, Daumier, Goya, Merian, van Gogh, Murillo and Renoir. He took them back to Moscow where he presented them to the Russian Architecture Museum. Later he was appointed director of the Museum. He asked all the General Secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party, one after another, to return the lost property to Bremen. Only Gorbachev paid any attention.
The citizens of Bremen are not only looking forward to the return of these treasures. The most important part of their city archives was collected from Moscow in the second half of October. The archive underwent an arduous journey. Its most prized contents were taken to the Bernburg an der Saale salt works during the war. In April 1945, they were inspected by American officers (I.G. Farben’s scientific library was also stored there). Were the six most important documents in the city’s history, including a document of Barbarossa, which the Russians claimed not have seen, already missing from the crates?
In 1946, the Bremen City Archive was taken to Leningrad. In 1952, the Soviets handed part of it over to the East Germans. The rest has remained in one of Moscow’s central archives since 1958. President Gorbachev and Chancellor Kohl agreed last year to exchange the three Hanseatic archives for the City Archives of Reval and Tallinn held in the Federal Republic.
It is remarkable how twenty-four crates of items from the archive which Bremen’s city fathers had removed to the Grasleben salt works got to the Soviet Union and from there to the G.D.R. Archive director Hartmut Müller believes that these crates were first of all taken away by the Americans. It may be that because they did not appear to be worth much they were put down in another mine or handed over to the Russians in exchange for something else.
The Berlin Ethnological Museum’s Sound Archive went a similar roundabout way. Twenty-five crates of highly valuable exhibits were stored at Grasleben. The British were only able to recover five crates and deliver them to West Berlin. The remainder reached East Berlin in 1959, having made a detour via Leningrad. The expert in the movement of works of art, Klaus Goldman, concludes that an American Special Commando group must have seized the sound archive and then put it back in the nearby Schönebeck salt works. Then in 1946 it was confiscated by the Russians.
Will a united Germany find a way to get hold of all the national treasures that were removed but are still unaccounted for? How do things stand with confiscations by official bodies? Are the victorious nations infringing the Hague Convention of 1954 “for the protection of cultural possessions in the event of armed conflict”, when they withhold information about their spoils of war from the rightful owners or otherwise hinder enquiries?
Many of the restitution files in the national archive in Washington are still locked away or in use by the C.I.A. At the same time, the stolen German inventories have not yet resurfaced. Before his premature death, young American criminal lawyer Sol Chaneles made himself very unpopular three years ago when he voiced his suspicions about this state of affairs. There was even greater disapproval of his claim that high-ranking American officers and Secret Service agents had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and countless works of art from the Merkers salt works. It was also rumoured that an American general had taken Oriental carpets worth more than $1 million back to the United States after the war. Strangely enough, the very pages on which carpets from the museums of Berlin should have been listed are missing from the Military Government files.
Does the legendary Fort Knox only hold American gold? Some treasure seekers cannot shake off this suspicion, since President Jimmy Carter took Hungary’s Holy Grail — St Stephen’s Crown — from the vaults, to hand it over to the government in Budapest twelve years ago. The crown was brought to safety by officers of the Hungarian Army and entrusted to an American military unit in Bavaria.
Hitler watercolours handed over
As recently as this year, the U.S. Army referred, before a Houston, Texas, to provisional treaty which preceded the 1954 treaty with Germany. In Part 9, Article 1 of this “agreement for the settlement of matters arising from the war and occupation”, it was agreed between the Federal Republic and the three occupying powers that German citizens would have “no claim of any kind” against any foreign nation or citizen arising from the war. The same applied to the German nation itself (Article 3).
But the court in Texas did not comply with the terms of this treaty, although the case in point involved the heirs of a Nazi. Henriette von Schirach and Heinrich Hoffmann Jr, the children of Hitler’s personal photographer, were suing the United Staes for the return of four watercolours by Hitler belonging to their father. American soldiers found the pictures in a castle in 1945 and confiscated them. They had been mistaken for property of the Reich. The Army had to hand back the watercolours along with two archives containing hundreds of photographs.
Before any claims can be made by the Federal Republic, as legal successor to the German Reich, old or new German States, churches, museums, collections or private citizens, there has to be a stocktaking of all works of art lost during the war. Now that Berlin’s museums have been put together again, information has become available and records are accessible, the proposal made by Chancellor Adenauer can once again be taken up. He suggested the setting up of a centre where records would be kept of all cultural assets taken from their rightful place during and after the war. This massive task demands the cooperation not only of diplomats, politicians, police, courts and art experts, but also art historians. For them a whole new field of research will be opened. Now the treasure hunt is really on ...
© Die Zeit and for the U.K. The Art Newspaper
originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'The sacking of Germany'