Elizabeth Campbell. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 55, Issue 4. April 2020.
In June 1946 art enthusiasts thronged an exhibition opening at the Musée National de l’Orangerie in Paris. It was not unusual for the small museum to draw crowds. Located in the southwest corner of the Tuileries garden, the Orangerie had housed Claude Monet’s famous water lily panels since 1927 and in later years had hosted well-attended temporary exhibitions featuring the Impressionists and Rubens. Yet this was no ordinary exhibition. It displayed artworks plundered by the Nazis and recovered by Allied forces from salt mines, castles and other repositories in the former Third Reich—Vermeer’s Astronomer, Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, a Vigée Le Brun portrait of Marie Antoinette, paintings by Watteau, Fragonard, Delacroix, Boucher, Cézanne, Monet, Matisse, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and a wide array of decorative objects. Many of these pieces had already traversed the Tuileries, as the Nazis had amassed and sorted their plunder in the architectural pendant to the Orangerie, the Jeu de Paume museum in the opposite corner of the garden, which had served as headquarters for the official German looting agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). In the preface to the exhibition catalog, the president of the French Commission for Art Recovery, Albert Henraux, proclaimed that France had proven that ‘efforts to reconstitute the national patrimony were not in vain,’ as ‘our masterpieces are back on the Place de la Concorde, site of the capital’s last battle and its liberation’. In his tribute to the patrimoine national—the French nation’s cultural heritage—Henraux failed to mention that before the war most of the plundered works had been owned by Jews.
The Dutch held similar exhibitions the same year at the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, featuring recovered works by Frans Hals, Van der Heyden, Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Cranach the Elder, Tintoretto, Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard. In the preface to the catalog for the Mauritshuis exhibition, a member of the Dutch Art Recovery Foundation, art historian Jan Gerrit van Gelder, vowed that ‘every effort will be made to remedy the cultural harm inflicted on our country to the greatest extent possible’. Two years later, the Belgians opened a comparable exhibition of recovered art at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, including panels of the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament by Dieric Bouts, Michelangelo’s Madonna sculpture from the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, and paintings by Cranach the Elder, Jordaens, Memling and Van der Weyden. According to the exhibition catalog, Allied restitution policies had created a foundation for ‘the reuniting of the Belgian cultural patrimony’.
The catalogs of these government-sponsored exhibitions convey a similar idea: the nation’s artistic heritage had been harmed by the Germans and postwar authorities intended to make the country culturally whole again, emphasizing collective ownership—‘our masterpieces’, ‘our cultural wealth’. This rhetoric, though, obscured an unsettling truth: while some of the pieces had been stolen from churches and public institutions, the vast majority had been plundered from private Jewish art collections. The exhibition catalogs thus illustrate a tension in these countries’ universalist conceptions of nationwide loss inflicted by the Nazis and their collaborators, and the very specific loss of life and property by Jews in the context of the Final Solution.
Since the mid-1990s the history and legacy of Nazi art looting has become more familiar to academic and public audiences alike, thanks to well-researched histories and legal analyses, and popular books and films with varying levels of historical rigor. The popular culture narrative celebrates the achievements of the ‘The Monuments Men’, the fine arts officers—men and women—who recovered art from Nazi repositories and returned the works to countries of origin and, often, to rightful private owners. The officers’ success prompted an American cultural commission to proclaim in 1947, ‘None of the great national treasures of France, Belgium, or Holland were lost in the war’. The commission had in mind masterpieces housed in churches and museums like the Mona Lisa, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and the Ghent altarpiece. If we shift the analysis to private collectors, however, a great many Jewish families in western Europe lost art treasures during the war due to antisemitic persecution during the German occupation. While tens of thousands of artworks were returned to rightful owners, thousands more have never been found, leaving us to speculate whether they were destroyed in the war or have been stashed in unknown locations.
Between the found and the lost is another category of plundered objects—artworks retrieved by Allied forces and repatriated to countries of origin, but never restituted to rightful owners. Thousands of these pieces were high quality works, worthy of Europe’s finest museums, for which no successful ownership claim had been submitted by 1950. Some had been stolen from Jewish homes, while others had been purchased by the Germans from Jewish collectors under varying degrees of duress. In the absence of successful claims, governments had no legal obligation to find survivors and heirs, nor did they voluntarily carry out thorough provenance research to trace the works to rightful owners. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the governments of France, the Netherlands and Belgium had all established long-term custodianships over the most coveted of these ownerless pieces, displaying them in state-run museums, ministries, embassies and other public buildings. The Dutch government claimed more than 4000, the French more than 2000, and the Belgians more than 600. Thousands of less worthy pieces were sold at auction and state property agencies deposited the proceeds to their national treasuries. The art custodianships endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when the press and public demanded greater transparency on the history and legacy of Nazi-era looting and spoliation.
This article examines the origins of the state custodianships in three countries—France, the Netherlands and Belgium—where the Germans had carried out significant art looting operations and dominated the art market during the occupation. Whereas previous studies and government reports have examined each national case separately, this study contributes to the existing literature by illustrating objectives and results common to all three examples, despite differences in the circumstances of occupation, postwar political institutions, restitutions rates and national policies. In all three cases, the cache of unclaimed artworks recovered from the Third Reich provided an unusual opportunity for these states to enrich their cultural patrimony during postwar reconstruction at little cost to the public treasury but at the expense of despoiled collectors and heirs. They are examples of patrimania, defined here as state appropriation in the name of national cultural patrimony. The end result was continued long-term dispossession of Jewish cultural property wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators in the context of the Shoah, a central component of ‘thefticide’, as defined by Irwin Cotler: ‘the greatest mass theft on the occasion of the greatest mass murder in history’.
As a wide-ranging comparison of the three countries is beyond the scope of this article, the analysis focuses on three elements: art restitution rates, the selection process, and public sales of objects deemed unworthy of state collections. I examine each of these factors in turn and conclude with reflections on the insight gained from a comparative analysis of the art custodianships, a continued source of cultural property disputes and controversy.
Over the course of the war, the Nazis amassed several hundred thousand works of art and millions of other cultural objects—books, manuscripts, archive collections and musical instruments. While they swept up national treasures in the plunder—from Belgium, the Ghent altarpiece, Michelangelo’s Madonna and panels from Dieric Bouts’ The Last Supper—Nazi looting in western Europe above all targeted Jewish collectors and dealers rather than state-owned art collections. Dominating the plunder in western Europe, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) under Alfred Rosenberg looted objects from Jewish homes, galleries and dealerships, while the Devisenschutzkommando (Currency Control Commando) stole items from bank vaults. The Nazis also seized lower quality works of art along with the plunder of furniture and household items through the Möbel-Aktion (Furniture Operation), which stripped 38,000 homes in France, 29,000 in the Netherlands and 4500 homes in Belgium. The Germans also dominated the art market in occupied countries and purchased works from vulnerable Jewish collectors through enticements of protection and threats of deportation. Nazi ‘plunder’ thus includes works that were both stolen and purchased from victims of persecution, and in the case of Jewish assets, must be understood within the broader framework of the Final Solution.
Aware of the Nazis’ massive displacement of cultural property, the Allies denounced all dispossession carried out by Axis powers. On 5 January 1943, 17 governments—including the Dutch and Belgian governments in exile, the French National Committee and the Soviet Union—issued the ‘Inter-Allied Declaration Against Acts of Dispossession Committed in Territories under Enemy Occupation and Control’, vowing ‘to do their utmost to defeat the methods of dispossession practiced by the governments with which they are at war against the countries and peoples who have been so wantonly assaulted and despoiled’. The warning applied ‘whether such transfers or dealings have taken the form of open looting or plunder, or of transactions apparently legal in form, even when they purport to be voluntarily effected’. The declaration thus denounced theft and all wartime sales to the enemy, without specifying the dispossession of Jews or any other particular group of victims.
Following the German surrender, the western Allies formed an international coalition to recover cultural property through the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A) division. Established by the USA at the end of 1943, the MFA&A eventually included 14 nations and more than 300 cultural officers. By September 1945, some 500 cultural repositories had been located in the US zone alone, prompting American authorities to establish collecting points in Marburg, Wiesbaden and Offenbach, and a central collecting point in Munich. By the end of 1945, regular shipments of cultural objects were flowing back to the liberated countries from the US zone. While there were fewer caches in the other western zones, British and French MFA&A officers oversaw similar restitution operations. In the eastern zone, the Soviets seized works found in caches as a form of reparations and did not join the MFA&A restitution effort.
The western powers carried out unprecedented cultural repatriation to liberated countries and internal restitution to German museums and individuals, totaling several hundred thousand works of art, plus millions of books, manuscripts, archives, and other cultural assets. By 1950, France had received 61,233 artworks, while Belgium had recovered 1155 objects. Statistics for the Netherlands are more difficult to compile, but an American report indicates that by March 1949, 6891 works had been repatriated to the Netherlands from the Central Collecting Point in Munich.
Once objects reached the liberated countries, national governments oversaw restitution to individuals. Restitution agencies, staffed by art experts and government officials, faced immense challenges sorting through thousands of objects without adequate personnel and resources, and processing thousands of claims with proof of ownership in deeds of sale, insurance policies and photographs. While restitution statistics are imperfect and do not neatly align in all three cases, available data indicate the proportion of repatriated art returned to individuals was much higher in France than in the Netherlands and Belgium. In France, 45,441 objects, or roughly 74 per cent of recovered artworks, were returned to rightful private owners by June 1950. By 1953, the Dutch government had restituted around 12 per cent (470) of recovered paintings. In Belgium, from a total of 885 objects from Jewish collections sent to the Third Reich, the government restituted just 62 items to four families—Hugo and Elisabeth Andriesse, Eric Lyndhurst, David and Jacob Reder, and Robert and Alice de Bauer—at a rate of merely 7 per cent.
This difference in restitution rates was largely due to the size and stature of plundered collections, the enemy’s acquisition methods (theft versus sales under duress), national restitution procedures and the relative competence of restitution agencies. Among the three countries, France was home to the greatest number of extensive Jewish collections in 1940, and several of the most privileged and well-connected collectors and dealers had fled the country. Paul Rosenberg and Georges Wildenstein established dealerships in New York, while from the Rothschild family, Edouard also fled to the USA and Maurice settled temporarily in Canada. The ERR and Devisenschutzkommando quickly targeted the Nazi-designated ‘ownerless’ (herrenlos) Jewish assets left behind by the emigrants. Vichy legislation on 23 July 1940 nullified the refugees’ French citizenship, further defining their property as ‘enemy assets’. From four families alone—Rothschild, David-Weill, Alphonse Kann and Seligmann—the Nazis looted a total of 10,000 objects; 5 per cent of despoiled collectors owned 75 per cent of artworks stolen from France. These large collectors would later recover pieces with relative ease by providing ownership documentation through deeds of sale, inventory lists, exhibition records, insurance policies and photographs.
During the final weeks of the occupation, the French Committee for National Liberation had established a legal framework for the re-establishment of Republican law and nullified legislation of the Vichy regime, including antisemitic measures. At the same time, republican notions of equality before the law meant that dispossessed Jews would be granted no special status to regain property compared with other categories of war victims, such as those displaced by Allied bombings or returning prisoners of war. The French Art Recovery Commission (Commission de Récupération Artistique, or CRA), established in September 1944, oversaw repatriated works of art under the leadership of Albert Henraux, curator of the Condé museum in Chantilly and president of the Friends of the Louvre advisory organization. Rose Valland, a Musées nationaux representative who had observed and documented Nazi looting operations at the Jeu de Paume, served the MFA&A in Germany from 1945 to 1953 at the rank of Captain and was a forceful advocate for French restitution. While restitution agencies in all three countries only partially restored cultural assets to rightful owners, especially Shoah victims and their heirs, the French CRA faced fewer charges of corruption and incompetence than its counterparts in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the Netherlands, there were fewer sizeable Jewish-owned collections in 1940 and fewer emigrant collectors and dealers who left behind ‘enemy property’. Compared with France, the Nazis acquired a greater proportion of artworks through forced sales and negotiations. The ERR also was less influential in the Netherlands, as two key plundering agencies fell directly under the authority of Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart: a Dienststelle (office) under Kajetan Mühlmann and the Enemy Property Agency. The Dienststelle Mühlmann above all served as an art dealership for the benefit of Hitler, Göring and other top Nazi officials.
Dealers in the Nazis’ employ fanned out across the country to acquire works on the leaders’ behalf. In July 1940, employees of the world-renowned dealership of Jacques Goudstikker, who had tragically died on a ship while fleeing with his wife and infant son, sold more than 1000 artworks to Göring and German dealer Alois Miedl. From German-born Jewish collector Fritz Gutmann, dealers Andreas Hofer and Karl Haberstock ‘offered’ to purchase more than 80 paintings, fine silver, bronzes and decorative objects. In the spring of 1943, the Nazis tricked Gutmann and his wife Louise into believing they had been granted safe passage to Florence, and instead deported them to Theresienstadt, where Fritz was beaten to death. Louise later perished at Auschwitz, while the Nazis plundered the remaining objects in their home. In another case aimed at securing works for Hitler’s museum project in Linz, Austria, Hans Posse negotiated with trustees of the estate of Fritz Mannheimer, a Jewish banker of German origin who had died bankrupt in 1939, to purchase some 3000 objects—paintings, fine furniture, Meissen porcelain, precious silver and medieval gold pieces. German decrees also forced Jews to deposit valuables at the Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. (Liro) robber bank, and many cultural items were promptly sold.
Thousands of purchased items returned to the Netherlands after the war, but were not automatically restitutable under Dutch law. The task of art recovery and restitution was entrusted to the Dutch Art Property Foundation (Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit, or SNK) headed by Ary Robert (Bob) De Vries, a well-known Jewish art historian who became director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague in 1947. In the context of Allied negotiations that appeared less and less likely to demand reparations from Germany, finance minister Piet Lieftinck aggressively sought restitution for the national good and viability of the state, without special consideration for Shoah victims. As legal historian Wouter Veraart puts it, Lieftinck ‘used the restitution machinery mainly to pursue the financial interests of the Dutch State … even if this policy conflicted with the interests of the dispossessed Jewish community’. In the case of objects purchased by the enemy and recovered from caches, the state claimed objects that had been sold on Dutch territory in apparently voluntary transactions. Claims of duress, however, were often difficult to prove. Even in clear cases of forced sales, Dutch law allowed the government to require payment of the sale price as a condition for restitution, placing a financial burden on despoiled Jewish families. Goudstikker and Gutmann heirs, for instance, paid for some objects but were unable to buy back all of their families’ items held by the state.
The SNK, moreover, was plagued by incompetence and corruption. De Vries reported in May 1948 that the Foundation faced a backlog of work due to insufficient personnel. Records include forms with insufficient information and duplicate forms for the same item. All of the restitution agencies were stretched thin with too few personnel, but De Vries compounded the problem in the Netherlands by attempting to circumvent procedures, not for personal profit but to benefit the Dutch national collection. In 1946, he was accused of falsely claiming three paintings from American authorities that had not been plundered in the Netherlands. Two years later he was suspected of submitting a fraudulent claim to the French CRA for a painting attributed to Jeroen Bosch. As Gerard Aalders puts it, the SNK at times appeared more geared toward acquisition than restitution. De Vries also was accused of improperly returning 32 paintings to dealer Nathan Katz amid speculation that Katz may have sold them to the enemy voluntarily. To the shock of the art history community, a government investigation led to De Vries’s arrest on fraud and embezzlement charges in July 1948, and he was forced to step down as director. He was acquitted in 1951 but negative press coverage had already tarnished the reputation of the SNK.
In Belgium, compared with France and the Netherlands, there were still fewer sizeable Jewish art collections before the war, but the ERR and Devisenschutzkommando seized works of value from homes and those held by national museums for safekeeping. In December 1939, Hugo Andriesse, a financier and industrialist, had entrusted to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels a collection of five tapestries, seventeen oriental rugs, and 28 lead-sealed crates of paintings by Flemish, Dutch and Italian masters, including a canvas each attributed to Rembrandt, Titian, Salomon, and Ruysdael. Andriesse then fled to the United States and his chauffeur, seeking some personal gain from the enemy, revealed the collection’s location. On 9 March 1942, the Devisenschutzkommando seized the works as enemy assets and shipped them to the ERR headquarters at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. The Germans also drew on Belgian law to create the Brüsseler Treuhandgesellschaft (Brussels Trustee Corporation, or BTG), which seized Jewish property, including works of art.
While there were fewer Jewish-owned fine art collections in Belgium, the Möbel-Aktion had a significant impact on lower income enemies of the Reich. As Jews were arrested, deported, or fled from authorities, the Möbel-Aktion ransacked their homes and transferred any objects of artistic value to the ERR. By the summer of 1943, one year after systematic deportations began, the Germans had confiscated an estimated 54,000 m3 of household items, creating a greater relative loss of lower quality furniture and everyday effects compared with the plunder of higher value art in France and the Netherlands.
In November 1944, shortly after the Liberation, Belgian authorities established the Office for Economic Restitution (Dienst Economische Recuperatie, or DER), charged with tracing, recovering and liquidating mobile assets lost during the war. A cultural division within the DER was headed by Raymond Lemaire, a 23-year-old art historian, assisted by Franz Baudouin, a renowned scholar of the Flemish baroque period. According to Rudi van Doorslaer, the relatively low restitution rate in Belgium was largely due to administrative incompetence and a lack of coordination among the various government offices that oversaw movable assets. Procedures of the DER, moreover, put smaller collectors at a disadvantage by largely relying on claimants to identify their own works in poorly organized warehouses with limited opportunities to view items.
By 1950, the restitution agencies in all three countries oversaw a significant number of artworks for which no successful ownership claim had been submitted—nearly 15,000 pieces in France, more than 6000 in the Netherlands, and some 1000 in Belgium. Officials and art experts in the three restitution agencies made assumptions about the ‘ownerless’ works. They presumed the owners had perished during the war and that no claim from rightful heirs was forthcoming. Or, they reasoned, the works had been sold to Germans and the seller had chosen not to claim them and pay associated fees. But thousands of recovered artworks remained ownerless for other reasons. Less wealthy survivors and heirs often lacked the required documentation to prove ownership. The Germans and their collaborators had ransacked the homes of Shoah victims, removing any paperwork the residents may have left behind. Many did not have insurance policies, deeds of sale or photographs to accompany claims. Some heirs were not aware that the state held assets that were rightfully theirs. In the absence of successful claims, neither national laws nor international norms required states to search for rightful owners, and for Jewish leaders and communities, the fate of unclaimed art was a lower priority than the more urgent struggles to secure housing, victims’ benefits and political rights. Government officials in all three countries, working in consultation with top art experts, thus faced no organized opposition as they developed plans to acquire recovered pieces for public institutions.
The process of selecting and distributing works followed a pattern in all three countries: national committees selected the highest quality pieces, saved the best for the most prestigious museums, and curators and museum directors from smaller institutions throughout the country lobbied to receive their share. In France, plans to acquire unclaimed artworks for public museums developed before the recovery process was even fully underway. In March 1945, education minister René Capitant sought approval from the finance ministry to purchase for French museums recovered works of art that had not been restituted within three years. He envisioned a special credit, outside the usual museum budget, with which the state could exercise a right of first refusal on unclaimed works that would normally be sold at public auction. This solution, Capitant argued, would ‘effectively defend the wealth of French collections and the national patrimony’. The idea resurfaced in 1948 when French officials were making plans to dissolve the CRA. On 21 June, an order by the education ministry created a selection committee that would reserve for state museums artworks that ‘for whatever reason could not be restituted to a legally recognized owner’. As Henraux explained to Georges Salles, director of National Museums, the chosen works would ‘significantly enrich our patrimoine national’. The selection committee’s work was codified further in a decree of 30 September 1949 that replaced the CRA with two committees charged with selecting ownerless art and books for state collections.
The art committee met eight times between 1949 and 1953, overseen by Jacques Jaujard, director of arts and letters, who had earned the Resistance Medal for his role protecting the French patrimoine during the occupation. Other members included Salles, Henraux, curators from the Louvre, the National Museum of Modern Art, the Algiers National Museum, the National Furniture Administration (Mobilier national), and representatives from the justice and finance ministries. The committee mapped out several categories of works worthy of selection: high quality pieces fit for display at the Louvre, works by secondary masters that were signed and/or dated, intriguing or rare pieces suitable for Louvre storage, works for historical museums and public art museums in larger cities throughout France (‘provincial’ museums), and objects set aside for the Mobilier national that would furnish and decorate ministries, embassies and other public buildings. The meeting minutes contain no mention of the works’ provenance or questions over rightful ownership. During the meeting of 21 December 1949, the head curator of paintings at the Louvre, René Huyghe, observed that the works had been sold and not stolen during the occupation. The statement is problematic on two levels: provenance research by the MFA&A and CRA had not been thorough enough to establish whether the works had been stolen or sold, nor to discern the degree of sellers’ duress. The meeting minutes convey a desire to carry out the triage process as efficiently as possible, with little debate over selected objects. In 50 minutes, the committee selected the equivalent of a respectable small museum collection: 562 paintings, among them Boucher, The Fountain; Ingres, Portrait of ‘Père Desmaret’; Monet, Cliff at Fécamp; Delacroix, Vase of Flowers on Console; Cézanne, Self-portrait; Veronese, Leda and the Swan; and Tiepolo, Alexander the Great and Campaspe in the Studio of Apelles. In March 1950, works by Gleizes, Léger and Maillol were allocated to the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris (Musée national d’art moderne, MNAM). A 45-minute meeting on 28 March 1952 resulted in 96 additional objects for public collections, including 61 paintings. Two were attributed to Boucher, The Forest and Nude and Cherubs, the latter eventually identified as Fragonard, Match to Powderkeg; two others were by Cranach the Elder, Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The committee chose 16 drawings, including one each by Delacroix, Tiepolo, Boucher, Meissonnier and Goya. Rose Valland reported with pride in 1954 that through the selection process, pieces ‘sold during the Occupation, the most beautiful ones, such as paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix and de la Tour, entered our national collections’.
The selected objects were not fully acquired by the French state. Instead, to the consternation of some curators, they remained on a special registry allowing rightful owners to claim them. The museum office created 14 object categories, the best known of which is Musées nationaux récupération (MNR), fifteenth to early twentieth-century paintings, though the acronym is commonly used today to refer to all works in the custodianship. Other codes were RP (twentieth-century paintings), RFR (fifteenth to nineteenth-century sculpture), AGRR (Greek and Roman antiquities) and MAR (East Asian artworks). Roughly 2100 items were chosen as museum curators from across France vied to house them. The great national museums were given first choice, with top priority granted to the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Works remaining after this initial culling went to smaller art museums in the provinces, and furniture and decorative objects were distributed among public palaces and other government buildings.
A similar art distribution process developed in the Netherlands. In December 1945, SNK board member and attorney Willem van Elden drafted restitution principles in light of an Allied reparations conference being held at the time in Paris. As Van Elden pointed out, the 1943 Allied Declaration shaped the Dutch view of looted property, which included all works stolen and purchased by the enemy: ‘All of the property taken out of the Netherlands by Germans is considered “looted”. By receiving repatriated cultural property, Van Elden argued, the SNK served as a custodian for ‘the Dutch people’ and lawful owners, ‘as they may appear’, suggesting that the custodianship in some cases might be temporary as ownership claims were submitted.
In the following year, it was clear to SNK administrators that the Dutch state would maintain control over numerous unclaimed pieces, some of which were worthy of the country’s finest art museums. They discussed the distribution of ‘suitable’ pieces to public museums, based on an advisory commission’s recommendations. The seven-member commission was chaired by the head of the Rembrandt Association, E. Heldring, and also included Van Gelder, and industrialist and collector Daniel George van Beuningen. The commission held its first meeting on 23 August 1946 and discussed its approach to distributing some 1200 artworks, including 500 paintings. Van Gelder compared the task ahead of them to assets divided in an inheritance: the affected museums were unlikely to be satisfied with the commission’s decisions. The allocation would certainly benefit the country’s largest and most prestigious institutions, such as the Rijksmuseum. As Van Beuningen argued, ‘it is of utmost importance to make the great museums more glorious than they already are’. Thus, the highest quality artworks were to be reserved for major museums in the Randstad region of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. At the same time, commission members recognized an opportunity to distribute works to smaller or ‘provincial’ museums that had long been neglected by the state, and aimed to prevent institutions like the Rijksmuseum from absorbing too many pieces. The commission established guidelines inviting museum directors to submit wenslijsten (wish lists) based on a catalog of enemy property provided by the SNK. The guidelines specifically invited such lists from museums in Arnhem, Dordrecht, Eindhoven, Groningen, Haarlem, Leiden and Maastricht, reflecting the commission’s aim to distribute pieces beyond the country’s most famous museums.
Museum directors and curators rose to the challenge and lobbied to secure pieces for their collections. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam identified works by several artists that would fill ‘gaps’ in its collection, including two paintings by Van Gogh, a Kokoschka, a Daumier and a Monet. Some museum directors recruited support from powerful patrons. In Eindhoven, Anton Frederik Philips, former head of the multinational company bearing his name and best-known for manufacturing lightbulbs, endorsed the wish list of Edy de Wilde, director of the Van-Abbe Museum, seeing an important educational opportunity for the public. In other cases, historical connections to a given city and the location of depicted scenes helped to determine the distribution; Groningen received works from the northern Netherlands while the commission assigned paintings from southern regions to Maastricht.
The commission issued an initial distribution list in October 1947 and the SNK board of directors approved it a month later, acknowledging the provisional nature of the recommendations given the uncertain legal status of the ownerless works. Museum collections would be enriched first, then pieces would be available to build a state collection of furniture, art and decorative objects for government offices, embassies and other public buildings. The Dutch created their own version of the French Mobilier national, invoking the French term in their discussions, despite initial opposition from Lieftinck, who had advocated selling the furniture pieces with the proceeds deposited to the national treasury. In all, the Netherlands created a custodianship for more than 4000 recovered objects, including works by Frans Hals (Portrait of a Man), Jacob van Ruisdael (Watermill, Wooded Landscape, Rocky Landscape with Waterfall), Jan Steen (The Expulsion from the Temple, Cockfight in a Tavern, A Peasant Wedding), Gerard ter Borch (Portrait of a Woman, Interior of an Attic-Room, Interior with Soldiers Playing Cards), Lucas Cranach the Elder (Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John the Baptist, Venus and Amor) and Cornelius Troost (The Maternity Visit, The Doctor’s Visit, Portrait of a Man and Boy).
In Belgium, the DER and the education ministry organized the appropriation of ownerless art. The DER General Director, M. Reul, explained to the Belgian finance ministry that all the artworks under consideration had been sold to enemy buyers during the occupation in ‘regular transactions’ and were ‘restituted by Allied occupation authorities since they came from the Belgian cultural patrimony’. Reul proposed that the education ministry would select works of art with which it could ‘enrich our cultural patrimony’, and the DER would transfer the remaining works to the state property agency, known as Domaines, which would sell them at auction with proceeds deposited to the Treasury. The ‘enrichment’ of museums came at a cost, however. According to public finance laws, the education ministry could not simply obtain the artworks for free, as credits had been appropriated for art acquisitions. The ministry thus was required to purchase the works from Domaines at ‘reasonable’ prices, including sales fees normally paid by auction buyers.
By the end of June 1949, a commission of curators had selected 68 paintings worth just over Bfr 4 million. Choices for provincial museums included: for the Antwerp Museum—Philippe de Marlier, The Virgin Surrounded by Garland of Flowers; for the Maison Rubens in Antwerp—three paintings to complement those by the Master, one attributed to Corneille de Vos, a landscape by Lucas van Uden, and by Frans Snyders, Statue of the Virgin Surrounded by a Garland of Flowers; for the Maison Jordaens in Antwerp—five paintings by the Flemish painter; for the museum in Tournai—The Holy Family in the school of Rogier Van der Weyden. A landscape by Van Goyen was selected to hold for an eventual exchange of art with the Netherlands. As the list of chosen works grew, the fine arts office sent updates to the finance ministry. By mid-November, the amount had grown to BFr 5.3 million and was credited in 1950 to a special Domaines account entitled ‘restitutions from Germany’. Among the most valuable works purchased were two paintings by Memling for a total of Bfr 300,000, an Eve by Cranach for Bfr 125,000, and a Madonna by Van der Weyden for Bfr 300,000. In a request to the finance ministry for the special budget credits, fine arts official Van Mulders seemed to recognize the creative public accounting involved, reassuring the finance ministry that ‘this is a fictional operation with no real cost to the State’.
Minutes from a meeting in February 1951 illustrate the distribution process among royal and provincial museums carried out by a committee of eight curators and art experts, four each representing the Royal Museums in Brussels and the Antwerp Royal Museum. The director of arts and letters, Lucien Christophe, presided over the meeting and explained that the chosen works would be divided into three groups: those selected for the Royal Museums, those for the Antwerp museum, and works that would be entrusted to the fine arts office to bolster provincial museum collections. The experts examined some 60 works and the two delegations took turns picking pieces. The delegations drew lots to see which would choose first. Brussels had the first pick and within an hour, each delegation had chosen 18 paintings; the rest would be held in storage or distributed to provincial museums. The meeting minutes contain no detail as to why certain works were chosen. The speed with which decisions were made—an average of under two minutes per painting—suggests that the delegations had studied the list of available works in advance and determined their preferred pieces. After the selection process, all parties were reportedly ‘perfectly satisfied’ with the distribution. Baron Descamps, representing the Musées Royaux in Brussels, made a point of thanking Christophe for the methodical and ‘extremely courteous’ manner in which the process was carried out, prompting the other attendees to follow suit.
Curators and municipal officials throughout the country lobbied to receive selected artworks. The city of Tournai, birthplace of Rogier van der Weyden, was particularly keen to acquire paintings by the artist. The curator of the local museum urged Christophe to include Tournai in the distribution, emphasizing the damage done to the city during the war and the local population’s tremendous reconstruction effort: ‘the granting of several works, including a Rogier’, he proclaimed, would ‘reward’ the townspeople and offer ‘encouragement’. The lobbying was successful and Tournai acquired two Van der Weyden paintings. Similarly, Paul Renotte, assistant mayor for the fine arts in Liège, underscored the harm done to the museum’s works of art at the end of the war. On 7 September 1944, the museum was damaged when a German tank filled with dynamite exploded nearby, an event Renotte highlighted to argue, ‘we have a right to reparations’. Plus, he pointed out, the museum had fewer old master works than other museums in the country, at a time when it aimed to expand its holdings by artists from the Meuse region and southern Netherlands. In the end, Liège was allotted eight paintings. The selected works were added to each institution’s official catalog, indicating the state’s intention to acquire the pieces and not to merely conserve them for potential claimants.
The French, Dutch and Belgian governments also benefited from the sale of art that had not been chosen for public institutions. These sales, often conducted without thorough provenance research, followed international cultural property norms of the time and adhered to national laws requiring the public sale of sequestered assets. In France, the Domaines state property agency exhibited the objects to the public and advertised the auctions in its bulletin, with descriptions of some items and illustrations of the most valuable pieces. While the bulletins did not specify the likely origins of the objects, journalists and art experts at the time were well aware that many had been stolen from Jewish owners or sold under duress. Some also contested the inflated prices, such as a silver soup tureen of disputed authorship attributed to Thomas Germain that sold for more than Fr 4 million. The Domaines agency did not guarantee authorship, prompting one appraiser to quip, ‘I don’t want to get soaked in this tureen’. In all, an estimated 13,000 objects were sold in France, though sources vary on the exact number, due to different methods of counting objects alone or in lots; a silver tea set could be considered one or several ‘items’. The total revenue is more certain; by June 1953 the Domaines agency had collected Fr 96,120,000. Valland boasted the following year that through these auctions ‘the French state recovered a good portion of the funds it had been forced to give to the enemy’.
The Dutch government also sold a variety of recovered objects ranging from tchotchkes to works from the renowned Goudstikker, Mannheimer, and Lanz collections. In August 1950, Jolle Jolles, De Vries’s successor as director of the SNK, reported that ‘719 paintings were sold at auction, 18 paintings were sold in direct sales, 120 carpets and an unspecified number’ of furniture and applied art objects were sold at a total value to that date of Nlg 51,667.76. According to Helen Schretlen, however, the total revenue amount collected through 1953 was much higher—at least Nlg 2 million. Government reports and correspondence provide limited information on the sale of Jewish-owned items, but according to Schretlen, objects from the Mannheimer collection alone generated Nlg 1.5 million.
In Belgium, Rossignol of the DER justified the sales due to Germany’s imposition of payments through the clearing system during the occupation. The sale of recovered, ownerless art thus became a kind of indirect reparation, mitigating losses Belgium had not been able to recover fully in postwar negotiations. Between 1948 and 1954, the Belgian Domaines agency held six public auctions of ownerless artworks and high quality furniture, representing 35.8 per cent of objects repatriated to Belgium with sales totaling Bfr 3,303,395, of which an estimated Bfr 1,535,003.60 came from Jewish-owned property. As in France, the auction catalogs provided no indication of probable Jewish provenance.
By the late 1950s, the custodianships in western Europe were status quo and endured with little controversy for nearly 40 years. In the minds of many, restitution matters had been settled, as evidenced by the successful return of thousands of artworks, including famous national treasures such as the Ghent altarpiece. The Jewish Restitution Successor Organization and Jewish Cultural Reconstruction distributed some half a million ownerless cultural and ceremonial objects to Jewish communities around the world, mostly in the USA and Israel. In July 1957, the FRG enacted the Federal Restitution law (Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz, BRuuml;G), allowing compensation for goods taken to the territory of West Germany or West Berlin.
In France, Rose Valland continued to serve the museum administration until her retirement in 1967 and was among the curators who quietly maintained the custodianship. She oversaw archives related to the MNR pieces but did not propose using them to conduct more thorough provenance research which might have helped to trace the art to rightful owners. At the same time, she questioned recurring proposals to establish a statute of limitations on claims. In 1965, the Director of French Museums, Jean Châtelain, explained to her that one had to think not only about the individuals who had experienced traumas of the past, but also ‘those who live today, and those who will come after them, year after year’. For the latter, ‘who are the future, we must forget the past … however moving the past may be’. He suggested relaunching research into the collection if it contained ‘major works’. Otherwise, ‘let’s leave the pieces available to the living, which does not at all diminish the respect we owe the dead’. Works by Picasso, Monet and Courbet surely qualified as ‘major’, but the research was never carried out. Neither was a statute of limitations on claims established, but there were only four restitutions between 1957 and 1994. Hubert Landais, head of administration of French museums from 1977 to 1987, offered the following explanation: ‘It is a very bizarre story. We never attempted to look for the owners. I realize how surprising that must seem. The weak point in the justification offered by museum administrators is that no one in the last fifty years has taken the initiative’.
In the Netherlands, management of the ownerless works transferred from the SNK to the Office for Reparation Payments and Restitution of Property (Bureau Herstelbetalings en Recuperatiegoederen, HERGO) under the finance ministry in July 1950, and then two years later to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, where it became known as the Nederlands Kunstbezit-collectie (NK). Documents that had been gathered by the SNK remained in the finance ministry archives, however, distancing the art collection from the relevant documentation. Over the next 45 years, no effort was made to review the Foundation archives systematically and connect information with data from other government offices on the wartime seizure and forced sale of assets. The Belgian custodianship similarly endured into the 1990s without any evidence of government review.
On an international level, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) spearheaded measures to protect cultural property, in the wake of the massive displacement of assets during the Second World War and in the context of postwar decolonization. The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict includes a wide definition of sites and objects—architectural monuments, works of art, books, manuscripts—with a central criterion that the property should be ‘of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people’. In 1970, UNESCO also coordinated the first significant international effort to prevent the illegal trafficking of art in peacetime, through the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. By 2018, 134 member states had ratified the Convention but with uneven application and enforcement, due to a flourishing black market and customs officials’ frequent inability to determine whether shipments had violated national export laws.
It was not until the mid-1990s that the press and the public began to question the right of state-owned museums to hold artworks plundered from victims of the Nazis and their collaborators. The timing of this inquiry is due to several interwoven factors: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe ushered in a new period of reflection on wartime property losses across the continent; in the USA, Cold War realpolitik, especially with regard to foreign policy toward Germany, gave way to moral concerns about the incomplete compensation of Holocaust victims and heirs, bolstered by domestic politics during the Clinton administration; the fiftieth anniversary of the end of war led to further national commemorations and personal reflections, some provided by Holocaust survivors who called for belated justice; class action lawsuits filed in US District Court in New York brought claims against insurers, Swiss banks, and German companies that had used Jewish slave labor during the war; European governments declassified wartime archives, allowing journalists and historians to document human and material losses; in the realm of Nazi-looted art, groundbreaking studies by writers Lynn Nicholas and Hector Feliciano captured the public’s attention, and in a rigorous academic study, Jonathan Petropoulos argued that in the Third Reich, art was politics.
Forced to respond to a new wave of journalistic and public scrutiny, governments in France, Belgium and the Netherlands created national commissions to study the occupation-era spoliation and plunder of Jewish assets broadly defined—real estate, bank accounts, insurance policies, gold and artworks—to determine the extent to which each state had benefited from spoliation and restitution, and to propose remedies to heirs and Jewish communities. Of the three countries, the Dutch were most proactive, initiating provenance research on more than 4000 objects in the NK. Between 2002 and 2016 a Dutch Restitution Committee issued 133 recommendations involving 1540 claimed items, including the 2005 restitution of some 200 paintings to American claimant Marei von Saher, heir to the Goudstikker estate. The French government stalled in pursuing systematic research on some 2000 works until the creation of a task force in March 2013, under culture minister Aurélie Filipetti. A database on the Ministry of Culture Site Rose-Valland indicated that 116 objects were restituted by June 2019, including 56 since 1999. Yet more work remains, and another task force created in 2019 will continue the research. In Belgium, the Buysse report from 2001 recommended further research on some 300 items of likely Jewish provenance, but there is no public sign this research has been carried out.
In the wake of war, occupation and unprecedented human and material losses, the liberated countries of western Europe aimed to rebuild their cities and economies and to restore a sense of national grandeur. The Nazi displacement of millions of cultural objects had required military and state intervention in the repatriation and restitution process, first through the MFA&A and international cooperation, and then by national governments. Whereas right-wing political nationalism had been discredited by the failure of fascism and Nazi collaboration, the works of art repatriated to France, Belgium and the Netherlands were a source of cultural nationalism, symbolizing the restoration of sovereignty. After the successful restitution of cultural assets to some private owners, other unclaimed works of art became a means to make the nation culturally whole by bolstering state museum and furniture collections. Here we see a tension between efforts by postwar governments on the one hand to re-nationalize artistic patrimony plundered by the Nazis, and on the other to return stolen assets to individuals, especially Jewish victims.
A comparison of all three cases yields insight into common elements of the custodianships, despite national differences in the circumstances of occupation, Nazi acquisition methods and postwar policies and political institutions. Whereas other studies have underscored differences in national restitution policies, especially comparing France and the Netherlands, in the more limited area of unclaimed works of art, the national responses in France, the Netherlands and Belgium were remarkably similar. In all three cases, a consensus emerged on the state’s overriding right and responsibility to conserve and display the most coveted ‘ownerless’ assets as ‘national heritage’. The process required broad cooperation among curators, museum directors, experts serving the MFA&A and national restitution committees, and government officials at national, regional and local levels. An indication of the stakes involved, national committees managed the selection and distribution process, culling the best art for national museums, while curators at provincial and local institutions vied to receive objects. All three states further asserted a right to benefit from the art recovery process by selling less coveted pieces and depositing the proceeds into their national treasuries. Opportunity and expediency thus drove art appropriation at the expense of Jewish victims and heirs.
The legacy of mid-twentieth-century plunder leaves governments today with a responsibility to abide by their commitment to facilitate the restitution of Nazi-era assets, as agreed in international conferences in Washington, DC (1998), Vilnius (2000) and Prague (2009). This means aggressively pursuing provenance research on objects acquired since 1932 and produced before 1946, annual parameters that include the entire Nazi period, and regularly posting updated research findings online—measures that would demonstrate a commitment to promises of transparency made at the turn of this century. This ethical obligation also extends to private museums in the USA, where much of the Nazi plunder flowed via the postwar art market. Beyond legal and ethical considerations, provenance research can also yield new understandings of art history. When victims of plunder have been identified, institutions should then draw on the expertise of genealogists, as has the French government, to trace artworks to rightful heirs and reach an agreement that satisfies all parties, whether restitution or another settlement. In this scenario, objects are worthy of museum collections not only based on prestige and aesthetic value, but also for their clean provenance. Such an international commitment would further advance early twenty-first-century progress toward greater transparency and belated justice.