Nazi-stolen art returned to the Nazis

MUNICH. Decades after World War II, more than 10,000 works of art confiscated by the Nazis in Bavaria, according to official statistics, returned to their rightful owners, including descendants of Jewish families. A new scandalous investigation reveals how families of former Nazis persecuted Bavarian officials in attempts to return the transferred art objects, which they continued to regard as their property.

Hitler’s personal secretary, Henriette von Schirach and her family made a lot of efforts to regain a collection of nearly 300 works, including the small view of the Dutch Square by Jan van der Heiden (View of a Dutch Square, Jan van der Heyden). Before the war, this painting was the property of Gottlieb and Matilda Kraus (Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus), Jews who left their apartment in Vienna with a collection of art objects confiscated by Gestapo officials in 1941. Henrietta von Schirach convinced Bavarian officials to give her a picture for nothing - for 300 German marks, which was approximately equal to 75 US dollars (about 600 US dollars nowadays).

“The essence of the story is that what was stolen from my family was returned back to those who stole it. How does it work? ”Asks John Graykowski, great-grandson of Krausov.

Documents were found in the archives confirming that in 1950-60, hundreds of paintings were actually sold back at low prices to the same Nazis who took part in the robberies, including the widow of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s senior assistant, whose art collection totaled more than a thousand works.

This whole story surfaced due to searches made by John Grajkovsky. In 2009, he turned for help to the London Commission for Looted Art in Europe, whose staff made a number of key discoveries. Anne Webber, one of the commission’s leaders, says her researchers concluded that the resale of Nazi-looted art was secret. “They called it return sales,” Webber said. “Why the paintings were returned to the Nazis, and not to the families from which they were stolen, we do not understand.”

For the first time, the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung spoke about the “returned” sales in late June. The publication had political implications. Last week, the Bavarian Landtag committee demanded that government officials report all cases of resale of art objects to Nazi families, as well as how many stolen works are still kept by the state and which part of them can be returned to the heirs.

Mrs. von Schirach’s grandson, Ferdinand von Schirach, a German lawyer and writer whose grandfather was jailed for 20 years for deporting more than 60,000 Austrian Jews, publicly promised to investigate the origin of his late grandmother’s art collection.

“We need to know the truth,” he said. “This is the only way to live with it.”

The art trade with Nazi relatives began in 1949, four years after the end of the war, when the U.S. military shifted responsibility for the restitution of looted works of art to Western Germans and Austrians. Munich became the focus of art dealers and those government officials who were supposed to return the collections to their rightful owners, but were actually engaged in their secret resale. The archive contains information about how Henrietta von Schirach worked for more than ten years in order to regain paintings, carpets and furniture. According to archival documents, her father, Heinrich Hoffmann, a personal photographer of Hitler, owned a collection of nearly 300 stolen paintings. Hoffman spoke about this collection during interrogation by the American military, but they did not take his words into account, as Hoffman suffered from alcoholism.

Robert M. Edsel, author of the 2009 book Treasure Hunters (Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men), said he was not surprised by the existence of a secret sales system.

“This is a problem for entire countries, private collectors and auction houses - to get away from the consequences of the Nazi past. The more they avoid transparency in this matter, the more they cause interest and disappointment. Why does this remain so important after many years? Because we are dealing with stolen things, ”summarizes Edsel.

In the case of John Grajkowski’s legacy, historians managed to trace the fate of the painting “View of the Dutch Square”: it got to the official collection point in post-war Munich, where works of art were stored for subsequent restitution, but in 1962 the State Museum sold this painting and another landscape XVII century from the collection of the Kraus Henriette von Schirach family. The last known owner of the painting is the Catholic Cathedral in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, which acquired it in 1963 at an auction for 16,100 German marks, which is equivalent to 31,000 US dollars at today’s exchange rate, i.e. 50 times more than Henrietta von Schirach paid for her a year earlier. The current location of the painting is unknown, but it is very similar to the work of van der Hayden, which is exhibited in the Louvre.

John Grajkowski expressed the hope that his family’s story would be thoroughly investigated and the art collection returned.

“Maybe people will feel responsible for what happened,” he says. “My grandmother was an artist, her paintings were also on the list of stolen works, and today, apparently, someone’s living rooms are decorated. I have never seen them, but would like to see them. ”

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru