WWII Looted Art is Still Big Business
An Atlanta Jewish Film Festival program online explored the flourished trade in works stolen from Jewish collectors during the Holocaust.
Eighty years ago, this month, when the Second World War ended in Europe, the world was finally able to add up the cost Jews paid during the deadliest war in history. But as a recent program of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival (AJFF) points out, we are still adding up the price that Europe’s Jews paid in so many other ways during those years.
In the AJFF online presentation, “Stolen Masterpieces – The Lasting Toll of Nazi Plunder,” the festival examined how the Nazi occupation of much of Europe led to art thievery on a grand scale. How, in the words of Stuart Eizenstat, who was part of the AJFF discussion, the plunder of artistic masterpieces owned by European Jews was as highly organized as the Nazi campaign of extermination against those same people.
“The Nazis intended not only to kill Jews individually and collectively, but to destroy every aspect of Jewish civilization and Jewish life,” Eizenstat said. “Remarkably, during the war, they stole up to 600,000 paintings. And this is unmatched anytime in world history. And they did so with the same efficiency and scale as the Holocaust itself.”
Many of these valuable paintings and other important art treasures were never recovered. Countless others disappeared into the murky world of private sales, facilitated by art dealers and others who had a hand in the plunder of Jewish-owned art and the murder of Jewish art collectors.
In one of the outstanding documentaries screened at the Festival earlier this year, the career of one of these notorious figures was re-examined. “Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief” recounted the life of Bruno Lohse, a former German SS officer and personal agent in Paris for Hermann Göring, who was second only to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy. The film is based on Jonathan Petropoulos’s 2022 biography of Lohse.
Lohse was a master at covering his blood-stained tracks over the years. He used pliable middlemen, avaricious Swiss banks, and a shadowy foundation in Lichtenstein to facilitate sales to some of the biggest galleries and museums in the world.
This tale of greed and thievery, according to the film, even extended into the lofty world of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lohse cultivated a friendship with none other than Theodore Rousseau, who was an important curator of the museum. Ironically, he had been a highly decorated member of the Monuments Men, that band of U.S. agents who worked tirelessly after World War II to return artistic masterpieces to their prewar owners.
The questionable contacts Rousseau had with Lohse highlights the difficulty that has developed around the question of how to deal with Nazi stolen art. The explosive growth of art museums in the U.S. after World War II, the tax laws that favored wealthy American collectors, and the dramatic rise in art prices over the last 80 years has helped fuel the trade in stolen art that exists to this very day.
Lohse’s career flourished over the years, and he retained a large collection of artistic masterpieces when he died in 2007 at the age of 95.
The prosperous career of this Nazi criminal continued with few interruptions, as the documentary and the AJFF program pointed out, because of the vast sums of money the art trade generates internationally.
Global art sales, according to one Swiss bank that tracks them, totaled more than 40 million transactions last year, worth nearly $59 billion.
Collectors and museums spending all that money for great art aren’t eager to return it to the heirs of Jewish collectors who saw their collections snapped up by Nazi agents like Lohse.
Robert Edsel, whose book on the work of The Monuments Men was made into an Academy Award winner in 2014 for George Clooney, told the AJFF online audience how difficult it is to repatriate these works.
“I’ve spoken to a collector who had a billion-dollar art collection in their home. And the person’s response was, are you telling me I would have to take this Monet water lilies off the wall and give it back to someone? And I said, yes, if it was looted. And the response was like that immortal quote of Charlton Heston’s, about prying the gun out of my dead hand.”
Still, progress is being made, even after all these years. Eizenstat has worked tirelessly over the years to create and help implement The Washington Principles, a system of international agreements that have helped to return art that was looted by the Nazi and others.
In recent years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has appointed a curator to examine the 1.5 million items in its collection to determine which may have been tainted by the crimes of the Holocaust.
comments