Homeward Bound 80 Years after Auschwitz

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau and the date, January 27, entered history as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On the eve of the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, some French museums have decided to redouble their efforts to find the rightful heir-owners of the remaining artwork still in their custody.

The process of restitution is as old as the end of World War II. It doesn’t do justice to either those engaged in finding the rightful owners and heirs or those self-same owners and heirs to say the process has been extremely challenging. The Nazi loot of artwork from the museums of occupied Europe, from private galleries and homes, and their shipment to Germany and Anschluss Austria was a protracted crime defined by Lynn Nicholas as The Rape of Europa (1994) after the Titian masterpiece. The discovery of many of the hidden storages and the recovery of their treasures and shipping them across the Atlantic or back to their European home/host nations, as on the eve of the war, was always the stuff of thrillers.

At the end of the war, about 61,000 artworks were brought back to France from Germany and stored across French national museums. According to the Louvre, 45,000 of these were returned to their rightful owners or heirs of the owners. But about 1,600 works still remain with the Louvre. (The original programme was called National Museum Recuperation.) Now, according to reports, the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (the museum of fine art in Lille), is awaiting a grant to begin its own process of tracking down the heirs of owners and settle claims.

According to more than a half-century of investigations by governments, academics, journalists, et al, the approximate number turned out to be 650,000—the number of artworks stolen by the Nazis from the very year they came to power in Germany till the end of the war. Many of these were works of Europe’s greatest artists and many were stolen, or taken, from Jewish families. The biggest difficulty for the restitution commissions has always been the fact that most or many of the owners died in the Holocaust. The restitution commissions work closely with heirs and claimants to settle the legal hurdles and establish ownership. Of late, claims to restitution have also been made by the heirs themselves, with some of the claims turning into notable successes, while other battles are still raging in courts.

It’s almost certain that the owners/heirs of thousands of the remaining artwork in the museums will never be found. The question of restitution is one of justice for a historical crime but it also comes up against the debate between public display and private ownership of artwork—despite the fact that these are Holocaust victims and Nazi loot we are talking about.

In a case last year, as reported in Smithsonian Magazine, two 17^th-century minor artworks (Floris van Schooten’s Still-Life with Ham and Peter Binoit’s Food, Fruit and Glass on a Table) recovered from Germany and kept in the Louvre were returned to the descendants of the Jewish family that had owned them. Those descendants then decided to donate the two paintings back to the Louvre as a “duty of memory” towards their family.

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, no part of the human and cultural restoration is over. It can never be. For that, memory would have to be a space one could return to, to undo things.

80th anniversaryAuschwitz-BirkenauJewish ownersNazi-looted artworkWorld War II