Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) (Amendment) Bill — House of Commons, 2019-03-15
Topic: Civil Rights
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I am very pleased to be able to be here today to support the Bill introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers). It is an incredibly important piece of proposed legislation The Spoliation Advisory Panel was established after a conference in 1998, the same year that I visited Auschwitz for the first time. Anyone who visits will never forget seeing the now sagging barbed wire that held people in to be contained until their deaths; the small, dark claustrophobic gas chambers; and, from the piles of hair and teeth, how people were literally pulled apart I have recently been reading Tony Judt’s book "Postwar", a magisterial history of post-war Europe. It tells the story of how Europe was put together after the war: how the new institutional architecture that has brought peace to the continent was built; and how the successful new states, none more so than the Federal Republic of Germany, were built up and resisted anti-democratic forces for decades. It covers the big symbolic moments, such as Willy Brandt kneeling in Warsaw, and, most joyously of all, the fall of the Berlin wall, a big moment in reuniting our continent It is no exaggeration to say that my right hon. Friend’s Bill, even though it is only about 100 words long, is another little piece in that story: the huge vase that was smashed into a million pieces gradually being put back together, the righting of wrongs and the building up of peace. The Bill is another piece in that story. She is quite right to make the argument that spoliation—taking from families their works of art and their precious belongings—was part of the attempt to dehumanise a whole group of people. I watched the French documentary film "The Sorrow and the Pity", which shows some of the Nazi propaganda of the time. What is striking is how sophisticated it was. It is not crude propaganda; it is quite effective propaganda that aims to dehumanise people. The looting of their possessions was a part of that to make them seem like a ragged group who were inhuman and fit only for death. Today, of course, we have new types of racist propaganda. We have the videoing for consumption on the internet of the barbaric killings in New Zealand. We have new antisemitic memes flooding the internet every day. This kind of propaganda always goes on. It is important that, on every level and every day, we continue to fight it On Second Reading, my right hon. Friend drew attention to a number of cases and read out the testimony of people who had been reunited with their belongings. There was the family who remembered a particular painting hanging on the wall. One person said that it had become more and more important to get back a piece of art because they had visited the artist’s studio with a grandparent. Her parents were both dead and it had become very important to have this piece of art back again. That was a very powerful testimony I can only imagine the frustration of families before the original piece of legislation, to which we are today hopefully going to end the sunset clause. Families have been in situations where they have identified property that is theirs in a museum somewhere else. It had been looted from them. A convention says that it should be returned to them and the museum wants it to be returned to them, but they are unable to be reunited with their possessions because of an absurd quirk of the law. It would be even more absurd for us not to remedy the quirk that a sunset clause has, for no particularly good reason, been put in the original legislation. Hopefully, we will get rid of that today I finish by saying to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet that I am proud that our country has been a leader in pushing forward the convention and the advisory panel. It was staggering to see, as part of the background to the debate, how much art and how many possessions have been scattered around the continent, with 100,000 pieces of art still missing and the vast destruction of the cultural heritage of the continent. The UK has been a leader in this area. We have talked about the 23 works of art that have been returned to their rightful owners through this process. My right hon. and very hard-working Friend has played her part. She has done a lot of work and has been a tireless champion for this very important cause. It is a pleasure to support her important work today.