纳粹劫掠
掠奪猶太書籍 > 後期發展

Although most of the stolen artworks and antiques were documented, found, or recovered "by the victorious Allied armies [...] principally hidden away in salt mines, tunnels, and secluded castles", many artworks have never been returned to their rightful owners. Art dealers, galleries, and museums worldwide have been compelled to research their collection's provenance in order to investigate claims that some of the work was acquired after it had been stolen from its original owners. Already in 1985, years before American museums recognized the issue and before the international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims, European countries released inventory lists of works of art, coins, and medals "that were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis during World War II, and announced the details of a process for returning the works to their owners and rightful heirs." In 1998, an Austrian advisory panel recommended the return of 6,292 objets d'art to their legal owners (most of whom are Jews), under the terms of a 1998 restitution law.
Nazi concentration camp and death camp victims had to strip completely before their murder, and all their personal belongings were stolen. The very valuable items, such as gold coins, rings, spectacles, jewelry, and other precious metal items, were sent to the Reichsbank for conversion to bullion. The value was then credited to SS accounts.
Pieces of art looted by the Nazis can still be found in Russian/Soviet and American institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed a list of 393 paintings that have gaps in their provenance during the Nazi Era, the Art Institute of Chicago has posted a listing of more than 500 works "for which links in the chain of ownership for the years 1933–1945 are still unclear or not yet fully determined." The San Diego Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art provide lists on the internet to determine if art items within their collection were stolen by the Nazis.
Stuart Eizenstat, the Under Secretary of State and head of the US delegation sponsoring the 1998 international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims in Washington conference stated that "From now on, [...] the sale, purchase, exchange and display of art from this period will be addressed with greater sensitivity and a higher international standard of responsibility." The conference was attended by more than 49 countries and 13 different private entities, and the goal was to come to a federal consensus on how to handle Nazi-Era Looted Art. The conference was built on the foundation of the Nazi Gold Conference held in London in 1997. The US Department of State hosted the conference with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 30 November to 3 December 1998.
After the conference, the Association of Art Museum Directors developed guidelines which require museums to review the provenance or history of their collections, focussing especially on art looted by the Nazis. The National Gallery of Art in Washington identified more than 400 European paintings with gaps in their provenance during the World War II era. One particular piece of art, "Still Life with Fruit and Game" by the 16th-century Flemish painter Frans Snyders, was sold by Karl Haberstock, whom the World Jewish Congress describes as "one of the most notorious Nazi art dealers." In 2000, the New York City's Museum of Modern Art still told the US Congress that they were "not aware of a single Nazi-tainted work of art in our collection, of the more than 100,000" they held.
In 1979, two paintings, a Renoir, Tête de jeune fille, and a Pissarro, Rue de village, appeared on Interpol's "12 Most Wanted List", but, to date, no-one knows their whereabouts (ATA Newsletter, Nov. '79, vol. 1, no. 9, p. 1. '78, 326.1–2). The New Jersey owner has asked the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) to republish information about the theft, with the hope that someone will recognize the paintings. The owner wrote IFAR that, when his parents emigrated from Berlin in 1938, two of their paintings "mysteriously disappeared". All of their other possessions were shipped from Germany to the US via the Netherlands, and everything except the box containing these two paintings arrived intact. After World War II, the owner's father made a considerable effort to locate the paintings but was unsuccessful. Over the years, numerous efforts have been made to recover them, articles have been published, and an advertisement appeared in the German magazine, Die Weltkunst, 15 May 1959. A considerable reward has been offered, subject to usual conditions, but there has been no response.
However, restitution efforts initiated by German politicians have not been free of controversy, either. As the German law for restitution applies to "cultural assets lost as a result of Nazi persecution, "which includes paintings that Jews who emigrated from Germany sold to support themselves, pretty much any trade involving Jews in that era is affected, and the benefit of the doubt is given to claimants. German leftist politicians Klaus Wowereit (SPD, mayor of Berlin) and Thomas Flierl (Linkspartei) were sued in 2006 for being overly willing to give away the 1913 painting Berliner Straßenszene of expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which was in Berlin's Brücke Museum. On display in Cologne in 1937, it had been sold for 3,000 Reichsmark by a Jewish family residing in Switzerland to a German collector. This sum is considered by experts to have been well over the market price. The museum, which obtained the painting in 1980 after several ownership changes, could not prove that the family actually received the money. It was restituted to the heiress of the former owners, and she had it auctioned off for $38.1 million.
In 2010, as work began to extend an underground line from Alexanderplatz through the historic city centre to the Brandenburg Gate, a number of sculptures from the degenerate art exhibition were unearthed in the cellar of a private house close to the "Rote Rathaus". These included, for example, the bronze cubist style statue of a female dancer by the artist Marg Moll, and are now on display at the Neues Museum.
From 2013 up to 2015, a committee researched the collection of the Dutch Royal family. The committee focussed on all objects acquired by the family since 1933 and which were made prior to 1945. In total, 1,300 artworks were studied. Dutch musea had already researched their collection in order to find objects stolen by the Nazis. It appeared that one painting of the forest near Huis ten Bosch by the Dutch painter Joris van der Haagen came from a Jewish collector. He was forced to hand the painting over to the former Jewish bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. in Amsterdam, which collected money and other possessions of the Jews in Amsterdam. The painting was bought by Queen Juliana in 1960. The family plans to return the painting to the heirs of the owner in 1942, a Jewish collector.