U.S. Urges Religious Property Return

The Clinton administration Wednesday urged the countries of Eastern Europe to cut through bureaucratic obstacles and promptly return religious property seized by Nazi occupiers during World War II and by the communist governments that followed them.

Undersecretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat, chief of the U.S. delegation to an international conference on Nazi loot, told the gathering that Eastern European governments have begun the grueling process of identifying and returning confiscated real estate. But the process is so slow that most of the remaining Holocaust survivors may not live to see it completed.

“Governments improperly took this property from the rightful owners without compensation,” Eizenstat said. “Now it is our common responsibility to ensure that, finally, justice is done.”

The State Department conference, attended by 44 governments and 13 nongovernmental organizations, was called to consider ways to return art, bank accounts, insurance policies and real estate plundered by Nazi armies. It is scheduled to close today after issuing comprehensive recommendations for returning the loot.

“The return of Jewish communal property, such as synagogues, cemeteries, day schools and community centers, is absolutely essential to the reemergence and rebirth of Jewish communal life in Central and Eastern Europe,” Eizenstat said. Most conference sessions are closed to the public and the press, but the U.S. delegation released Eizenstat’s prepared text.

Later in the day, Eizenstat told reporters that the conference is the first forum since the end of the war to take a comprehensive look at the issue of confiscated religious property. He said that national governments represented at the meeting showed a “sense of urgency” to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but some of the properties are controlled by municipal governments, which have ignored national policies requiring them to relinquish lucrative assets that they have been using for a half century.

Most Nazi-confiscated property in Western Europe was returned long ago, but, in the nations of the former Soviet bloc, religious property has been held by the government and frequently has been converted to secular use. Christian churches and other religious facilities were also expropriated by the post-war communist regimes. Eizenstat called for the return of Christian property as well, but the conference on Holocaust-era assets focused primarily on Nazi thefts from Jews.

“Today the region’s democratic governments are taking concrete steps to rectify these injustices,” Eizenstat said. “It is now time to build on these encouraging examples and shape an international consensus on principles for moving forward so that we can advance the cause of justice and strengthen democratic institutions and adherence to the rule of law.”

The inventory of seized religious property is huge--more than 5,000 parcels in Poland alone and thousands more in the other countries of the former Soviet bloc. And it will be difficult to determine who should receive the returned property because the Holocaust depleted the ranks of Eastern European Jews. In Poland, for instance, the prewar Jewish community numbered more than 3.5 million. Only about 10,000 remain.

On a related subject, the U.S. delegation and most of the nongovernmental Jewish organizations are demanding the opening of all national archives dealing with the Holocaust era. But many governments are dragging their feet.

Lord Janner, chairman of Britain’s Holocaust Educational Trust, said that the Vatican refuses to provide access to its records, fueling 50 years of suspicion that the Holy See failed to respond to the moral challenge of nazism.

Janner, who was a British soldier in World War II and acted as a war crimes investigator after the conflict, said that, if the Vatican has nothing to hide, it should open its records. Vatican representatives say that they will provide Holocaust files in due time, he said, but “they are just getting going on the Inquisition”--the effort by the medieval Roman Catholic Church to root out heresy, most notably in Spain in the 15th century.

The Rev. Remi Hoeckman, the Holy See’s delegate to the conference, urged delegates to refrain from creating “scapegoats.”

Eizenstat, asked if he was optimistic that the Vatican would open its files, said: “I’m looking for reasons to be optimistic in this case. I haven’t found them yet.”

On the explosive question of confiscated artworks, Eizenstat said that the conference hopes to establish a worldwide database that would help identify the Nazi loot. He estimated that as much as one-fourth of all artworks in Europe was plundered by Nazi troops.

“The art world, insofar as dealing with looted Nazi art, will never be the same again,” Eizenstat told reporters. In the future, he said, museums and other collectors will know for certain if art on their walls was plundered by the Nazis.

Earlier he told the conference, “I am confident that some of the greatest collections in the world will be returned to their rightful owners and a vast storehouse of information about other works will open up.”

But Francoise Cachin, French director of museums, said that France has been displaying recovered Nazi art since 1949, waiting for owners to turn up. Much of the art, she said, has not been claimed.

On Tuesday, Russian delegate Valery Kulishov, said that his government will try to identify all “victim art” looted by the Nazis from individuals and religious centers and then captured by the Soviet army as the war came to a close. But he made it clear that Moscow intends to keep “trophy art,” works that the Soviet government considered the property of the defeated Nazis.

Eizenstat called the Russian gesture “a real breakthrough,” although he conceded that Moscow considers the trophy art to be compensation for Soviet losses during the war. The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has several rooms of trophy art on display and more stored in a basement.