Web Site to List Artworks Lost to the Nazis

It has taken an Allied victory in World War II, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and a technological revolution, but those who lost works of art to the Nazis many decades ago soon will have a fighting chance of finding their long-lost treasures.

A handful of art historians in this depressed eastern city 80 miles west of Berlin are scanning images and descriptions of Germany’s vast repository of artworks whose ownership is unclear. The aim is to create a database accessible beginning in March to anyone in the world through the Internet.

The online registry is the product of an agreement last month among federal, state and regional leaders who oversee institutions housing cultural goods. The Berlin Declaration, brokered by Culture Minister Michael Naumann after Germany’s pledge a year earlier to step up property restoration to Jewish victims of the Nazis, obliges every museum to post descriptions of artworks known or suspected to have immoral provenance.

From the time the Nazis came to power in 1933 until the demise of the Third Reich in 1945, Jewish families were systematically robbed of their art. Some Jewish collectors were pressured to sell masterpieces for a fraction of their value at auctions run by Nazi henchmen amassing works for a museum Adolf Hitler planned in his Austrian hometown, Linz. Others had their modern works denounced as “degenerate” and destroyed in public bonfires on orders of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Other valuables were looted by Nazi troops who swept through Eastern Europe. These included works taken from the famed Amber Room at Catherine’s Palace near St. Petersburg.

“Even 10 years ago, it was not possible to make such a huge volume of losses public because the Internet had not been developed to the degree it is today,” said Michael Franz, a lawyer who heads the Coordination Office of the Federal States for the Return of Cultural Property, the agency developing the online registry. “In Germany alone, we have more than 3.6 million looted art objects in an internal database, with highly detailed descriptions of 35,000 of them.”

That roster of works stolen from 325 German museums and institutions--mostly by Soviet troops after Germany was defeated--includes many of the paintings, porcelain, engravings and other items of value purloined from Jewish victims, since Nazi “collectors” often kept spoils in local museums and vaults.

The planned two-way registry, in which those seeking lost artworks can post their own descriptions on the German Web site, should considerably speed up a restoration process that until now has relied on word of mouth and small-circulation catalogs of missing valuables to inform the art world about suspect ownership.

The few recent cases in which cultural property was returned to its rightful owners illustrate how difficult it is for information about an artwork’s whereabouts to reach those who need it.

Last June, a Vincent van Gogh drawing worth more than $6 million was returned to the family of a Jewish collector who was forced to sell it in 1935 for the equivalent of $600. The drawing of olive trees in a mountain setting had been hanging in Berlin’s widely visited National Gallery for most of the past six decades--unbeknown to the survivors of Max Silberberg, the previous owner, who died in the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.

The decision by the Prussian Heritage Foundation, which runs the National Gallery, to return the Van Gogh and two other valuable works to Silberberg’s daughter-in-law without a court trial was hailed by art historians and human rights advocates as an important precedent for belated justice.

Many of the claims that have poured in to the coordination office since it was established in 1994 involve one museum seeking works displayed by another, since some of what the Nazis looted came from public collections. Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, for instance, recently was awarded a Johannes Lingelbach painting, “The Battle of Constantine,” that had been stolen from the Italian Embassy in Berlin in 1943 and loaned from stocks of herrenlose--ownerless--works to a succession of German museums since the 1960s.

Museum directors, such as Kornelia Berswordt of the Schwerin State Museum in the northern state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, say they feel daunted by the huge volume of claims and investigations expected with the coming database but nonetheless want the ownership issues settled.

“We want to do this in any case, even though you can imagine what a huge undertaking it will be to establish whether something was obtained unjustly or through a normal transaction,” said Berswordt, who sees much of the restoration effort involving museum-to-museum claims rather than individuals.

Still, there are surprisingly frequent appearances on the international art market of treasures lost during the Nazi era and long ago given up for destroyed, said Franz. Some come to light with the deaths of former Allied soldiers who took works of art home instead of turning them over to officials.

“The statute of limitations does not provide protection to those who reappear years later with items obtained illegally,” the lawyer-cum-art historian said of recent legal challenges in New York and London blocking auction of treasures purloined in wartime. “This is an important message to anyone holding looted artworks that they will eventually be forced to return them.”

One of the first significant inventories of misbegotten acquisitions to be posted on the Web site will be Hitler’s Linz Collection. It contains more than 13,000 objects bought, stolen or bilked from private collectors and public curators throughout Europe for the museum that Hitler was planning as a rival of the Louvre in Paris.

Because many of the original Jewish owners were killed in Hitler’s concentration camps, thousands of important pieces were still unclaimed in 1962, when the West German government allowed museum directors from throughout the country to borrow the herrenlose treasures of the Linz Collection for exhibition. Now almost every museum in the country houses works never reunited with their rightful owners.

The Internet registry being created in Magdeburg will make it possible for those who lost cultural valuables during the Nazi terror, or their descendants, to learn whether the works survived and where they may be stored or displayed.

The coordination center has had a Web site--https://www.beutekunst.de--for three years, but to date it lists only missing art from museums in the surrounding state of Saxony-Anhalt and scattered press clippings on restoration issues. As of March, however, every German museum’s inventory of pre-1945 works acquired after 1933 will be detailed on the database.

An international Art Loss Registry in London already lists works for which original owners are searching, as well as items stolen, looted, confiscated or sold below market value under political pressure. But the privately managed database is available only on a pay-per-use basis to art trade professionals such as auctioneers and insurers. The Magdeburg records will be free to the public.