News Item: 00026

1st Aug 2007

List of looted Nazi art on internet

Source: http://www.dw-world.de

Germany's Finance Ministry is trying to find the proper owners of looted Nazi art by documenting photos and descriptions of paintings and other pieces of art confiscated during the Third Reich, reports Diana Fong of Deutsche Welle in its press release.

An on-line catalogue of some 100 art objects looted by the Nazis was posted by the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (BADV) on Wednesday. The list includes a dozen early Renaissance portraits and biblical scenes by Lucas Cranach the Elder, best known for his oil renditions of Martin Luther, as well as an oil-on-canvas Rubens portrait from the 1600s of the Archbishop Antonio Trieste of Ghent.

The agency, which is a division of the Finance Ministry and has branches throughout Germany, was established last year to handle claims not only for looted art, antique furniture and other cultural artefacts, but also the restitution of real estate and property seized by the Nazis.

Although most legal claims were settled in the post-war years in the former West Germany, the origins of much of the art unearthed in the eastern states after the reunification in 1990, has only recently begun being documented and returned to the original owners.

So far the provenance of 36 objects out of nearly 600 that have been thoroughly documented have been or are in the process of being returned to Holocaust survivors or their descendants. Returning the art to its proper owners is nearly always a long legal process that can take years, or even decades, for owners to prove the art belongs to them.

The looted listed on the BADV's Web page consists mainly of oil paintings, but also Italian, English and German antiques replete with detailed descriptions, historical references and a black and white photo. Most of the art has been loaned out to museums throughout Germany, including several works that had been originally intended for Hitler's museum in Linz, Austria.

The Nazis looted about 650,000 artworks in all according to estimates by the Jewish Claims Conference, of which only a fraction have been returned in spite of highly publicised restitution efforts since the mid-1990s. One of the main reasons for the meagre returns was the difficulty involved in adequately documenting the provenance of art assets.

Although parts of BADV's Web page are available in English, the detailed list of paintings and artworks are not.