Jewish art collections – Nazi looting

When the Nazis grabbed power in Germany, they had clear ideas about what art is. The persecution of Jews allowed them to seize Jewish property, forbid Jews from running art galleries, push them out of their countries to exile, and send them to camps and death. All this enabled some prominent Nazis to start their own art collections. However, most of the looted valuable classical artworks were destined for existing or planned museums. Nazis and their collaborators looted art collections and moved them from annexed or occupied countries most often to Germany and Austria. This helped trade in looted art flourish not only in Paris but also in the United States. Due to cataloguing needs, storage requirements and Allied Forces' bombings, looted cultural property was displaced many times and finally moved to cellars and salt caves in southern Germany and Austria. Similar developments took place at the Eastern Front, leading to double looting. The Soviet army seized art looted by the Nazis in the territories it conquered and occupied, claiming them as war trophies, and further displaced artworks across the parts of eastern Europe it held. The division of Germany among the four occupying forces and the establishment of the Iron Curtain further complicated the task of locating looted art, as catalogues were scattered across the continent. Due to the huge efforts of the liberating armies, works of art found in Western-occupied zones were returned to the countries from which they had been seized. In their turn, the governments were expected to hand these items over to their rightful owners. However, this did not always happen; owners and their heirs, or the artworks they were searching for, were not always located. More than 50 years after WWII, to address the fact that the owners of many artworks had still not been identified, the international community adopted the Washington Principles, the Vilnius Forum Declaration and the Terezin Declaration, as a signal that progress towards resolving this difficult task requires museum searches and international cooperation. The aim is to help the few Holocaust survivors still alive, or their heirs, retrieve their artworks. Restitution of cultural property looted by Nazis and their collaborators is not only an act of justice. It is also a gesture of recognition of the Jewish contribution to flourishing cultural and artistic life in Europe.