Looted art in the Third Reich | DW Documentary

This was once the center of the Nazi Party in Munich. And here, where the Nazis planned the systematic seizure of Jewish property, work is now underway on a belated restitution for those crimes. The batch of documents that arrived at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich is a treasure for the art world. Provenance researcher Meike Hopp received the entire archive from the art dealer Julius Böhler from the years 1933 to 1945 for analysis. It could be a great opportunity to locate lost works of art from Jewish collections. -This can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

We have at least 8,500 photographs like this to digitize. We have a total of almost 40,000 Böhler transactions that we are working on and resolving. So we have a lot of work ahead of us. -Victor Klemperer. Rudolf Mossé. Siegfried Lämmle. Artur Rubinstein. James Bleichröder. Fritz Gutmann. Agathe Saulmann. These are important names, but we must always remember that they are simply representative of many, many destinies in the Nazi era. Given the large number of objects that we as provenance researchers work with and the many names we find that we cannot even properly identify, cases like these are very important as examples.

They allow us to demonstrate how the mechanism of expropriation and looting worked and how certain objects ended up in museums. And, of course, each object has a very moving story to tell about the fate of its former owners. The city of Pfullingen is located in southwestern Germany. The Jewish couple Ernst and Agathe Saulmann, avid art collectors, lived here from the late 1920s until they were forced to flee Nazi Germany at the end of 1935. Provenance researcher Iris Schmeisser was examining the collection of the Liebieghaus Museum in Frankfurt. She was checking the legality of it when she discovered that in the museum there was a figure of the Virgin that had belonged to the Saulmanns. -I think we can imagine how the Saulmanns lived in the late 1920s, what a feeling it must have been to live in a house full of art.

I'm trying to imagine where the Virgin could have been. The 14th-century alabaster Madonna and Child was sold in 1936 to the Liebieghaus by the Munich art dealer Julius Böhler on behalf of the Saulmanns. The owners were forced to put it up for sale when they fled the country. -You can sense in this photo that the house was empty when it was taken. And I recognize this knob on the stairs. Now we have the carpet and the wallpaper. It is hidden under the current decoration. -These are photographs that the Reutlingen Tax Office took in the couple's absence.

It is very important to note that it was in his absence. But they are nevertheless extremely valuable sources because they provide some pieces of the puzzle that allow us to reconstruct what this space was like when Ernst and Agathe Saulmann lived here. Ernst and Agathe Saulmann moved into the Erlenhof house in the summer of 1927. In the neighboring town of Eningen, Ernst Saulmann had a successful cotton textile factory. His wife was the one who built the art collection and had another rather extravagant hobby. -Well, apparently this is where Agathe Saulmann landed her plane and took off from this field.

Whether there was a small clue in this field or not, I don't know. Maybe there was. But anyway, this is the place. Félix de Marez Oyens is the son of Agathe Saulmann's first husband. He lives in Paris, where he is an art dealer and rare book expert. He now represents a group of Saulmann's heirs. -You call it 'ein Märchenschloss'. A "Märchenschloss", a fairytale house. Only 11 objects from the family's considerable collection have so far been found, in five German museums and three private collections abroad. Felix de Marez Oyens visits Erlenhof for the first time;

Until now he only knew it from photographs. -The desk in this photo, which was Agathe's, which was here at an angle. From there he began his correspondence with Julius Böhler in 1936 about the need or planning of the various sales at Adolf Weinmüller's auction house in Munich. On December 18, 1935, Agathe Saulmann contacted the art dealer Julius Harry Böhler: -We are currently trying to sell our factory and liquidate our assets. Could you be interested in selling our collection? Before receiving an answer, the Saulmanns had to flee the country and leave behind everything they had built here. -The moment it became clear that the Saulmanns were gone, the authorities imposed the so-called Reich Flight Tax.

It was almost 140,000 marks that the Saulmanns had to raise and pay quickly. The tax, originally enacted to stem capital flight from Weimar Germany, became in the hands of the Nazis a way to seize Jewish property. These alleged debts to the State were published in the official government bulletin, the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger. The Saulmanns were also listed here. In 1936, more and more Jews began to flee Germany. Many of the art owners turned to their longtime art dealer, Julius Böhler. In many cases, they were forced to hastily sell works they had originally purchased through him. In the spring of 1936, Böhler responded to Agathe Saulmann's letter: -Regarding your collection at Erlenhof, I have looked for the items in the catalogs and would be happy to sell them to you. -This is the building where the Böhler art dealership was then located.

The dealership, once called the "Antiquary of the Royal Court of Prussia", had a reputation for reliability among its customers. -This shows how well established he was already in Munich around 1900, and also that he had the financial power to build a building like this, with more than 20 exhibition rooms. You could basically call it a miniature Bavarian National Museum. And it shows how this trade flourished in those years. By the early 20th century, the dealership's sales to wealthy Jewish customers throughout Germany were booming. Renowned collectors such as James Simon, Alfred Pringsheim and James von Bleichröder purchased works of art at Böhler's.

When the Nazis took power, this clientele was separated practically overnight. -I not only imagine Julius Böhler walking around here, but also his clients, among them collectors who could be in a desperate situation and bringing objects that they were forced to sell in their hurry. From Florence, where she lived in exile, Agathe Saulmann once again turned to Böhler. She still believed that they could meet. -I am considering selling the German works of art first. I believe that if we could discuss this personally, we could reach a satisfactory agreement. After our conversation there should probably be an evaluation of our works at Erlenhof. -This correspondence shows his difficult situation, the pressure he was under.

And his desperation. After having left all his assets, having to maintain that correspondence from abroad with the merchant, but also with the Tax Office to know how to avoid having all his assets confiscated. -The objects I just scanned are all objects from the Saulmann collection that are registered in the Lost Art online database as still missing. These are not only works of fine art, but also crafts, furniture and everyday objects. You can almost recreate in your imagination what the family home and its interior decoration were like. That's what makes this so moving. -We have in total about 40,000 transactions that we have been able to reconstruct during the period covered by the Böhler Archive.

Of course, only part of it dates from the period 1933 to 1945. Since many dealers worked together, including people like Weinmüller and Böhler, I am sure that this archive, this trove of documents, will allow us to shed light on more questions. This could well include questions about Saulmann's collection. Today, the fifth generation of the dynasty runs the Julius Böhler art dealership from the family home in Starnberg near Munich. In 1995, Florian Eitle-Böhler handed over his grandfather's correspondence to the Bavarian Economic Archive. -This is our true home and always will be. He recently handed over the entire company archive to the Central Institute of Art History. -I have no more records here.

Everything is in public hands. For me it is important to make everything transparent. I'm not a fan of sweeping things under the rug. We've been trying to do this for too long. But what did Julius Harry Böhler tell his family about his business? -He liked to sit there and look at the lake. And when he was there we usually hid or tried to stay out of the way. We weren't allowed to bother Grandpa. That's how it went. My mother said: 'Grandpa is there, don't make so much noise.' That seems normal if you've grown up with it.

Today I wish it had been different, but it was. It was a rather unusual act: handing over all company records for investigative purposes. Did it take Meike Hopp and his team to convince you? -We talked for a long time with him and he told us that we could come visit him. He still kept the file with the files and the portfolios of photographs. It was an incredible moment when we went down to the basement and found these steel cabinets with portfolios of photographs of the objects that were being sold. Around 9,000 portfolios of photographs were preserved. There are also the files on the objects sold, which can tell us from which collection or which seller an object comes from.

And also who finally bought it. The archive of the Böhler art dealer provides provenance researchers with essential data. From the years 1933 to 1945 they document several thousand transactions. In the summer of 1936, the turnover of the art dealer Julius Böhler increased six-fold compared to previous years, reaching almost 1.3 million marks. Böhler took advantage of the situation. Among the largest buyers of it were the Pinakothek museums in Munich. The name of Julius Böhler appears again and again in the provenance lists of his deposits. For example, numerous objects from the collection of the Berlin banker James von Bleichröder.

Provenance researcher Andrea Bambi has dedicated a detailed study to the collection. -James von Bleichröder was the son of Gerson von Bleichröder who was an important banker in Berlin. The family, or he himself, owned an art collection, which is documented in an auction catalog from the Lepke auction house in Berlin, where the collection was sold in 1938. The sale included many paintings, but also very valuable decorative objects. , like pieces of art. furniture, etc. After James von Bleichröder died of natural causes in Berlin in 1937, his entire collection was auctioned by the Lepke Auction House and the integrity of the collection that the family had accumulated over two centuries was lost forever.

The rest of the Bleichröder family was persecuted by the Nazis and forced to sell the property under duress. Among the objects sold at the auction was the "Resurrection of Lazarus," painted around 1530 by a southern German master. One of the most active bidders in the room was Julius Böhler and he bought the painting. -We have the invoices from the Lepke auction house to the art dealer Julius Böhler here in Munich. There it was sold to Böhler for 3,600 marks and three quarters of a year later Hermann Göring bought it for the enormous sum of 8,000 marks.

So in nine months it more than doubled. Of course, someone like Böhler knew that when selling it to Göring he didn't need to ask for a low price. Hermann Göring, a prominent Nazi who had been appointed supreme commander of the Luftwaffe in 1935, was one of the largest beneficiaries of the

looted

art. He amassed an enormous collection of works of art, many of them by Jewish owners. He had a special interest in acquiring medieval and Renaissance works of art, especially female nudes. For provenance researchers, any indication that a work belonged to the "Sammlung Göring" (or Göring Collection) is a suggestion that it may be

looted

art. -For Julius Böhler, as for many of them, such as the Weinmüller auction house, the fact that the Jewish art dealers, who had had a strong presence and who were the big players, no longer existed meant that the market was completely transformed. around. -That was something that the Nazis exploited.

At that time there was a tense financial situation, which became evident in the art business. After 1933, so-called Aryan merchants like Adolf Weinmüller exploited it to establish their own companies and drive Jewish companies out of the market. The Weinmüller auction house was Böhler's first choice to auction Saulmann's collection. He did not tell the Saulmanns that since early 1936 he himself had been a 50-50 silent partner in the auction house and took a share of its profits. -That Weinmüller traded, quote, in unethical things or traded in looted art, what today is called looted art (back then they didn't have that term, I think), and why my grandfather was involved in it and when, I don't know.

HE. know something about that. In the summer of 1936, items from the Saulmann collection were sold at an auction billed as an “old collection of German art.” The profits of 40,000 Reichmarks were not enough for the Saulmanns to pay the Reich flight tax.-In addition, Julius Böhler selected some particularly valuable pieces from the collection and bought them himself at the auction. That was to sell them later for many times the price he paid at auction. Some of the buyers were public museums. Böhler knew the Saulmann collection very well, since his dealership had helped them put it together.

Now Böhler dismantled it and profited even more. At the big auction in the summer of 1936 he bought the Madonna and Child and a year later sold it at a profit to the Liebieghaus museum in Frankfurt. -He sold it for six times that amount. The money from the sale of the art collection went directly to the Tax Office or to the art dealer in charge of the sale. Saulmann themselvesI didn't see anything like that. It's hard to separate. Maybe he wanted to help Agathe Saulmann by saying, "You're under time pressure and I know a way to do this quickly"?

At the same time he was a merchant and made profits. That is the morally questionable element. -Actually, you can imagine that if a merchant can get more goods or has the possibility of getting high-quality goods at a low price, he would act uneconomically if he did not take advantage of the situation. On the other hand, dealers such as Julius Böhler, Adolf Weinmüller and many others were well aware of the situation in which Jewish collectors found themselves at that time. -There were cases in which he took works of art from persecuted owners abroad, and then there were cases in which he was clearly a speculator.

Once we're done with "Project Böhler," I think we'll be able to assign a percentage to his actions: how much he profited, how much he helped people, and how much he hurt them. It is still unclear to what extent Julius Böhler was connected to the Nazi regime. What is clear is that none of the partners participating in his dealership were members of the Nazi Party. But, as Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made clear, the party intended to ensure that all forms of culture were subordinate to the regime. Thanks to the cultural policies of the Nazis, numerous works of dubious origin ended up in the collections of German museums.

This dark legacy in public collections is something that imposes a burden of responsibility to this day. -One of the strange aspects of the Nazis – along with the genocide, along with the Holocaust – is that the leaders tried to adorn themselves with art. That has long been a tradition among those in power. But in this case, to the humanity that is essentially the basis of art is added the inhumanity of his political and military actions. And we will never fully resolve this paradox. In 1936, Adolf Hitler visited Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Florence. By then, Ernst and Agathe Saulmann had once again been forced to flee, this time to France.

They left behind their old vacation home in Florence and other valuable art objects. Shortly after his arrival, France fell under German occupation. The Saulmanns were interned in the Gurs concentration camp. At the same time, Hermann Göring had discovered France as a new source of art to plunder. He asked Julius Böhler to act on behalf of the Third Reich in France. Böhler refused, and Göring reportedly stormed out of the art dealer's mansion and never bought works from him again. -The market was driven by frenzy on the part of the Nazi elite. They had developed this image of the great art collector who was also a representative of Nazi ideology.

Having an especially valuable art collection was a sign of status. So these people were hanging around the art market, even though they weren't necessarily that knowledgeable. Or they didn't have the best advisors. This meant that the art dealers there (like Weinmüller, for example) could sell mediocre or inferior products to this Nazi elite at absurdly high prices. An obvious example is the painting 'Girl Feeding the Chickens' by Hans Thoma. -Basically this painting is emblematic of that time. In accordance with this new taste for art, Ernst Buchner, director of the Pinakothek museums, purchased numerous works by Hans Thoma, the regime's favorite.

He financed the purchases by giving Böhler several valuable works in exchange. -Curiously, he made the decision to resort to works that had been sacrosanct: he gave a Renoir and a Monet. Those are gaps that our today's collection bitterly longs for. In other words, he took two important works by artists of the caliber of Renoir and Monet and gave them to the art dealer Böhler. -In the large number of records we have received, there are reports of several thousand transactions carried out by the art dealer Julius Böhler between the years 1933 and 1945 alone. Therefore, it will be an enormous effort to digitize all of this, and it will be a enormous effort if we are to analyze and evaluate all transactions.

But we have to, because any of these transactions could provide a decisive clue to an expropriated, looted, or otherwise illegitimately traded work of art. When World War II ended in 1945, Germany was in ruins. Little by little the crimes of the Nazis came to light. That summer, Hermann Göring's remaining art treasures were discovered hidden in a train near Berchtesgaden. But this was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to the looting of works of art. -As soon as the cleanup of the ruins began, it became clear that how to deal with the looted cultural property was going to be a problem, as was the restitution of real estate or material assets to the persecuted families.

And at that time, ways were found to address it. In August 1945, Allied forces established the Munich central collection point. It was a repository of looted works of art and cultural artifacts with a view to returning them to their owners or possible heirs. It was located in a former administrative building of the Nazi Party, which today houses the Central Institute of Art History. -Unfortunately, the issue of art looted during National Socialism was somewhat forgotten. It may have been on people's minds immediately after the war, during the reparation process, but then, as the decades passed, it fell into the public consciousness.

Of course, there were people in the museums who knew there was a problem, but were not really interested in delving deeper into the subject - If Ernst Buchner, my predecessor three generations ago, played an active role in the old and new Pinakothek, at one time when they were bombed and the ruins had to be rebuilt, so that was definitely a mistake, given their intense involvement in the Nazi system. But at the same time, here in Bavaria there were clearly people who loved him as someone who knew the museum business. They wanted me to help rebuild the collection, rebuild the buildings, revitalize the institutions and organizations.

We must also keep in mind that at that time West Germany wanted to enjoy its post-war economic miracle and wanted to believe that the Nazi era and Nazi guilt had been overcome. In 1998, more than four decades after the end of the war, the Washington Conference on Holocaust-era Assets marked a watershed moment for families affected by expropriation. -We must dig to find the truth. This means that all researchers must have access to all files and by this I do not mean partial, sporadic or occasional access. I mean full access. Everywhere. Now. American diplomat Stuart Eizenstat had started the meeting.

Forty-four countries signed the Washington Declaration, committing to a set of 11 principles related to works of art confiscated by the Nazis. -Creating a sense of urgency is a moral obligation. The Washington Principles were not a legally binding treaty. They created a moral obligation to find fair and equitable solutions. -Until the Washington Conference, the issue of art looted by the Nazis was not on the agenda. Apart from descendants or heirs or, in some cases, survivors who had been forced to flee, no one was really interested in it. The Washington Conference fundamentally changed this. Representatives of non-governmental organizations and four dozen governments met to talk about this issue and that put it back on the agenda. -Perhaps it is unfortunate that it was not Germany, where these events took place, that gave the first impulse in 1998.

But in general, coming from the Jewish community, it ended up generating an enormous impulse. -The Holocaust was not only the greatest genocide in history. Six million Jews and millions of others. It was the biggest robbery in history. And the Third Reich did not steal all these works of art, cultural objects, books and instruments just to get more money for the Reich. That was part of it. But that was not all. It was that this was part and parcel of the genocide. It was a cultural genocide. It was about eliminating everything related to Jewish culture, Jewish property, root and branch.

And a lot of the works of art that we're talking about, when the press finds out, they read about the masterpieces. But most of the looted art had much more sentimental and family value than it had on the open market. And that's why the Washington Principles were designed to find what we call “just and equitable solutions.” -We gather here this week not to achieve miracles but to do everything in our power to replace darkness with light, injustice with equity, strife with consensus, and falsehood with truth. The joint search for truth and justice continues to this day.

In recent years, a global digital network has provided new opportunities for provenance researchers. Germany invests more than €10 million a year in digitization and provenance projects related to looted art. After the catalogs of the Weinmüller auction house were digitized, in the summer of 2014 researchers discovered an object that for years had been part of the collection of the Bode Museum in Berlin. -Each artifact has a biography, of course. So this is not only the Sculpture Collection, it is also an archive. And here we come to the Three Angels from the collection called 'S. in R.' This piece has been part of the collection since 1999.

Two or three years ago a colleague brought my attention to the fact that it appears in the catalog of the Weinmüller auction house with the label “S. in Collection R.’. That was code for 'Saulmann in Reutlingen'. Weinmüller's digital catalog made it possible to link the museum object with Saulmann's collection. -At that time nothing was known about its origin and people were not very concerned about its origin. Once we started looking into it, it soon became clear that there was this connection to Saulmann. And in fact, the catalog describes a group of angels with the baby Jesus.

When we compared the catalog images to the object itself, we saw that the object was missing the wing on the left, seen from our perspective. It's symbolic, in a way. What we have here is an angel who cannot fly. Once the provenance was confirmed, the museum had to act. -This is an important piece of art history and we hoped to preserve it for our sculpture collection. So I looked up prices on the art market for comparable works and we made a fair offer to the heirs. They accepted and so we were able to acquire the piece. -How can it be that the institution that has the work in its possession is the one that decides to preserve it?

For someone who has a complaint, that institution can never be independent and impartial. It is very problematic. -Obviously, museum curators and directors find it difficult to return works of art that have played a central role in their collection when they discover that they have been improperly acquired. But there is no doubt. They must be returned. In many cases, we have found ways to tell heirs how important it is to us to preserve the work in the collection and ask if we can keep the artifact or artifacts or collection on permanent loan, at least for the time being.

Or can we buy it back? But these options are only possible if the legitimate owner accepts it. Since the restitution and subsequent purchase from the heirs, a plaque on the work makes a brief reference to its former owners Ernst and Agathe Saulmann. -Of course, we were impressed that they had taken this initiative. And that was a somewhat moving moment because it was an acknowledgment of what had happened and a genuine attempt, not only to make restitution, but to correct something that was clearly part of a terrible mistake. And, of course, the Saulmann collection is just one small element in what is a sea of ​​expropriations of very important collections.

Unlike the angel sculpture, the Madonna and Child from the Liebieghaus museum in Frankfurt was sold at auction by Sotheby's in London after its restitution to Saulmann's heirs in 2015. It sold for £22,000, slightly below its appraised value. -We may have recovered about ten items out of hundreds. A couple was quite interesting or maybe even reasonably important. Most of them were not too important. But, of course, everything is of interest to us. -With the beginning of the restitution, Germany has returned 16,000 works of artart and books; Austria 30,000; dozens in the United States; hundreds and hundreds in the Netherlands. But we still have to fill the rest of the glass before implementing and respecting the Washington Principles.

And most importantly: honor the memory of those who were murdered and those from whom these works were brutally stolen as an integral part of the Holocaust. -Ten restored artifacts from the more than two hundred in Saulmann's collection are terribly few, or at least they sound terribly few. And it must also be taken into account that they were quite prominent collectors, with large collections and an authentic culture of art collecting. At the same time, however, there were many families who owned only one or two works of emotional importance (antiques, a portrait of their grandmother, perhaps a vase that had been passed down for generations) and which were also confiscated by the Nazis.

When you think about that, it becomes clear what an enormous number of objects we are talking about. But it is also clear that each individual object is representative of a broader problem and that it is important to fight for the true provenance of each and every object. In 1948, Agathe Saulmann took up that fight. After the death of her husband, she began her legal battle for restitution. Her claims were successful at first. In March 1950, a court ordered the return of the cotton weaving factory, the company land and the Erlenhof house to Agathe Saulmann. But there was nothing left to remind us of the life she had once led there. -It would have been very heartbreaking to come here and remember everything.

Surely. Agathe Saulmann hoped to hand over the Eningen facility to the United Nations to house refugee children from around the world. -And her return here to the area and her claims at that time received quite a bit of publicity. Not only because of the claim she made herself, but also because she was quite a striking character, of course, that she had been a minor celebrity in the area before the war. The mill's then-owner appealed her restitution claim and the court's decision. During the call, Agathe Saulmann committed suicide in Baden-Baden on June 18, 1951. It was her fourth attempt. -Hello!

What a beautiful horse, what a beautiful color. After Agathe Saulmann's death, her daughter Nina took over restitution claims. Félix de Marez Oyens' half-sister continued to investigate in detail the fate of the family's art collection. In the 1960s she asked to see the catalogs of the Weinmüller auction house, but was told that they had been destroyed during the war. We now know that they were rediscovered. -When my sister came back here in '62, '63, she went to try to track down the works of art. And she was unsuccessful.