WW2 What the Nazi’s plundered and stole during the war

Nazi plunder (German: Raubkunst) was organized stealing of art and other items which occurred as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Jewish property was looted beginning in 1933 in Germany and was a key part of the Holocaust. Nazis also plundered occupied countries, sometimes with direct seizures, and sometimes under the guise of protecting art through Kunstschutz units. In addition to gold, silver, and currency, cultural items of great significance were stolen, including paintings, ceramics, books, and religious treasures.

Many of the artworks looted by the Nazis were recovered by the Allies‘ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, also known as the Monuments Men and Women), following the war; however many of them are still missing or were returned to countries but not to their original owners. An international effort to identify Nazi plunder which still remains unaccounted for is underway, with the ultimate aim of returning the items to their rightful owners, their families, or their respective countries.

Background

Adolf Hitler, an unsuccessful artist denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, thought of himself as a connoisseur of the arts, and in Mein Kampf, he ferociously attacked modern art as degenerate. He considered Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism products of a decadent 20th-century society. When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, he enforced his aesthetics. The Nazis favored classical portraits and landscapes by Old Masters, particularly those of Germanic origin. Modern art was dubbed degenerate art by the Third Reich. All such art found in Germany’s state museums was sold or destroyed. With the funds raised, the Führer’s objective was to establish a European Art Museum in Linz. Other Nazi dignitaries like Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Foreign Affairs minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, also took advantage of German military conquests to grow their private art collections.

Plunder of Jews

The systematic dispossession of Jewish people and the transfer of their homes, businesses, artworks, financial assets, musical instruments, books, and even home furnishings to the Reich was an integral component of the Holocaust. In every country controlled by Nazis, Jews were stripped of their assets through a wide array of mechanisms and Nazi looting organizations.

Public auctions and private sales in Switzerland

The most notorious auction of Nazi looted art was the “degenerate art” auction organized by Theodor Fischer on 30 June 1939 at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. The artworks on offer had been deaccessioned from German museums by the Nazis, yet many well known art dealers participated alongside proxies for major collectors and museums. In addition to public auctions, there were many private sales by art dealers. The Commission for Art Recovery has characterized Switzerland as “a magnet” for assets from the rise of Hitler until the end of World War II. Researching and documenting Switzerland’s role “as an art-dealing centre and conduit for cultural assets in the Nazi period and in the immediate post-war period” was one of the missions of the Bergier Commission, under the directorship of Professor Georg Kreis.

Nazi looting organizations

The Nazis plundered cultural property from Germany and every occupied territory, targeting Jewish property in particular in a systematic manner with organizations specifically created for the purpose, to determine which public and private collections were most valuable. Some were earmarked for Hitler’s never realized Führermuseum, some went to other high-ranking officials such as Hermann Göring, and others were traded to fund Nazi activities.

In 1940, an organization known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce), or ERR, was formed, headed for Alfred Rosenberg by Gerhard Utikal [de]. The first operating unit, the western branch for France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, called the Dienststelle Westen (Western Agency), was located in Paris. The chief of this Dienststelle was Kurt von Behr. Its original purpose was to collect Jewish and Freemasonic books and documents, either for destruction or for removal to Germany for further “study”. However, late in 1940, Hermann Göring, who in fact controlled the ERR, issued an order that effectively changed the mission of the ERR, mandating it to seize “Jewish” art collections and other objects. The war loot had to be collected in a central place in Paris, the Museum Jeu de Paume. At this collection point worked art historians and other personnel who inventoried the loot before sending it to Germany. Göring also commanded that the loot would first be divided between Hitler and himself. Hitler later ordered that all confiscated works of art were to be made directly available to him. From the end of 1940 to the end of 1942, Göring traveled 20 times to Paris. In the Jeu de Paume museum, art dealer Bruno Lohse staged 20 expositions of the newly looted art objects, especially for Göring, from which Göring selected at least 594 pieces for his own collection.^[16] Göring made Lohse his liaison-officer and installed him in the ERR in March 1941 as the deputy leader of this unit. Items which Hitler and Göring did not want were made available to other Nazi leaders. Under Rosenberg and Göring’s leadership, the ERR seized 21,903 art objects from German-occupied countries.

Other Nazi looting organizations included the Führermuseum, the organization run by the art historian Hans Posse, which was particularly in charge of assembling the works for the Führermuseum, the Dienststelle Mühlmann, operated by Kajetan Mühlmann which operated primarily in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and a Sonderkommando Kuensberg connected to the minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, which operated first in France, then in Russia and North Africa. In Western Europe, with the advancing German troops, were elements of the “von Ribbentrop Battalion”, named after Joachim von Ribbentrop. These men were responsible for entering private and institutional libraries in the occupied countries and removing any materials of interest to the Germans, especially items of scientific, technical, or other informational value.

Art collections from prominent Jewish families, including the Rothschilds, the Rosenbergs, the Wildensteins, and the Schloss Family, were the targets of confiscations because of their significant value. Also, Jewish art dealers sold art to German organizations—often under duress, e.g., the art dealerships of Jacques Goudstikker, Benjamin and Nathan Katz, and Kurt Walter Bachstitz. Also, non-Jewish art dealers sold art to the Germans, e.g., the art dealers De Boer and Hoogendijk in the Netherlands.

By the end of the war, the Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of cultural objects.

Art Looting Investigation Unit

On 21 November 1944, at the request of Owen Roberts, William J. Donovan created the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) within the OSS to collect information on the looting, confiscation, and transfer of cultural objects by Nazi Germany, its allies and the various individuals and organizations involved; to prosecute war criminals and to restitute property. The ALIU compiled information on individuals believed to have participated in art looting, identifying a group of key suspects for capture and interrogation about their roles in carrying out Nazi policy. Interrogations were conducted in Bad Aussee, Austria.

ALIU reports and index

The ALIU Reports detail the networks of Nazi officials, art dealers, and individuals involved in the Hitler’s policy of spoliation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The ALIU’s final report included 175 pages divided into three parts: Detailed Interrogation Reports (DIRs), which focused individuals who played pivotal roles in German spoliation; Consolidated Interrogations Reports (CIRs); and a “Red Flag list” of people involved in Nazi spoliation. The ALIU Reports form one of the key records in the US Government Archives of Nazi Era Assets.

Detailed Intelligence Reports (DIR)

The first group of reports detailing the networks and relations between art dealers and other agents employed by Hitler, Göring, and Rosenberg are organized by name: Heinrich Hoffmann, Ernst Buchner, Gustav Rochlitz, Gunter Schiedlausky, Bruno Lohse, Gisela Limberger, Walter Andreas Hofer, Karl Kress, Walter Bornheim, Hermann Voss, and Karl Haberstock.

Consolidated Interrogation Reports (CIR)

A second set of reports detail the art looting activities of Göring (The Goering Collection), the art looting activities of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), and Hitler’s Linz Museum.

ALIU List of Red Flag Names

The Art Looting Intelligence Unit published a list of “Red Flag Names”, organizing them by country: Germany, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Luxembourg. Each name is followed by a description of the person’s activities, their relations with other people in the spoliation network and, in many cases, information concerning their arrest or imprisonment by Allied forces.

Soviet Union

See also: Soviet plunder

After the initiation of Operation Barbarossa, Eastern Europe was relentlessly plundered by Nazi German forces. In 1943 alone, 9,000,000 tons of cereals, 2,000,000 t (2,000,000 long tons; 2,200,000 short tons) of fodder, 3,000,000 t (3,000,000 long tons; 3,300,000 short tons) of potatoes, and 662,000 t (652,000 long tons; 730,000 short tons) of meats were sent back to Germany. During the course of the German occupation, some 12 million pigs and 13 million sheep were seized by Nazi forces. The value of this plunder is estimated at 4 billion Reichsmarks. This relatively low number in comparison to the German-occupied nations of Western Europe can be attributed to the indiscriminate scorched-earth policy pursued by Nazi Germany and the retreating Soviet Union forces in the Eastern Front.

To investigate and estimate Nazi plunder in the USSR during 1941 through 1945, the Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices was formed on 2 November 1942. During the Great Patriotic War and afterward, until 1991, the Commission collected materials on Nazi crimes in the USSR, including incidents of plunder. Immediately following the war, the Commission outlined damage in detail to 64 of the most valuable Soviet museums, out of 427 damaged ones. In the Russian SFSR, 173 museums were found to have been plundered by the Nazis, with looted items numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

After the dissolution of the USSR, the Government of the Russian Federation formed the State Commission for the Restitution of Cultural Valuables to replace the Soviet Commission. Experts from this Russian institution originally consulted the work of the Soviet Commission, yet continue to catalog artworks lost during the war museum by museum. As of 2008, lost artworks of 14 museums and the libraries of Voronezh Oblast, Kursk Oblast, Pskov Oblast, Rostov Oblast, Smolensk Oblast, Northern Caucasus, Gatchina, Peterhof Palace, Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), Novgorod, and Novgorod Oblast, as well as the bodies of the Russian State Archives and CPSU Archives, were cataloged in 15 volumes, all of which were made available online. They contain detailed information on 1,148,908 items of lost artworks. The total number of lost items is unknown so far, because cataloging work for other damaged Russian museums is ongoing.

Alfred Rosenberg commanded the so-called ERR, which was responsible for collecting art, books, and cultural objects from invaded countries, and also transferred their captured library collections back to Berlin during the retreat from Russia. “In their search for ‘research materials’ ERR teams and the Wehrmacht visited 375 archival institutions, 402 museums, 531 institutes, and 957 libraries in Eastern Europe alone”. The ERR also operated in the early days of the blitzkrieg of the Low Countries. This caused some confusion about authority, priority, and the chain of command among the German Army, the von Ribbentrop Battalion and the Gestapo, and as a result of personal looting among the Army officers and troops. These ERR teams were, however, very effective. One account estimates that from the Soviet Union alone: “one hundred thousand geographical maps were taken on ideological grounds, for academic research, as means for political, geographical and economic information on Soviet cities and regions, or as collector’s items”.

Poland

Main article: World War II looting of Poland

After the occupation of Poland by German forces in September 1939, the Nazi regime committed genocide against Polish Jew and attempted to exterminate the Polish upper classes as well as its culture. Thousands of art objects were looted, as the Nazis systematically carried out a plan of looting prepared even before the start of hostilities. Twenty-five museums and many other facilities were destroyed. The total cost of German Nazi theft and destruction of Polish art is estimated at 20 billion dollars, or an estimated 43 percent of Polish cultural heritage; over 516,000 individual art pieces were looted, including 2,800 paintings by European painters; 11,000 paintings by Polish painters; 1,400 sculptures; 75,000 manuscripts; 25,000 maps; 90,000 books, including over 20,000 printed before 1800; and hundreds of thousands of other items of artistic and historical value. Germany still has much Polish material looted during World War II. For decades, there have been negotiations between Poland and Germany concerning the return of the looted Polish property.

Austria

Main article: Nazi storage sites for art during World War II

The Anschluss (joining) of Austria and Germany began on 12 March 1938. Looting of Jewish properties began immediately. Churches, monasteries, and museums were home to many pieces of art before the Nazis came but after, the majority of the artwork was taken. Ringstrasse, which was a residence for many people but as well as a community center, was confiscated and all of the art inside as well. Between the years 1943 and 1945, salt mines in Altaussee held the majority of Nazi looted art. Some from Austria and others from all around Europe. In 1944, around 4,700 pieces of art were then stored in the salt mines.

Führermuseum

Main article: Führermuseum

After Hitler became Chancellor, he made plans to transform his home city of Linz, Austria, into the Third Reich’s capital city for the arts. Hitler hired architects to work from his own designs to build several galleries and museums, which would collectively be known as the Führermuseum. Hitler wanted to fill his museum with the greatest art treasures in the world and believed that most of the world’s finest art belonged to Germany after having been looted during the Napoleonic and First World wars.

Hermann Göring collection

Main article: Hermann Göring Collection

The Hermann Göring collection, a personal collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was another large collection, approximately 50% of which was property confiscated from the enemies of the Reich. Assembled in large measure by art dealer Bruno Lohse, Göring’s adviser, and ERR representative in Paris, in 1945, the collection included over 2,000 individual pieces including more than 300 paintings. The US National Archives and Records Administration‘s Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 2 states that Göring never crudely looted, instead he always managed “to find a way of giving at least the appearance of honesty, by a token payment or promise thereof to the confiscation authorities. Although he and his agents never had an official connection with the German confiscation organizations, they nevertheless used them to the fullest extent possible.”

Nazi storage of looted objects

The Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of objects from occupied nations and stored them in several key locations, such as Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Nazi headquarters in Munich. As the Allied forces gained advantage in the war and bombed Germany’s cities and historic institutions, Germany “began storing the artworks in salt mines and caves for protection from Allied bombing raids. These mines and caves offered the appropriate humidity and temperature conditions for artworks.” Well known repositories of this kind were mines in Merkers, Altaussee, and Siegen. These mines were not only used for the storage of looted art but also of art that had been in Germany and Austria before the beginning of the Nazi rule.^[41]

Modern art, denigrated as degenerate, was legally banned by the Nazis from entering Germany. Artworks designated as such were held in what was called the Martyr’s Room at the Jeu de Paume. Much of Paul Rosenberg’s professional dealership and personal collection were so subsequently designated by the Nazis. Following Joseph Goebbels‘s earlier private decree to sell these degenerate works for foreign currency to fund the building of the Führermuseum and the wider war effort, Hermann Göring personally appointed a series of ERR-approved dealers to liquidate these assets and then pass the funds to swell his personal art collection, including Hildebrand Gurlitt. With the looted degenerate art sold onward via Switzerland, Rosenberg’s collection was scattered across Europe. Today, some 70 of his paintings are missing, including: the large Picasso watercolor Naked Woman on the Beach, painted in Provence in 1923; seven works by Matisse; and the Portrait of Gabrielle Diot by Degas

Additionally, plundered objects were sent to Argentina, where numerous fascist refugees escaped, especially during the presidency of Juan Perón (1946–1955).

Plunder of Jewish books

One of the things Nazis sought after during their invasion of European countries was Jewish books and writings. Their goal was to collect all of Europe’s Jewish books and burn them. One of the first countries to be raided was France, where the Nazis took 50,000 books from the Alliance Israélite Universelle; 10,000 from L’Ecole Rabbinique, one of Paris’s most significant rabbinic seminaries; and 4,000 volumes from the Federation of Jewish Societies of France, an umbrella group. From there, they went on to take a total of 20,000 books from the Lipschuetz Bookstore and another 28,000 from the Rothschild family’s personal collection, before scouring the private homes of Paris and coming up with thousands of more books. After sweeping France for every Jewish book they could find, the Nazis moved on to the Netherlands where they would take millions more. They raided the house of Hans Furstenberg, a wealthy Jewish banker and stole his 16,000 volume collection; in Amsterdam, they took 25,000 volumes from the Bibliotheek van het Portugeesch Israelietisch Seminarium; 4,000 from Ashkenazic Beth ha- Midrasch Ets Haim; and 100,000 from Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. In Italy, the central synagogue of Rome contained two libraries, one was owned by the Italian Rabbinic College and the other one was the Jewish community Library. In 1943, the Nazis came through Italy, packaged up every book from the synagogue, and sent them back to Germany.