Breaking van Gogh

On September 18, 1946, the US Office of Military Government for Germany, Economics Division, Restitution Branch Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section, together with the US Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) in Washington, released a detailed report on art dealer Dr. Hans Adolf Wendland. He was a key figure in Nazi-looted art during the war and was connected to the regime. Knowing this, the ALIU team knew it would be imperative to interrogate him if they were to swiftly and successfully recover the art stolen from mostly Jewish dealers, owners, and collectors after the war.

In September 1946, ALIU investigators brought in Dr. Wendland and interrogated him over a ten-day period. During those grilling sessions, they uncovered his ties with Göring art spook Hofer, stating he was part of a

complex web of art looting and acquisition spun by the Nazis, the most important German figure whose base of operations was a neutral country—Switzerland. He was one of the most agile and informed contacts of Walter Andres HOFER, “Director of the Art Collection of the Reichsmarshall.” He figured, whether wittingly or not, as the receiver of confiscated art in the first exchange of paintings from French private collections effected by the Einsatstab Rosenberg, and subsequently participated in three other exchanges with GOERING’s agent, playing an important role in the importation of these works of art into Switzerland.272

The declassified brief went on to state, “Wendland was arrested in Rome by the American Forces on July 25, 1946, at the request of the American Legation, Berne.” He was subsequently sent to the Wannsee Internment Camp near Berlin.273

During the joint interrogation, Wendland admitted that he had become a “moral outcast in Switzerland” and that he feared to be linked in a deeper investigation with Theodor Fischer of Lucerne.274 But he and Fischer had met in Berlin in 1920 as part of the rising avant-garde art scene, even as Germany was licking its wounds from the fallout of World War I.

Before and during the war, Theodor Fischer was one of the greatest and wealthiest art dealers in Switzerland. “In an auction in June 1939 in Lucerne gallery owner Theodor Fischer auctioned approximately 125 paintings and sculptures by great modern artists such as Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh, Klee, and Kokoschka.”275 ALIU investigators were keenly aware that Hans Wendland and Theodor Fischer knew each other as far back as 1920. With that insight, the ALIU investigation continued to challenge Wendland’s assertion that he was merely a “consultant,” that he aided Jews, and that Fischer did not incorporate his business until January 1, 1945.276

ALIU came back and laid out the facts to Dr. Wendland, pointing out that he had traveled to France six times between 1941 and 1943. The first trip was to secure his belongings, which had been blocked; he admitted to making three trips “between occupied and unoccupied France during the occupation.”277

In the fourth section of the ALIU report, “Business Ethics,” Wendland admitted to producing false receipts and then submitting them for payment that would be made by Hofer to him—a clever trick for the books. Some of those paintings sold by Wendland to Hofer would find their way into the hands of Hermann Göring. Those receipts enabled Hofer to receive payment from Göring in Swiss francs, which he would settle for French francs.278

ALIU’s probe further uncovered that in the first exchange with Herr Hofer, “the chief reason for the exchanges on Göring’s side was the lack of foreign currency.” The investigators could then connect the dots from Hans Wendland to Herr Hofer; from then, the looted art made its way into Göring’s hands or to Emil Bührle by way of Dr. Fritz Nathan, who as far back as 1942 was already the arms dealer’s art advisor and specialist on modern art.279

The ALIU report also delved into the “Four Missing Pictures” that were supposed to hang on Göring’s bedroom wall, but somehow ended up with Emil G. Bührle. They included van Gogh’s Landscape drawing (Paysage, Landschaft), his painting Green Wheat Field, Jan Steen’s Marriage of Cana, and a pair of Cézanne portraits, Nos. 67 and 69, all on the Allied list of looted artworks.280

Why was this important? It showed the line from Wendland-Hofer through Nathan to Bührle as a long-established conduit for looted art during the war. It becomes clear why Emil Bührle destroyed his company records of business transactions, cash flow, and account balances from 1939 to 1945. Had those records ever been found by ALIU, Bührle would have certainly joined Hermann Göring at Nuremberg. Had that happened, who knows where Peter Witt’s version of Wheat Field with Cypresses would have ended up—perhaps somewhere other than hanging in the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The ALIU report concluded with the personal assets and property that Hans Adolf Wendland owned, might have owned, and might have hidden in stealth bank accounts in Switzerland.

Had brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, or even Jo van Gogh-Bonger for that matter, been around in the aftermath of World War II and borne witness to the wholesale destruction of a race of people, its rich culture and heritage, they would have been repulsed. It would have especially disturbed them that at the center of the shadow market of financing the war was the stolen art of Vincent and his Impressionist brethren from the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, four decades after the war ended, that the clawbacks pursued by the likes of Mendelssohn family heir Dr. Julius Schoeps began to track the fates of the missing heirloom artwork sold under extraordinary duress during the Nazi liquidation of Jewish-run and Jewish-owned businesses in Germany before the war, and in the occupied countries of Western Europe, particularly France, during the war. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web had accelerated the ability of the families whose art was looted to communicate more globally, doing quicker and deeper research that simply wasn’t available in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

The Internet explains why many of the court cases and legal challenges are still being heard in 2016, especially since it takes such a long time for cases to be heard, decisions to be made, appeals filed, and so on, going up through the higher courts both in the United States and Germany, among other European nations where the victims lived and operated their art galleries.

It also explains why the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with its 2006 report on Nazi-looted art, continues the fight for restitution, and why Jewish organizations forced Switzerland to finally act, not just on the art theft front with the 2002 ICE investigation report, but also through the courts and the United Nations to expose all the secret Swiss bank accounts and Swiss banks and other institutions that aided the Germans during the war by hiding, fencing, and financing stolen property.

On Monday, November 30, 1998, the US State Department and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum held a four-day summit—the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets—that focused on Nazi-confiscated art during the 1930s and World War II. The “government-organized, international meeting of forty-four governments and thirteen non-governmental organizations (NGOs) … sought to address the issue of assets confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust (1933–45), specifically art and insurance, as well as communal property, archives and books, and to conclude any remaining gold issues.”281 It was built off the success of the London Nazi Gold conference, which had been held the year before.

The Holocaust-Era Assets conference developed eleven guiding universal principles, though admitting that many of the speakers in attendance, from the United States to France, Germany, and Eastern European countries, operated in different legal systems.282

Dr. Konstantin Akinsha, Research Director, Project of Documentation of Wartime Cultural Losses, United States, opened his session by stating:

The establishment of different databases, collecting information about art works looted during WWII, is now a popular topic within the circle of scholars and representatives of organizations and groups involved in the search for the “disappeared” cultural property of the victims of the holocaust. There are many plans and ideas to create a “total” database, which will include all possible claims and information about nearly every artwork looted during the war. Unfortunately, such an undertaking doesn’t appear very realistic.

In 2010, German authorities intercepted an elderly man, Cornelius Gurlitt, on a train from Zurich to Munich. He was “carrying a large amount” of cash on him, so they went to his apartment and found more than 1,000 works of art by Chagall, Renoir, and a missing Matisse—Seated Woman—stashed away. The combined value of the artwork exceeded $1 billion. What was an old man, living in apartment that resembled a hovel, doing with a trove of missing World War II pieces of art with a value more than that of the building block he lived in? It turned out that his father had worked as an art broker for the Nazis.283 Seated Woman was a painting that had belonged to art dealer Paul Rosenberg before he was forced to flee from the Nazis, leaving behind his art. Rosenberg would subsequently spend years trying to recover the pieces that were looted, and his story is just one of many.

There would be subsequent conferences that were born out of the 1998 Holocaust-Era Assets summit, including a four-day conference held in Prague in June 2009, which produced a report of over a thousand pages on the proceedings, and a Milan conference in 2011, carrying the title of Restitution Experience Since The Washington Conference (1998), which discussed major achievements since that first summit and what the updated “Washington Principles” called “provenance research on national collections” for the more than forty participating nations.284

At the 2009 conference in Prague, in a story called “Retaining van Gogh,” it came to light that a New York City attorney had sent a letter to the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) about Vincent’s Saint-Rémy painting Two Diggers Among Trees (December 1889), which was transferred from the estate of art collector Robert Hudson Tannahill in 1970 to DIA. The letter went on to explain that the painting, along with one other van Gogh, belonged to the estate of Mrs. Hugo Nathan (no relation to Dr. Fritz Nathan), as she was forced to sell it in the liquidation of her assets by the Nazis in 1937, all because she was Jewish.

As of February 2016, van Gogh’s The Diggers, as DIA calls the painting, can still be seen at the Detroit Institute of Art.285

More problematic than the resolution of a single particular case is the entrenched mentality, the human keeper mentality, the mentality that led the Germans and the Soviets to fight over every brick of Stalingrad to produce a bloody stalemate. In other words, the behavior of the museum heads to choose to fight, in most cases, rather than to resolve many of the provenance and restitution issues.

Our research team repeatedly found the keepers of various archives unwilling to accommodate them, or willing to respond to only the most tightly focused enquiries, behavior that reinforced the need for regulations allowing greater freedom of access in the area of Nazi-looted art.286

Translation: good luck to the victims in getting your looted artwork, or art sold on the cheap under the Nazi threat, returned to you. They also wrote about the purpose and scale of the looting:

Many of them were used to enrich the collections of Göring or other Nazi elites. Others were siphoned off to Switzerland, for example, to the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne, while an estimated 500 were destroyed in the symbolic N.S. bonfire at the Jeu de Paume in July 1943, so vividly described by French curator Rose Valland.

In terms of art looting, the ERR’s most blatant claim to the status of war criminals was the seizure of over 20,000 works of art from over 200 private Jewish collections in France and Belgium. That whole process was instigated by Reichsmarschall Herman Göring in part to enrich his own collection.287

(ERR refers to Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which was the special task force set up and overseen by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg.)

Pushback in response to the demands for restitution of Nazi-plundered art came from all directions, and from top institutions in the United States and Europe. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Director Philippe De Montebello, who at the 1998 conference also sat on the board of the United States Association of Art Museum Directors Task Force, was one director who was not going to cave to demands for either the suspected looted art to be returned to the rightful owners or for financial compensation.

During his “Break-out Session on Nazi-Confiscated Art Issues: Principles to Address Nazi-Confiscated Art,” in the ten minutes he was allotted to address his art museum peers, members of Congress, and US Holocaust Memorial Museum executives, De Montebello said: “Principally, the task force report called on American art museums to begin to conduct a comprehensive review of their collections to ascertain if any works may have been unlawfully confiscated during the Nazi/World War II era, and never subsequently returned.”288

He went on to discuss guidelines for museums, and then he managed to waste some of his allotted ten minutes by deflecting away from the core subject of the conference, stating:

The fact is, museums proudly announce acquisitions—the Met has joyously recorded in recent weeks the purchase of works by Jasper Johns and Van Gogh—and frankly, if my press office had not generated considerable press attention, internationally, someone would now be looking for other work! And of course, museums display new acquisitions prominently in their galleries, indeed all new acquisitions at the Met have a special and highly visible blue sticker on the label.289

When will all the questions of the looted World War II art, the art with suspect or tainted provenance, be resolved? How many more conferences on Holocaust-era assets need to take place to get close to getting it right?