Awaken the Beauty Within...
Webber said that despite decades of
effort by the Kraus family, it was only in
2004 that the first of their paintings was
returned — the Austrian government
returned six of the family’s paintings that
were in their museums. She said the fam-
ily turned to the commission after being
told by others there was little chance of
finding the other paintings.
The commission’s researchers learned
that two other Kraus paintings had been
found by the Monuments Men in the
collection of Heinrich Hoffman, the
personal photographer for and close
friend of Hitler. The commission then
discovered that in the early 1960s, the
Bavarian museum acceded to a request
by Henriette Hoffmann-von Schirach that
they be “returned” to her.
Hoffmann-von Schirach was the daugh-
ter of Heinrich Hoffmann and the former
wife of Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi
Youth leader and later Hitler’s district gov-
ernor of Vienna. Von Schirach was tried
at Nuremberg and found guilty of crimes
against humanity for the deportation of
60,000 Austrian Jews to Nazi concentra-
tion camps. He served 20 years in prison.
“It seems that Bavaria thought restitu-
tion meant restitution to the Nazis rather
than to their victims,” Webber said.
In fact, she said, despite officials insist-
ing there was virtually no paperwork on
the issue, her researchers found pages and
pages of documents in the Bavarian state
archives showing that between 1949 and
the early ’60s, Henriette Hoffmann-von
Schirach “got back some 90 works of art
and 4,000 books — she made the claims
as von Schirach’s wife.”
Markus Stotzel, an attorney in Germany
working with Urbach, the Manhattan law-
yer, said they, too, have been stonewalled
in their efforts to recover art from the
Bavarian museum.
“We have a valuable claim for eight
paintings against the Bavarian collection
and, in 2008, we asked them to provide us
with copies of the backs of the paintings
so we could see the gallery labels, exhibi-
tion markers, collector stamps — it pro-
vides clarification about the provenance,”
he said. “There has not been even an offer
to meet over the last eight years.”
Webber said her researchers learned
that in 1962, the Bavarian museum sold
to von Schirach’s wife one of the two Old
Master Kraus paintings for 300 deutsche
marks. Webber said she sold it in 1963
for 16,100 deutsche marks to the Catholic
Cathedral Association of Xanten in
Germany’s North-Rhine Westphalia.
“That was more than 50 times what she
paid,” Webber said. “Jewish families trying
to recover their looted artworks were told
nobody knew where they were and that
they had to provide extensive proofs of
ownership and documentation. Most did
not have any because their whole world
had been destroyed by the Nazis. They did
not have homes or photographs — they
were lucky if they had their lives.
“But at the same time they were finding
insurmountable barriers and the German
government was telling them they do
not know where their property was, the
museums and the government of Bavaria
were engaged for almost two decades in
working with high-ranking Nazi families,
whose demands were dealt with promptly
and efficiently. They had little require-
ment to prove they really owned the
paintings.
“Over 2,500 works from the collections
of the Nazi leaders were handed over to
Bavaria,” Webber continued. “And these
were the artworks the families of the Nazi
leaders were getting back over this period.”
She said the commission wrote to the
Bavarian State Paintings Collection to
make a claim for the return of the second
Kraus painting and to ask who authorized
the sale of the first.
“We received only two documents from
the museum and no explanation. We then
asked the Bavarian government, but they,
too, provided only two documents and
no explanation. It was this that spurred
us to undertake our own research and to
uncover hundreds of documents in the
Bavarian government archives and this
whole scandal.”
In July 2011, Webber’s organiza-
tion contacted the Catholic Cathedral
Association on behalf of the Kraus family
and made a claim for the family’s paint-
ing, Webber said. Although the church
provided proof of the Kraus’ ownership,
Webber said it has locked away the paint-
ing and repeatedly rebuffed restitution
requests by the family on the grounds it
has no obligation to return it.
Germany was criticized earlier this year
after a two-year, $2 million investigation
into the ownership of about 700 Nazi-
looted paintings determined the prov-
enance of only five.
Schneider of the Claims Conference said
until heirs have the right to have their sto-
len property returned, “all those who stand
in the way of this goal align themselves
with the Nazis rather than their victims.”
Because the statute of limitations has
been cited by those refusing to return
Nazi-looted property, the Senate Judiciary
Committee recently held a hearing on
legislation that would lift the statute for
such crimes. Among those testifying was
actress Helen Mirren, who portrayed a
Holocaust survivor’s successful quest for
the return of her family’s Nazi-looted
paintings in the movie Woman in Gold.
“Restitution is more than reclaiming a
material good,” Mirren testified. “When
the Jewish people were dispossessed
of their art, they lost their heritage —
memories were taken along with the art.
Having no memories is like having no
family. That’s why art restitution is so
imperative.”
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July 28 • 2016
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