New online resource aids in return of Nazi-looted art

October 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW YORK

The Nazis stripped hundreds of thousands of artworks from Jews during World War II in one of the biggest cultural raids in history, often photographing their spoils and meticulously cataloguing them on typewritten index cards.

Holocaust survivors and their relatives, as well as art collectors and museums, can go online to search a free historical database of more than 20,000 art objects stolen in Germany-occupied France and Belgium from 1940 to 1944, including paintings by Claude Monet and Marc Chagall.

The database is an effort by the New York-based Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The database is unusual because it has been built around Nazi-era records that were digitized and rendered searchable, showing what was seized and from whom the groups said.

The Claims Conference, which helps Holocaust survivors and their relatives reclaim property, said it had used the database to estimate that nearly half of the objects may never have been returned to their rightful owners or their descendants or their country of origin.

“Most people think or thought that most of these items were repatriated or restituted,” said Wesley A. Fisher, director of research at the Claims Conference. “It isn’t true. Over half of them were never repatriated. That in itself is rather interesting historically.”

Marc Masurovsky, the project’s director at the museum, said the database was designed to evolve as new information is gathered. “I hope that the families do consult it and tell us what is right and what is wrong with it,” he added.

The database combines records from the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md.; the German Bundesarchiv, the federal archive in Koblenz; and repatriation and restitution records held by the French government.

By giving a new view of looted art, the database could raise questions about the possibly tainted history of works of art in some of the world’s most important museum collections, experts said.

“I always tell people we have no idea how much is out there because nobody has ever bothered to take a complete inventory,” said Willi Korte, one of the most prominent independent provenance researchers of looted Nazi art. “I think all of those who say there’s not much left to do certainly should think twice.”

The Claims Conference says about 650,000 art objects were taken, and thousands of items are still lost.