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Country Reports |
The Belgian recovery efforts were reactivated through the Office Belge de l'Economie et de l'Agriculture (O.B.E.A.) in 1993. The recent events in eastern Europe had induced the O.B.E.A. that the investigations and the restitutions directly after the Second World War returned only a part of the works of art to their rightful owners.
From the start different technical problems presented themselves. Firstly the O.B.E.A., as successor of the Office de Récupération Economique (O.R.E.) was responsible for recovery of economic and cultural Belgian goods, in accordance with international and national laws. In the mid sixties the O.R.E. had halted its activities and dispersed its documentation. (Some institutions, which worked in close contact with the O.R.E., like the Ministry of Reconstruction had ceased to exist and its dossiers had been transferred to unknown places).
Secondly the Belgian state underwent fundamental political changes, through a federalisation. On beforehand the Ministry of Culture was a national office. Now the Walloon and Flemish communities each have a Ministry of Culture. (After the Second World War the restitution of works of art was treated as a national matter).
Thirdly through these structural changes the different ministries, as the national Ministry of Economic Affairs, was and still is undergoing a reconstruction phase in which official tasks are redivided and redirected.
In the first phase of the mission it became apparent that coordination and communication was needed. Two commissions were created to lead and direct these investigations: a Technical Working Group and a Guidance Committee of High Level, with representatives of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Scientific Policy and the Ministry of Justice. (Also close contacts were established with institutions directly or indirectly involved with the cultural losses of Belgium). As a second step official meetings were organized with the Netherlands and France, which had started years earlier with their research and restitution efforts. (The Belgian state, which led the restitution mission after the Second World War for Luxemburg, informed its Ministry of Culture of their losses to help them start their efforts). Further contacts were sought with different foreign recovery services and specialists.
A second important problem was caused by the dispersal of the archives about the Belgian losses. The O.R.E. had brought together documents found in Belgium and Germany, but never properly catalogued or published them in repertories. The only publication was a selective catalogue "Répertoire d'oeuvres d'art dont la Belgique a été spoliée durant la guerre 1939-1945", which contained 301 works of art.
This information was gathered shortly after the Second World War and missing links were never re-investigated during the fifties and sixties. The present mission takes it upon itself to complete this documentation, with information made available during the last forty years. A new stream of studies of the Second World War and Belgium were made under the auspices of the Centre de Recherches et d'études historiques de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale in Brussels. Also a wave of programs on the subject appeared on Belgian television. The cultural losses are momentarily put on computer and updated in catalogues for national and international distribution, namely Missing art-works of Belgium. Part 1: Public Domain and Part 2: Belgian State are finished. Part 3: Private collections and Part 4: Belgian libraries are in preparation.
A report about lost Belgian archives and their discovery will be given in the next newsletter. Momentarily the Mission Recuperation of Art-works is installed in the national Ministry of Economic Affairs, under the direction of Director general A. Bourlet, who leads a new directorate which, among other things, is occupied with international agreements.
Jacques Lust
The position of the Federal Republic of Germany concerning the "Spoils of War" undoubtedly is a very special and complicated one. There is no forgetting of the fact that it was Nazi Germany that started not only World War II itself but also the looting of cultural treasures throughout Europe. This first looting led in consequence to the translocation of cultural treasures all over Europe - like a first stone falling in a game of dominoes.
The looting fell back on Germany during the end of the war and afterwards. Many of the cultural treasures supposedly secured against bombing suddenly were located on territory under the control of another state. The Trophy Committee of the Red Army took many objects directly out of museums or security depositories, where they were sent for protection during the war. Most of the security depositories were located in the eastern part of Germany.
Germany lost about 200.000 works of art, 3 kilometers of archival material and 3 million books. Through glastnost and perestrojka it seemed possible to get these treasures back. In the newly concluded agreements between the Federal Republic of Germany and the successor states of the Soviet Union as well as most of the other former socialist states of Eastern and Central Europe this aspect was taken into account. The agreements state, that missing or unlawfully removed cultural treasures found on the territory of either partner of the agreement are to be returned.
On the basis of these agreements Germany is leading negotiations with Russia, the Ukraine and Poland (the text of this agreement is quite different). Other states are to follow. Until now these negotiations did not have the results hoped for.
The complexity of the issue of lost cultural treasures in the Federal Republic of Germany lies at the interface of the independence of the states in matters of education and culture and the cultural and educational policy of the Foreign Office. Thus the Federal Government and the Federal States work on these matters and carry out negotiations together. Both are equally prepared to face the great responsibility in this field. The Federal Ministry of the Interior has set up a documentation centre in Berlin, the Federal States contribute to this work through the Coordination Office of the States for the Return of Cultural Treasures. Both authorities work closely together.
The main task for the experts is to accurately document the losses and verify the details. A lot of aspects have to be taken into account. Many of them are resulting from the former existence of two German states. The restitution of art treasures by the Soviet Union to the German Democratic Republic in the fifties as well as the German-German culture exchange in the late eighties are two examples. Documentation cannot be restricted to the recording of reports on losses. It must be examined, put into concrete terms and verified by means of intensive research in the affected institutions themselves and also by comprehensive information from various other archives. The history of the museums and collections is very complicated, the archival materials are kept in different places, many of them are lost. Especially for the museums in the new states of Germany it is very difficult to reconstruct the history and the actual losses since the Nazi-time, because for a long time it was not allowed to deal with these questions at all.
The negotiations with Russia are structured as follows: There is a joint German-Russian restitution commission. Beneath this commission four expert groups have been set up, dealing with archives, libraries, museums/collections and legal issues. The heads of these expert groups are represented in the joint commission. The last meeting took place in June 1994.
Meanwhile exhibitions of so-called "trophy art" from Germany took place in Sankt Petersburg and Moscow. The exhibition of the drawings of the Bremen Kunsthalle - parts of the "Baldin collection" - in the Hermitage (Sankt Petersburg) in November 1992 was the first exhibition of "trophy art" in Russia at all. Most of the objects were exhibited again in Moscow in March 1993. The current exhibitions of (mostly German) "tropy art" in Moscow (Pushkin Museum) and Sankt Petersburg (Hermitage) attracted great interest of the national and international media. As is well known, the exhibition in Moscow was prepared without contact or even information of the German side.
Not only in connection with these exhibitions the interest of the media and public in the question of the lost cultural property and their restitution has increased considerably.
Doris Lemmermeier
In the Second World War Hungary lost more than 40.000 objects of art - pictures, decorative art, medals etc. This is the number of objects still not recovered. A considerable part of them belonged to the famous private collections of Hatvany, Herczog and others.
A great number of objects were removed by German military troops after they had occupied Hungary (March 19, 1944). After that collections mostly belonging to Hungarian Jews were plundered by Germans and transported to Germany. A considerable part of them was stored by the Nazis in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany and transported from there in 1945 to the Soviet Union. Some famous pictures of the Hatvany and Herczog collections are now in the Grabar Institute in Moscow.
The other lost objects were taken by special Soviet military troops after the occupation of Budapest and Hungary. These valuable collections were stored in the safes of banks in Budapest and at other places (houses, libraries, schools, castles etc.). The Soviets accumulated the objects first in Budapest and then transported them to the Soviet Union.
In 1991 the Hungarian Government dispatched a note to the Russian Government requesting the return of the cultural objects. The Hungarian Restitution Commission was formed by the Hungarian Government in 1992. On the 11th of November 1992 a first protocol with the Restitution Committee of the Russian Federation was signed. According to the agreement the parties were to cooperate in the search, registration and mutual preparation for the return of properties which came into their possession during World War II and afterwards.
The next Hungarian-Russian restitution agreement was signed in Moscow on May 21st 1993 by the Ministers of culture. The Hungarian experts recovered some valuable books of the Calvinist school in Sárospatak and some Jewish books in the library in Nishni Novgorod (formerly Gorki).
In April 1995 the Hungarian Minister of culture signed a restitution agreement with the Restitution Committee of the Ukraine in Kiev.
Unfortunately the restitution process moves very slowly and depends on the political situation in Russia.
At the end of February 1995 the Pushkin Museum in Moscow opened an exhibition of "secret" objects of art, among them the famous pictures of the Hatvany and Herczog collections as well as a great number of "unknown" objects, originally also belonging to former Hungarian collections.
The Hungarian Restitution Commission created a computer database in the Hungarian National Gallery. Dr. L. Mravik, a Hungarian art historian, prepared a catalogue of Hungarian art objects lost during World War II to be published in the near future. In the Museum of Applied Art in Budapest an exhibition of the photographs of lost objects was organized.
István Fodor
Directly after the war, the Dutch Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit ("The Foundation of Netherlandish Art Property") collected information about art works sold voluntarily or under duress to (representatives of) the German occupying forces, stolen or confiscated by the Germans or otherwise lost during the war. This information was used to identify the objects in the Central Collecting Points in Germany.
One year after the art restitution program got under way, the Netherlands had already received 24 shipments, consisting of 4700 items of cultural objects exclusive of archives. With these and other restitutions from the Collecting Points concluded, Dutch art recovery work effectively ended in the 1950's although the task was never officially terminated. Today there are at least 6.000 paintings alone still registered as missing.
Also not found after the war were the 526 drawings from the Koenigs collection. At the end of 1945, it was rumoured that they had been taken to the Soviet Union, but all efforts to locate them failed. After the German Democratic Republic returned 33 missing drawings to the Netherlands in 1987, this, together with the changing political climate in Eastern Europe, led to the reopening of the case. The responsibility for the recovery task was transferred from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Culture and the execution of the task was entrusted to the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (Netherlands Office for Fine Arts) in The Hague. A catalogue of the missing drawings was published and for years efforts were made to find the exact location of the drawings.
In October 1992, Russian Minister of Culture Sidorov announced in an interview that the Koenigs collection had been found. This was the first time the presence of the drawings in Russia was acknowledged. One year later, the joint Russian-Dutch Koenigs group, established in April 1993, was allowed to make an inventory of each of the 307 drawings present in the Moscow Pushkin Museum. They were all in excellent condition and will be exhibited in Moscow in September 1995. Work on the Koenigs case continues - 184 drawings, all by German masters, have still not been located. There have been no meetings of the bilateral working group since November 1993.
Josefine Leistra
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