SPOILS OF WAR N 4 1997

Special Reports

INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL LAW OF RESTITUTION OF WORKS OF ART LOOTED DURING ARMED CONFLICTS. PART III

This is the third part of a series of articles on the history of the international law on restitution by the same author.

After a time of theoretical discussions on looting and restitution during the Enlightenment, described in Part II, the question of restitution was practically raised on a major scale by extremely turbulent events at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. They are so well known that we do not need to give more details. It is enough to remember that because of Napoleon's plans for making Paris a greater center of art, comprising the most famous works of art from all over Europe, the time of his reign was simply a period of continuous looting. According to GÊrard and Isabey it was only the Republic of France, "thanks to her power and the superiority of her artists and educational system", where these works of art could be properly and definitely protected. The French certainly realised the legal aspect of their activity. Therefore, even simple pillaging often assumed a hidden form maintaining the appearances of legality by giving it the form of benevolence or compensation, usually coerced armistice and peace treaties. We can give numerous examples of such agreements, for example, 3 armistices signed in 1796 alone (with the Prince of Parma, with the Prince of Modena and with the Holy See), as well as a peace treaty signed with Venice one year later. All of them include clauses on gifts of particular works of art or collections specified only in the quantity of objects to be given to the specially sent commissaries.

A typical example of such a clause reads as follows: "The Pope will give over to the French Republic 100 paintings, busts or statues according to the choice made by the commissaries who will come to Rome, among these objects one should find in particular the bronze bust of Junius Brutus and the marble bust of Mark Brutus which are now located in Capitol, additionally 500 manuscripts chosen by these commissaries" (Art. VIII of the Armistice with Holy See, signed in Bologna on July 23, 1796).

Other examples of the discussed practice are the Albani-Braschi and Pope Pius VI. collections, which were handed over as 'compensation' for the murder of General Duphot in Rome.

Napoleon´s defeat brought the expected time of clearance of the accounts. After a prolonged period of bargains and intensive endeavors of diplomats, the allied forces could finally remove their treasures from the Louvre. It was not an easy task although the very principle of restitution was not questioned. On the one hand this was complicated by the political circumstances of the time. The allied forces, who were re-establishing the ancient regime in France, supported the Bourbons and did not want to weaken their position by a too open restitutional operation. On the other hand the French simply did their best to stop the return of objects. One of the witnesses present in Paris noted that works of art to be returned to Prussia were taken from the Louvre by a unit of 200 soldiers under the command of Eberhard von Grote, and it almost ended in a clash with an intervening detachment of the French National Guard.

All these events had a decisive impact on the development of international law. Nahlik described their importance in his book giving this part in question the following title: "The great chapter in restitution of works of art - Paris 1815". The essence of the whole story is the fact that due to the complete and consistent restitution that concluded the Napoleonic Lootings, the full protection of works of art and the ban on their capture during war was definitely established as a rule of international customary law. That was finally confirmed by the allied forces' own behavior: they took from France nothing more than they lost. We may also add in conclusion that this rule was generally observed during the following century. Rigby vividly summarized that in words: "Probably no one would have been more amazed than Napoleon himself to learn how his ravenous fingers were closing the looting gate in Europe, closing it so well, in fact, that it could be sealed by the peace-makers of World War I, and kept sealed until Adolf Hitler blew off the hinges".

The discussed rule was then confirmed with satisfaction by the contemporary doctrine of the law of nations. In 1819, Kluber wrote the following on the issue of war prizes: "Nowadays, works of literature and fine arts, as well as objects used in religious ceremonies are respected and usually spared and left undisturbed". Wheaton was even more firm when he stated: "By the ancient law of nations, even what was called res sacrae was not exempted from capture and confiscation. Cicero conveyed this idea in his expressive metaphorical language, in the Fourth Oration against Verres, where he says that: "Victory made all the sacred things of the Syracusans profane". But by the modern usage of nations, which has acquired the force of law, temples of religion, public edifices devoted to civil purposes only, monuments of art, and repositories of science, are exempted from the general operations of war".

Wojciech Kowalski, Department of Intellectual and Cultural Property Law,
Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Silesia, Katowice

ON THE RESTITUTION TO ITALY OF CULTURAL PROPERTY REMOVED TO GERMANY DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR UNDER THE TERMS OF THE 1947 TREATY OF PEACE

Summary:

1. Foreword

2. The provisions of the Treaty of Peace between Italy and the Allied and Associated Powers, signed at Paris on February 10, 1947, relating to the return of property taken during the Second World War: a) Article 75.

3. Continued; b) Article 77, para. 2.

4. Possibility of integrating Article 77, para. 2, by the provisions of Article 75 of the Treaty of Peace by way of interpretation.

Now that several years have elapsed since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War we may realistically address the issue of the return of cultural property removed to Germany from Italian territory during the Second World War by the Nazi forces of occupation, which subsequently fell into the hands of the Allied and Associated Powers - and in particular of the Eastern European countries - parties to the Treaty of Peace concluded with Italy on February 10, 1947.

The relevant provisions of the Treaty of Peace for our purposes are Articles 75 and 77, para. 2. Article 75 refers to the hypothesis of restitution of property by Italy - expressly mentioning cultural property - removed from the states then belonging to the United Nations; Article 77, on the other hand, deals with the (reverse) hypothesis of property removed from Italy to be returned by the Allied and Associated Powers parties to the Treaty. As we shall see, Article 75 of the Treaty must be borne in mind, with certain provisos, when interpreting Article 77, para. 2, in so far as it contains a far more detailed set of provisions governing the restitution of property than Article 77.

The first point to be examined is therefore Article 75 of the Treaty of Peace. Article 75 imposes on Italy the obligation to restore, in the shortest possible time and in good order, all the property (including gold) that had been removed by any of the Axis Powers, by force or duress, from the territory of any of the states belonging to the United Nations. This obligation covers all identifiable items or property present in Italy and remains effective irrespective of any subsequent transactions after the date of their removal. The obligation to return the property includes a series of complementary (or implicit) obligations, namely: a) the obligation to bear all the costs relating to labor, materials and transport in Italy in order to return them, b) the obligation to co-operate, at Italy's expense, and provide all necessary facilities to search for the property to be returned, and c) the obligation to take all the measures to effect the return of property then held in any third country by persons subject to Italian jurisdiction.

Article 75 places the burden of identifying the property to be returned and of proving ownership on the requesting state, and the burden of proving that the property was not removed by force or duress rested with the Italian government. A procedural provision in this norm requires claims to be presented within six months from the entry into force of the Treaty. Lastly, Article 75 provides that if, in particular cases, it is impossible to return "objects of artistic, historical or archaeological value", Italy would transfer objects of the same kind, and approximately equivalent value, as the objects removed, as far as the objects are obtainable in Italy.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that the property to be returned under Article 75 also included cultural property. Furthermore, the whole provision is framed in such broad terms, leaving absolutely no ambiguity by the wording "all property" in para. 2, that one is compelled to conclude that the obligation of restitution must have included both public and private property (cultural or otherwise) belonging to both natural and juridical persons. There would also appear to be no doubt whatsoever that the restitution of the property by Italy was also subject to the presentation of an explicit claim by the state then belonging to the United Nations from whose territory the property had been taken, and therefore that no such obligation existed if no such claim had been made, or if any such claim was presented later than six months following the entry into force of the Peace Treaty.

Let us now turn to Article 77, para. 2 of the Treaty which, as already indicated above, refers to the reverse situation to the one contemplated in Article 75, namely, the return to Italy of property removed to Germany during the Second World War.

Even by a cursory glance it can be noticed that Article 77, para. 2 is far less detailed than Article 75. For in contrast to Article 75, a whole series of important references are missing: a) the present location of the property, b) the irrelevance of subsequent transactions after the removal of the property, c) the complementary obligations to (or implicit in) restitution, and in particular the obligation to return the property in good order and in the shortest time, d) the need to submit a claim for the return of the property by a specific deadline, e) states on which the onus to identify the property and prove both ownership and the fact that the property was removed without the force or duress is placed, f) "objects of artistic, historical or archaeological value" and hence specifically cultural property, and particularly the possibility of their restitution "by equivalence".

Article 77, para. 2, however, contains - apart form a number of elements in common with Article 75 -, several additional elements not found in Article 75. It provides that the objects removed and to be returned must be the property of Italy or Italian nationals, that the property must have been removed to Germany and that the removal must have taken place after September 3, 1943.

Bearing this in mind, the first point is to interpret Article 77, para. 2 of the Treaty on the basis of what it expressly provides. Firstly, it would appear to be beyond dispute that this norm imposes a real obligation of restitution of property on all the parties to the Peace Treaty other than Italy. For apart from the absolutely unambiguous wording, the whole provision would otherwise be totally meaningless.

Secondly, it is clear from Article 77, para. 2 referring to property belonging both to Italy and to Italian nationals, that the property for which there is an obligation of restitution includes both publicly and privately owned property.

Thirdly, there is no reason on assuming that Article 77, para. 2 does not either refer to cultural property. For by not specifying (nor excluding to be applicable to) particular classes of property, this norm suggests that it refers to all types of property, and therefore includes property belonging (not only to the state or private individuals but also) to both natural and juridical persons.

Lastly, we feel that there can be no doubt that Article 77, para. 2 applies to cultural property removed to Germany and which today is located in states parties to the Treaty of Peace other than Italy or under the actual or potential jurisdiction of one of these states. Specifically referring to "property ... removed ... from Italian territory to Germany" without any reference to their present whereabouts, the provision clearly applies regardless of the place to which they were subsequently transferred.

At this point it would seem opportune to ask whether the more specific provisions of Article 75 might be used to fill the corresponding "lacunae" in Article 77, para. 2 of the Treaty. More precisely, one wonders whether, and to what extent, Article 75 might be used in respect of aspects not regulated in Article 77, para. 2 to integrate this latter norm by way of interpretation.

It must be recognized immediately that in order to solve this problem it is necessary, from the methodological point of view, to consider the different purposes that the provisions of a peace treaty respectively concerning the victors and the vanquished have or one should presume they have. On this basis, there are no grounds for automatically interpreting the provisions relating to the one group of norms for the purpose of interpreting those relating to the other group. On our opinion, however, at least as far as the specific problem dealt with here is concerned, such an interpretation can be admitted with regard to the provisions of a peace treaty whose purpose ranges beyond the distinction between victorious and vanquished states. Put in this way, the problem is which provisions of Article 75 are strictly connected to (and justified by) the status of the victor or the vanquished, and which, on the contrary, are independent of that status.

In our opinion, these latter provisions are, first and foremost, those which lay down obligations deemed to be implicit in the obligation of restitution, namely: the obligation on the state against which the claim is made to do everything possible to ensure that the property located in third countries is returned by anyone subject to its jurisdiction; the irrelevance - as far as the existence of the obligation of restitution is concerned - of any transactions subsequent to the removal of property; and the obligation of restitution by 'equivalence' when the restitution 'in kind' is impossible and to the extent to which (it can be shown that) the requested state is able to procure, within its own territory or anyway within its own jurisdiction, 'equivalent' property to that originally removed. The provisions laying down obligations, such as those contained in Article 75 relating to identifying the property and providing proof of ownership (by the claimant state), can also be extended to apply to Article 77, para. 2 in that they are strictly 'technical' in character. For it is clear that these obligations - by their very nature, and hence regardless of which of the two states is victor or vanquished - cannot lie with any states but those indicated in Article 75, since the state against which the claim is made could hardly be expected to provide proof of ownership of the property in the claimant state.

With specific regard to the 'burden' of identifying the property, it should also be noted that - as the claimant state often does not know the whereabouts of the property taken from it and therefore which other state to present the claim to, and may not even know whether other property whose restitution could be requested exist elsewhere - it is clearly only a formal obligation on the claimant state. In fact, one must presume that the claimant state knows and can identify which property has been taken from it better than the state against which the claim is made. Concretely, identification can only be made through reciprocal co-operation between the two states, regardless of their being victor or vanquished. The onus placed on the claimant state to identify the property must also include the obligation to request the restitution of the property which is explicitly indicated in Article 75 and implicitly inferable from Article 77, para. 2 in so far as the contents of the latter can be integrated by reference to the contents of the former. However, the deadline provided by Article 75 for submitting the claim for restitution (or any other deadline) cannot be extended to apply to Article 77, para. 2 because the deadline provision cannot be implicitly inferred from (being totally independent of) the obligation of restitution or the obligation to identify the property. Consequently, the obligation of restitution referred to in Article 77, para. 2 only subsists if and when Italy presents a claim to a state party to the Treaty of Peace on whose territory, or anyway under whose jurisdiction, the property is located, on the basis of an (at least initial and provisional) identification of that property.

Lastly, the provision contained in Article 75 relating to the onus (placed on the state against which the claim is presented) of showing that the property was removed without force or duress can also be extended to the hypothesis provided by Article 77, para. 2 because both these norms are intended to facilitate restitution, and therefore both must be interpreted, in dubious cases, in a manner which entails - not excludes - the obligation of restitution; and this precisely occurs when the (particularly onerous after a long time has elapsed) burden of proving that the property had been removed without force or duress lies with the state required to return it in the event (which is more than likely) that the proof cannot be furnished.

Conversely, the status of victor or vanquished is of relevance in the provisions of Article 75 where the obligation is imposed on the state against which the claim is made to bear all the restitution costs, an obligation which entails all the costs relating to labor, materials and transport incurred in the process of restitution and providing, at its own expense, all the necessary facilities for the search for and the restitution of property eligible for restitution. For these are obligations imposed by the victor state on the vanquished state to provide services which would not be imposed on it under normal circumstances. Requiring a state (the victor under the terms of the Peace Treaty) not only to return property belonging to others under its jurisdiction, but also to pay the costs for returning the property to another state (the vanquished state, into the bargain) seems to push the scope of the Treaty far beyond its original purposes and the relations established under it between the victorious and the vanquished states, also bearing in mind that the property was removed by the Nazi forces of occupation, and not by the state required to return them. All that can be said here is that, notwithstanding Italy's obligation to bear all the costs of restitution incurred by the state required to return the removed property, in the event of any doubt about the amount of costs, the amount closer to the lower rather than the higher costs claimed should be used. A justification for this conclusion may be found in the well-known case law of domestic courts of the vanquished states in the wake of both the First and Second World Wars based on a narrow interpretation of peace treaties.

Carlo Focarelli, Researcher, Italian National Research Council, Rome

Library Losses

CATALOGUE OF THE BOOKS FROM THE SÁROSPATAK COLLECTION IN THE NIZHNY NOVGOROD LIBRARY. FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS

Access as a key notion underlying each library function has been introduced to Russian librarianship relatively recently. Not surprisingly, apart from political reasons (existing in the past and still affecting the present), access to removed collections has been seriously hindered. Even now, 50 years after the war, book collections originating from different countries have not been properly identified, described and introduced to researchers.

The Sárospatak collection has shared the fate of most of the 11 million books brought soon after the war to the Soviet Union and scattered all over its vast territory. This extremely valuable collection has been kept in the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Library for many years, but no-one of the staff even dared to make it accessible to users. Thank God it was well preserved due to the professionalism of the librarians in charge and was not discarded like thousands of documents of similar origin housed in basements or storage facilities entirely inappropriate for housing library materials. When the collection was identified as the one belonging to Sárospatak it was obvious that regardless of any political decision about restitution its existence had to be known by researchers across the country on the one hand and by those who compiled it, i.e. by the Hungarians, on the other hand.

The Sárospatak Reformed Church College still has the records of all the missing items which helped enormously to verify the origin of the items located currently in Nizhny Novgorod. Nevertheless, due to the uncertain situation with the restitution, the collection was to be catalogued and thus be accessible. This explicit target was explained to the Open Society Institute, Budapest, which finally took the decision to provide financial support to the project. The final product of the project conducted by the joint team of librarians from the Regional Library of Nizhny Novgorod, Hungary (National Library, Sárospatak Reformed Church College Library, Hungarian Cultural Centre in Moscow) and the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow, should be a catalogue of short title descriptions published in a traditional format and in the form of an electronic version put on internet. The project is in progress now. The preliminary descriptions of 1448 items of the collection have been checked against reference sources for further verification with the original publications in Nizhny Novgorod. The short title methodology enables us to identify documents with a high level of trustworthiness, though it does not differentiate between the so-called variants of editions which are not that frequent in the pre-18th century publishing practice. In a number of cases this verification was impossible because there were no corresponding citations in the Hungarian National Bibliography compiled until 1635.

The whole project is to be finished by August 1997. Hopefully its results will stimulate the uncovering of other collections that have become victims of the last war and inspire Russian librarians to implement practical actions towards finishing the war by the end of the millennium.

Galina Kislovskaya, Deputy Director General,
Library for Foreign Literature, Nizhny Novgorod

VALUABLE BOOKS FROM HUNGARY IN NIZHNY NOVGOROD

The library of the Reformed (Helvetian denomination) College in Sárospatak was founded together with the College itself in the 16th century. In the 17th century the library received the renowned collection of the Rákóczi family. A sizeable part of this collection was lost when in 1671 the school was banished from the town. The library of the College which was re-admitted to the town in the early 18th century was enriched by donations from its former students and the library has since then continuously served education in Hungary. A magnificent library hall was built in 1834. The library currently houses about 400,000 works.

In 1938, fearing the outbreak of the war, the most valuable volumes from the library were shipped to the vaults of two banks in Budapest (Hungarian Trade Bank, First National Savings Bank) for safeguarding. The three cases containing these volumes disappeared at the end of the war, and only two of the listed items were found. A third one was taken away by one of the workers when the items were packed for shipment in 1945; he returned it later to the Sárospatak library. The greater part of these books was eventually identified in the Regional Scientific Library of Nizhny Novgorod during 1994-95.

The manuscripts listed among the over 1,400 items included a Polish Bible (1390-1455), a theological treatise written in 1404 in Vienna, the Attila biography written by Leonardus Aretinus in the later 15th century, church song-books from Hungary from the 16th-17th centuries (Patay graduale, Csáti graduale), an Old Slavic evangelical book and various mixed tomes. There were 27 incunabula, including one which in the 15th century was annotated with Hungarian glosses. Most of these printworks date from the 16th-17th centuries and are written in an archaic Hungarian: they were either printed in Hungary or were the works of Hungarian authors printed abroad. These are extremely important in terms of the Hungarian culture: one of these 118 unique works is the first printed edition of the poems of Bálint Balassi, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the Renaissance. Of about 60 other printworks present here there are no other examples known in Hungary. It is thus fairly obvious that the books from the Sárospatak library now in Russia include extremely valuable and unique volumes. Some of these are invaluable and irreplaceable for the Hungarian culture, while others represent a significant value also by international standards.

A register from 1938 lists the volumes shipped to Budapest in 1938; another list was made during 1994-95 in Nizhny Novgorod. The eleven items containing archival documents and 50 gold coins from the coin collection also disappeared at the same time as the volumes.

The 16th-17th century Hungarian language printworks and other old books in the collection of Baron Móric Kornfeld were also deposited in the vaults of the Hungarian Trade Bank. In Nizhny Novgorod we were able to identify two incunabula which were registered as artworks owing to their binding and colored illustrations, as well as 61 old Hungarian printworks, eight of which are unique pieces. The 17th-20th century printworks from the collection of Tihamér Kuhárszky and his manuscripts on Egyptology were also deposited here. We identified several volumes containing ex librises from various Hungarian private collections. The collection of the local museum contains a French printwork with 61 engravings from the 17th to the 20th centuries from the collection of Alajos Péterffy.

László Nagy, Catholic University of Budapest

Publications

REVIEW OF THE RUSSIAN PRESS FOR 1997 ON THE QUESTION OF THE RESTITUTION OF CULTURAL VALUES

This review of the Russian press was made on the basis of the "Restitution File", being compiled by the chief bibliographer of the Information Centre of the Library for Foreign Literature, O.M. Ivlieva (contact phone 095-915-3636).

More than fifty articles, devoted to the discussion of the problem in whose possession the cultural property should be that was removed to Russia after the Second World War, have appeared this year on pages of the Russian press. The majority of the publications is a resonance of the debates in the parliament about the "Federal Law on Cultural Values Removed to the USSR as a Result of World War II and Located in the Russian Territory" (Federal Law). The chronicle of the events drawn from periodicals looks as follows. On March 23, 1995 the Council of the Federation, using the right of the legislative initiative, placed for discussions in the State Duma the draft of the above mentioned Federal Law, which was accepted by the senators. However, at the first reading in the Duma the draft did not receive the necessary number of votes. Only on July 5, 1996 at the third reading the draft was accepted in the Duma and sent for consideration to the Council of the Federation. However, on July 17 something unexpected happened. The Council of the Federation, probably not able to withstand accusations in the mass media, and also the pressure from the government side, rejected the draft and sent it back for revision. On February 5, 1997 a modified draft of the law was placed again for discussion in the State Duma and was accepted in this new form. On March 5, quite surprisingly, without any problems, the law was authorised by the Higher Chamber of the Parliament and was handed over for signature to the President of the Russian Federation B.N. Yeltsin. The President rejected the Federal Law, basing his decision on the fact that "the law proclaims a unilateral decision on the problem of the removed cultural values without taking into consideration standard norms of the international law". On April 4, the State Duma once more approved the law aiming to overcome the President´s veto. Now it was time for the Council of the Federation´s word. On April 16, the Higher Chamber of the Parliament made the decision to transfer the discussion of the law to the next plenary session (i.e. on May 14), and before the session to carry out a ´by call´ voting with the help of signature sheets, that would ensure 100% voting on overcoming the President´s veto. By many politicians and journalists this fact was perceived as a present, issued by the senators for the President´s visit to Germany. And already on April 17, i.e. the day after the session of the Council of the Federation, Boris Yeltsin met in Baden-Baden with the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, but the expected sharp edges of the problem of ´trophy art´ were removed, as the Federal Law was not accepted, and ´Boris´, as always, brought in his briefcase a gift for ´his friend Helmut´, this time in the form of documents from archives of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Weimar Republic, Walter Rathenau, and microfilms of archival materials of the SED (Socialist United Party of Germany). Russian journalists paid special attention to the fact that the Russian President handed over to the Head of the German State a two-page list of Russian cultural values being kept, in the opinion of the experts, in Germany at the moment and being a subject to restitution.

Coming back to publications in periodicals on removed cultural values, we can note that we cannot see, not even in a single article of the domestic press, a categorical opinion that Russia should return ´trophy objects of culture´. The USSR suffered in the Second World War from Germany and its allies (the loss is estimated approximately in 1,3 trillion US dollars), and the trophy cultural values, on the basis of legal agreements accepted at the end of the war as an insignificant compensation, were taken out to Russia. And exactly on the pages of the newspapers we can see a discussion about the methods of resolving the question of the removed cultural property in conditions of a changed standing of Russia in the world´s community. The legislative authority in face of practically all members of the parliament votes for resolute measures. From here comes a categorical tone of the Federal Law which, for some stipulated exceptions, deprives Western countries of the hope of restitution of removed cultural objects. But the executive authority led by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation rejects the legal basis of the law which proclaims all removed cultural values as property of Russia. Deputy Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Shvydkoi, writes in the article "Do No Harm!"1: "You should really try hard to accept the law on nationalisation at the end of the XXth century".

Doctor of jurisprudence Evgeny Usenko², Abdulkhan Akhtamzyan³ and also employees of the State and Law Institute of the Academy of Sciences, acting on the side of the legislators, as confirmation of their point of view about the Russian property on ´trophy´ values refer to such legal documents as the Act of Unconditional Capitulation of Germany, Yalta and Potsdam decisions on reparations, the Paris peace agreements of 1947, the UNO Status. There are among these legal substantiations and ´fresher´ ones, for example, the letter of September 12, 1990 of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the four powers who won in World War II, which stresses that Germany refuses the claims of any kind to these states and recognises after-war decisions as permanent and invariable ones.

Some people working in the field of culture and military leaders act in support of the Federal Law. Several newspapers have published their address to the President of the Russian Federation, the Prime Minister and the two Chambers of the Russian parliament, in which they warn that in case of the rejection of the law "the third grand robbery of Russia for the last 100 years" would take place.

On the other hand, the persistence with which the executive authority refuses to recognise the Federal Law is quite understandable as well. For several years the President of the Russian Federation, the Prime Minister, and also the Minister of Foreign Affairs have signed a number of international agreements in which Moscow has undertaken obligations "to restore justice" and to return cultural values to Western countries. The string of these legal documents was started by the agreement between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany, signed on November 16, 1990, Article 16 of which stipulates the returning of the cultural values illegally removed during the Second World War. The supporters of the Federal Law stand for the observance of the principle of ´justice´. We already returned to the German people masterpieces of the Dresden Art Gallery, 320,000 books, 15,000 manuscripts and archival documents, part of the books from the unique Gotha collection, but "who will return or compensate cultural values, lost or stolen by German occupants in Russia?"⁴. The executive authority objects to them that the right to private property is firm, that is why it is necessary to take into account the fact that "some values were taken out under the order of Soviet military administration in Germany and others were brought to Russia in a soldier´s bag". And, despite all our losses in this war, we are a great country, and "our laws ... should comply with our greatness".

Among all these provoking newspaper trials, perhaps one article "It All Comes from our Habit of Secrecy"⁵ stands out for being very calm in tone and sober in its stated opinion. In this article the Director of the Art Institute, Alexey Komech, says, firstly, that the problem of ´trophy art´ probably wouldn´t exist, if the masterpieces allocated to our museums on a completely lawful basis were on display and accessible to everybody, instead of being concealed out of some false bashfulness. "There is no secret storing in Western countries; usually everything, which is in stock, is known". Secondly, everything that came to us illegally should be returned. And, thirdly, the question of an exchange or sale of objects of culture is not only complicated, it is immoral. A hidden meaning here is offensive: you are poor, we will help you.

Yet it is necessary to reflect on a symptomatic publication of the journalist Ludmila Volkova "Who Will Be a Decision-Maker in the Question of Military Trophies?"⁶. Her article is a review of a telephone poll of Moskovskii Komsomolets´ "Public Voice". The question of the poll was to return to Germany the works of art taken out to the Soviet Union, or not to. 80% of the people who called considered that we shouldn´t return the works of art; 16% are categorically sure of the opposite; and only 4% still doubt. Among those who doubt only one reader put forward, from our point of view, a correct decision: "It is very difficult to answer unequivocally, we do not know all the details. We need the facts to think it over".

In the article of Tatyana Maximova "Hide Rembrandt! The enemy does not sleep"⁷ one should think that the author speaks not exactly about restitution. The album of the Dutch diplomat Andrey Vinius is being kept in the Library of the Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Department. 170 drawings which belong to the ´golden century´ of Dutch art (17th century) are assembled in this album. This edition requires restoration. The Dutch offered help free-of-charge for the right of exhibiting the album in the Netherlands. The Ministry of Culture didn´t give its permission to take "cultural values out of the country". A conclusion can be drawn immediately: let these unique drawings deteriorate here, but we will never give them back to the Dutch. Such an unreasonable decision, unfortunately, becomes typical for state leaders of Russia. We shouldn´t forget that in the discussions and acceptance of the Federal Law the specificity of individual subjects of culture, their particular importance for national spiritual life were never taken into consideration. And consequently it is necessary not only to return those things, that have got to our territory illegally, but also cultural objects, that were not required by the Russians, for example, a significant number of the books in foreign languages, which nobody read and would hardly read in our country; and, at last, to return things that we are, unfortunately, unable to keep for mankind in the state in which they should be kept. We should honestly admit that our country is in such a condition that we don´t have any means for the construction of new specially equipped storages for the archival documents, for rare books. We can not ensure preservation and restoration of the unique subjects of culture. That is why, probably, we should think about our descendants in world scale.

Evgenia Korkmasova, Library for Foreign Literature, Moscow

Notes:
1 Literaturnaya Gazeta. March 12,1997. P .9.
2 Article "The Displaced Values is Russian Property". In: Rossijskaya Federatsiya. No 19. 1996. P. 48-50. Article "Have Some Decency, Gentlemen!...". In: Rossijskaya Federatsiya. No 4. 1997. P. 52-53.
3 Article "There is No Such Things as Free-of-Charge Masterpieces". In: Vek. 1997. No 8. 225. P. 12.
4 A. Akhtamsyan "There is No Such Things ...".
5 Kultura. March 15, 1997. P. 3.
6 Moskovskii Komsomolets. March 11, 1997. P. 7.
7 Komsomolskaya Pravda. March 12, 1997. Application. P. 1.

PROCEEDINGS OF AMSTERDAM SYMPOSIUM (1996) PUBLISHED

In "Spoils of War" No. 2 Josefine Leistra reported on our Amsterdam symposium in April 1996, marking the 50th anniversary of the return of looted Dutch book collections (pp. 31-33). The same issue included a summary of Col. S.J. Pomrenze´s symposium lecture on his activities in Offenbach in Spring 1946 (pp. 18-20).

We are glad that now, exactly one year later, the proceedings have been printed thanks to the co-operation of all lecturers, the editorial committee and the great efforts of our translator and editor Lee Mitzman (Amsterdam). A substantial support of the Netherlands Inspectorate of Cultural Heritage and the ISSH printing facilities enabled us to publish the full text of all lectures and introductions.

The full (and in some cases extended) lectures are divided (just like the symposium) into several sections. The heading "Looking Back" covers the lectures by Mr. Pomrenze (on the Offenbach Archival Depot) and by A.J. van der Leeuw (on the Dutch claims in the Fifties).

The second section is entitled "Current Research" and includes the lectures on Rosenberg´s Music Theft Apparatus (Willem de Vries), on the "Vicissitudes des archives maÚonniques franÚaises sous le rÊgime de Vichy (1940-1944)" (Vicissitudes of the French Free Masons Archives under the Vichy-regime, Florence de Lussy), on "Das Schicksal der Dokumente des YIVO in Wilna" (The Fate of the YIVO-Documents in Vilnius, Esfira Bramson) (both followed by an English summary), and the extensive contribution by Patricia Grimsted on "New Clues in the Records of Archival and Library Plunder: The ERR Ratibor Center and the RSHA VII Amt Operations in Silesia" (with a new map showing all relevant sites).

The third section on "Recovery and Co-operation" contains the lectures on books, archives and art of Western origin kept in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia: "The Fate of the Archives and Books of the Belgian Socialist Movement" (Wouter Steenhout and Michel Vermote), "Exploring Western Archives in Russia" (Hans de Vries), "German Literary Treasures in the Russian State Library for Foreign Literature" (Ekaterina Genieva), "On the Recovery of Art. Recent Developments" (Josefine Leistra) and on "Russia´s only Restitution of Books to the West: Dutch Books from Moscow (1992)" (Frits J. Hoogewoud).

Next to the lectures we added a fourth section with illustrated "Introductions" given during the excursions to institutions and collections looted during World War II: Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Ets Haim, Jewish Historical Museum, the Jewish archives in the Amsterdam Municipal Archive, the Women´s Archives and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Freemasons´ Collection in the Hague. Short bibliographies to all articles and quite a number of new illustrations enhance the usefulness of the book.

Frits J. Hoogewoud, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Amsterdam

The Return of Looted Collections (1946 - 1996): An Unfinished Chapter. Ca. 120 pp. (ISBN 90 6861 1364). Full details about acquiring the book are to be obtained from Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Amsterdam University Library, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

HUNGARIAN PUBLICATIONS ON THE SPOILS OF WAR

The title of László Mravik´s article "Saved How Many Times?"1 is an ironic reflection on the title of the exhibition in the Pushkin Museum of Moscow with artworks seized by the Red Army during World War II ("Twice Saved"). In this article Mravik repeatedly emphasizes that between 1945 and 1949 the Red Army seized and shipped out of Hungary an exceptionally high number of artworks, thereby violating all international legal norms. This fact can be conclusively proven by the existent documents. It can also be confirmed that the Soviets destroyed a part of these artworks and collections while still in Budapest, in the depository where they were collected: stamp collections were burned, porcelain was smashed to pieces, while a part of the goldsmith´s work was melted down.

This conclusively disproves the cynical and untrue statements made by Irina Antonova, Director of the Pushkin Museum, that Hungarian Jewish art collectors had sold their collections to the Germans. According to international treaties, Hungarian Jewry, which was systematically stripped of its properties and shipped off to concentration camps, cannot be regarded as a belligerent party, and neither can various church organizations. Thus their former properties were seized entirely unlawfully by the Soviet Army. The Russian government is in fact continuing the atrocities perpetrated by the Holocaust by refusing to return the property of the former victims. The intentions of the Russians were clearly signaled by Irina Antonova when she included some of the paintings housed in the Grabar Institute of Moscow which have already been identified by Hungarian experts in the permanent exhibition of the Pushkin Museum. In conclusion Mravik notes that the steps taken by the current Hungarian government for reclaiming the artworks in question are ineffective.

In 1994 László Mravik organized two exhibitions - in the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest and in the Helikon Castle Museum of Keszthely - showing the photos of outstanding artworks from Hungary which in the course of the 20th century were either sold abroad, seized or destroyed. The catalogue of the exhibition, also written by Mravik,² offers a good overview of the losses of artworks suffered by Hungary in the 20th century, including - among others - paintings by Rembrandt and the French impressionists, outstanding medieval goldsmiths´ works, textile and coin collections which were taken out of the country.

The first great losses were suffered during the great economic slump of the 1930s when collectors began selling off pieces from their collections, mostly abroad, to improve their finances. Before World War II a part of the collections owned by wealthy Hungarian Jews was also sold abroad as a result of the anti-Jewish legislation. In March 1944 the Germans occupied Hungary, and Eichmann and other high ranking German officers seized most of what had remained of these collections either through blackmail or simply by taking them away. These artworks were later shipped to Germany and at the end of the war they were seized by the Red Army in Berlin.

The greatest losses, however, were caused by the Red Army which occupied the country in 1945. Special Russian military units raided the vaults of the Budapest banks where, beside other valuables, they also seized about 3,000 artwork deposits from these vaults. According to MrÂvik´s estimates, these could amount to as much as half a million artworks. These were for some time stored in Budapest, and together with artworks seized in other parts of the country, they were shipped to the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1949, where they have been housed to the present day. Characteristically enough, on August 3, 1945, the then Hungarian Minister of Culture wrote a letter to Marshal Voroshilov, the Soviet President of the Allied Control Commission, in which he requested that the Hungarian artworks stored in Budapest should be returned to their rightful owners and to Hungary. Voroshilov did not even bother to reply. Together with other documents, a copy of this letter is also published in the catalogue. The catalogue includes as well a reproduction of archive photos of 42 outstanding artworks.

István Fodor, Director of the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Budapest

Notes:
1 Új Mûvészet VII. Nos 10-11, October-November 1996.
2 Mravik, Laszlo: Scattered Collections. Keszthely 1994.

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE "LIBRARIES, BOOKS, IDEOLOGY DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-1945)" IN JURMALA (LATVIA)

The National Library of Latvia, through this conference, taking place in Jurmala from October 8-12, 1996, aimed to fill the still existing blank leaves in the history of Eastern Europe, i.e. in the history of its libraries, publishing houses, censorship, books destroyed or robbed as spoils of war during World War II.

23 papers were delivered in total. Most of the participants and speakers were from the Baltic States: 15 Latvians, 3 Estonians, 2 Lithuanians. Among the foreign speakers were 2 Poles, and speakers from Russia, the United States, Finland and Hungary (one from each country). The choice of the speakers reflected the main theme of the conference: the situation of culture in the Baltic countries during the war. The situation there was quite specific and not very typical compared to other countries in Europe occupied by the Nazis. During World War II the Baltic States lived through two occupations: Soviet (which, for example, lasted in Latvia from August 5, 1940 till June 1941) and German (until summer 1944). Thus the lectures had to describe and characterize two separate systems of cultural repression: Soviet and Nazi. The papers either gave a combined account of both systems or described them separately. One of the speakers discussed only the Soviet period (K. Konstantinus: Latvian Book Publishing during the First Year of Soviet Occupation 1940-1941) and six other speakers dwelt exclusively on the German occupation (e.g. I. Skinke: The Work of the General Directorate for Education and Culture 1941-1944; A Glimpse at Historical Sources). Ten speakers referred to the entire 1940-1944 period (e.g. V. Zanders: Book Publishing in Latvia during World War II).

Generally, the papers of Baltic speakers used a sharper tone in the description of the Soviet occupation than in the description of the German occupation. The latter one took a relatively smooth course in these countries because the Baltic States engaged in a far-reaching cooperation with the Germans who allowed them to keep some forms of local administrative authority, run publishing houses and libraries, and the cultural life, though censored, had not been so much destroyed as in the USSR or in Poland. The speakers presented the activity of publishing houses (5 papers), ideology of occupiers and their power apparatus (3 papers), the situation of individual literary genres (such as the novel, 1 paper), the situation of libraries (3 papers), official censorship (2 papers), the situation of bibliography (1 paper). A Hungarian speaker, Laszlo Szogi, referred in his paper on "The Influence of Wartime Events and Ideologies on Hungarian Scientific Libraries" to the situation of research libraries in a country which for the most part of the war was a German ally and in which only in 1944 part of the collections were affected by the wartime threat as they were taken, among others, into the depths of Russia.

Different problems were raised by Russian and Polish authors. Irina Matveyeva from the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg in her lecture entitled "Removal of Russian Book Collections during World War II" presented the war losses in quantitative terms by different categories of libraries, gave an account on the displacement of books both in the territory of Russia and the Baltic States, transport of collections to Germany and problems with their restitution. Andrzej Mezynski of the Parliamentary Library in Warsaw in his paper "Losses from Polish Libraries during World War II" gave some figures illustrating the entire picture of losses of Polish libraries (ca. 30 million books lost), and also described the mechanism of destruction hidden behind the whole process. Hanna Laskarzewska of the National Library in Warsaw in her address "Is it Possible to Study Losses of Libraries 50 Years after the End of World War II?" spoke about the methodological and factographic difficulties of the attempts to describe library losses from the perspective of 50 years that have passed since the end of the war.

The papers will be published in a special conference proceedings volume.

Andrzej Mezynski, Library of the Sejm, Warsaw

CONFERENCE "PROPERTY AND RESTITUTION - A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY TO HISTORY" IN GENEVA

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights organization with headquarters in Los Angeles and a membership of over 400,000, convened for a conference in Geneva on June 23-25, 1997 entitled "Property and Restitution - A Moral Responsibility to History".

The Centre, which draws the lessons of the Holocaust to the analysis and combat of contemporary prejudice, placed about two years ago the issue of assets looted by the Nazis among its highest priorities. Beyond the research significance, the elderly and frail condition of Holocaust survivor claimants demanded a political and media initiative from the Centre to sensitise governments, banks, insurance companies and museums implicated in the restitution process.

Thus, 27 experts from 18 countries and three continents assembled in Geneva to present their findings on gold, real-estate, objets d´art and other property plundered from the victims.

Government officials, representatives of investigating commissions, lawyers, bankers and ethicists also addressed claim procedures, juridical precedents, the use of internet and electronic media in the search for owners, political leadership´s responsibility to the victims of Nazism and the role of religion on the spiritual and moral account. A special reception to honor five Swiss ´righteous gentiles´, who jeopardized their own lives to rescue fugitives from the Nazi atrocity, emphasised the role of the individual in preserving human values. The conference provided the first public platform for the General Secretary of the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, since its establishment in 1947.

The veteran war criminal investigator, Simon Wiesenthal, closed the conference with his message on "Memory as the Key to the Future".

On August 15, 1944, with the Allies approaching Paris, a train of looted art was stopped by the Resistance on its way to the German frontier. On the same day, a train of deportees left Drancy for Auschwitz; it was never stopped. This counterpoint provided a poignant departure for the conference session on "Looted Objects d´Art-The Path to Recovery". Moderated by International Herald Tribune correspondent Barry James, Konstantin Akinsha, Hector Feliciano, Josefine Leistra and Doris Lemmermeier approached the problems of art location and restitution, respectively, from the former Soviet, French, Dutch and German perspectives. Added details were provided on the Mauerbach auction in Austria. The arrival of three members of the Russian Duma with a list of art objects sought for repatriation by Moscow provided an intriguing twist, as also an itemized collection from Argentine sources, recently discovered in Buenos Aires.

Director of Archives Quai d´Orsay, Ambassador Louis Amigues, spoke of claims procedures for the some 1,950 "MNR" (non-reclaimed) items in the Museums of France, but would not confirm rumors that these heirless objects could be placed for safekeeping in the Museum of Jewish Art and Tradition, about to open next year in Paris. Nor was it denied that a bust of Madame de Pompadour in President Chirac´s ElysÊe Palace and an early mould of Rodin´s "The Kiss" in Prime Minister Jospin´s Matignon mansion were included in the "MNR" list.

The Paris auction houses for property and art thrived at their peak under the German occupation. The exposure of such abuses illustrates the perils of collaboration with evil.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of archives in East-Central Europe launched the first debates on restitution of Jewish property lost to the Nazis and the Communists. The European Parliament presented reparation as the key to the entry into the community of the enlightened and democratic West. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is now receiving three or four claims per day from Australia to Chile, South Africa to Israel, as the media take up the enquiry on a global level.

"Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue", the Biblical injunction hints at twin acts of commission. In the context of genocide these point to remembrance and restitution. Restitution or reparation is not charity but "Tikkun", an acknowledgment of responsibility and settlement of rights.

Restitution is a moral pedagogy, and in respect to the current campaign, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre emphasises two caveats:

The focuses of research (neutral Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Argentina and occupied France or Norway, etc) are not the bearers of collective guilt. Alliances must be built with all elements in those societies that seek the truth.

The issue is not exclusive to Jewish claimants. Coalitions should be made with other victims´ organisations, for the Shoah, in its aim of total extermination of the Jews, was primus inter pares, but was also a bench mark for the atrocities wrought upon all other victims of Nazism.

The Geneva conference program carried a quotation from Leviticus Chapter 25.10: "In the fiftieth year , thou shalt ... restitute to each man his property...". If, by creating a synergetic effect between experts and participants, the Wiesenthal Centre´s conference has assisted in reinforcing the push for transparency as a moral responsibility, its purpose will have been partially achieved, for the exposure of these truths lances a long-festering boil and allows the pus to drain. The cleansing of the wound can be an act of catharsis for the collaborator, added armament against Holocaust denial and a final accounting for the victims - both Jewish and non-Jewish - and their heirs.

Shimon Samuels, Director for International Liaison,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Paris

CONFERENCE "THE RESTITUTION OF CULTURAL TREASURES: PROBLEMS OF REPATRIATION AND COMMON USAGE" IN MINSK

The international scientific conference on "The Restitution of Cultural Treasures: Problems of Repatriation and Common Usage (Legal, Scientific, and Ethical Aspects)" took place in Minsk on June 19-20, 1997 under the aegis of UNESCO.

It was organized by the National Scientific Education Centre F. Scaryna with the participation of the Ministry of Culture and Education, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Byelorussia, and the UNESCO. The other participants were delegates from eight European countries, including the Ukraine. On this occasion the intergovernmental collection "Vyartanno" (Returning) no. 3 was published. It deals with archival materials on the problems of search and repatriation of national cultural treasures which are outside the borders of Byelorussia (see Bibliography).

The conference highlighted the importance of combining the efforts of the international community concerning the mentioned problems in the spirit of international legal norms in accordance with the U.N.O. documents about science, education and culture. The conference proved the cooperation effectiveness of scientists and cultural workers regarding the restitution of cultural values.

Fruitful discussions on legal, scientific and ethical restitution aspects, which are considered to be new opportunities for cooperation in the cultural field, led to new knowledge branches: the necessity to update national legislative norms and to adjust them to the international standards, to create a common database in this field.

The main subject of the conference was Russia. In connection with the law adopted in Russia "On Cultural Values Removed to the USSR as a Result of World War II and Located in the Territory of the Russian Federation", the topical question arose about treasures looted by the Nazis from museums, archives, libraries of Ukraine, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldavia which were removed to Russia in 1945-46.

Russia ignored the agreement signed by the presidents of the CIS "About the Repatriation of Cultural and Historical Treasures to Countries of their Origin" (Minsk, February 14, 1992). These are the ethical problems and the problems of cooperation in the European space: they exist or they are supposed to be in force.

The close cooperation of post-Soviet countries in the field of cultural heritage (concerning its discovering, searching and usage) was also discussed. The necessity to take into account international legislative acts and ethical aspects in order to settle conflicts was stressed. The conference dealt with the question of organizing a meeting with the intergovernmental expert groups from the CIS in Moscow in order to start projects that will contribute to the return of cultural objects. The participants agreed to call upon UNESCO to pay attention to these problems in post-Soviet countries.

Great attention should also be paid to the cultural treasures which were discovered on the territory of other countries after the migration from Germany in 1945-1946.

The participants called upon the Secretariat of UNESCO to organize a special session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Commitee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Treasures to the Countries of their Origin and its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation, and to the problems of actualization of the search for treasures lost during the Second World War.

The conference in Minsk proved the effectiveness of the steps, taken towards enrichment of international experience concerning the repatriation and restitution of cultural treasures.

Alexander Fedoruk, Head of the National Commission
of the Restitution of Cultural Treasures to Ukraine, Kiev

The text of the final document of this conference see country report Byelorussia.

THE ROLE OF UNESCO "INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMMITTEE FOR PROMOTING THE RETURN OF CULTURAL PROPERTY" IN THE RESOLUTION OF DISPUTES CONCERNING CULTURAL PROPERTY REMOVED IN CONSEQUENCE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

One of the unsettled issues of the Second World War has been the restitution of cultural property taken during the hostilities. In the absence of peace treaties or special restitution agreements neither the "Protocol to The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict" 1954, nor the UNESCO "Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property" are directly applicable to this issue because their provisions are not retroactive, although the principles of the Hague Convention represent customary international law.

What options are available for states wishing to recuperate such property? As in any disagreement between states on movable cultural property, they may undertake bilateral negotiations in order to conclude a restitution agreement settling their mutual claims.

If the bilateral negotiations fail, the states may use the services of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin and its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation. This Committee was set up in 1978 by the General Conference of UNESCO and its founding was motivated by the claims of recently decolonized states for the return of cultural property which they had lost to the colonial countries. Although its competence has never been invoked in the case of conflict-linked removed cultural property, it would have jurisdiction in conformity with Article 4 of its Statutes.1

The Committee is composed of 22 member states of UNESCO. Currently Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Italy, Kuwait, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Madagascar, Myanmar, the Netherlands, Peru, the Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Togo, Ukraine and Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) are members of the Committee. The Committee meets every two years, and half of its members are elected every two years by the General Conference of UNESCO.

Its major role is to serve as a negotiating forum at assisting the member states of UNESCO to resolve claims for the restitution or return of cultural property to its country of origin. It should be pointed out that the Committee does not have power to adjudicate; it may only mediate and recommend.

The Committee also encourages technical co-operation, training activities, exchange of information on legal and other aspects of the fight against illicit traffic in cultural property and last, but not least, it raises political awareness of this problem.

To date, the Committee has held nine sessions. Sessions of the Committee are not limited to its members; representatives of other member states of UNESCO and of states which are not members of UNESCO are present in substantial numbers as observers, international intergovernmental (e.g. INTERPOL, the Council of Europe, the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law) and non-governmental organizations (e.g. the International Council of Museums) take part in the work of the Committee. The Committee adopts recommendations which deal with various aspects of the fight against illicit traffic of cultural property.

Some cases of restitution within the Committee should be mentioned: the exchange of artefacts between museums in Jordan and the United States of America, the return of over 7,000 cuneiform tablets from the German Democratic Republic to Turkey and the return of over 12,000 pre-Columbian objects to Ecuador from Italy after a seven-year litigation. Other cases are still pending: the well-known case of the Parthenon Marbles held presently in the British Museum which are claimed by Greece from the United Kingdom, the claim of Turkey against the Federal Republic of Germany related to a sphinx from the Hittite capital at Boghuzkoy and finally, the claim of the Islamic Republic of Iran against Belgium concerning gravegood from Khorvin (the last case is still being litigated).

At a symposium held in Kiev from December 12 -13, 1996, Ukraine, which is a Member of the Committee, sponsored a Recommendation which was adopted, proposing that the Committee should be asked to hold a special session to discuss issues related to cultural property removed as consequence of the Second World War.

In conformity with Article 5(1) the Committee has the right to convene an extraordinary session dealing with this issue.² However, it is evident that not all Committee members are equally interested in this matter. In such case, the Committee may also create an ad hoc subcommittee³ or an ad hoc working group⁴ composed of a limited number of experts representing the states concerned which would study this matter.

It might be preferable to create a sub-committee of only those Committee members which are really concerned in the matter, inviting participation from other member states of UNESCO which are also concerned. Another possible procedure would be for UNESCO to establish a simple working group, not specifically attached to the Intergovernmental Committee, to study the problem, in accordance with the general mandate of the Constitution of the organization.

To conclude, mediation through the Committee may have some advantages. First, the states concerned would be able to exchange their views in a neutral forum without being obliged to accept some obligatory decision of this forum. Second, this issue would be discussed from a number of points of view; not necessarily only the legal one. Finally, the states would be able to avail themselves of the experience of the UNESCO Secretariat in this field.

Lyndel V. Prott, Chief, Jan Hladik, Assistant Program Specialist,
International Standards Section, Division of Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, Paris

Notes:
1 Article 4. "The Committee shall be responsible for:

Seeking ways and means of facilitating bilateral negotiations for the restitution or return of cultural property to its countries of origin when they are undertaken according to the conditions defined in Article 9;

Promoting multilateral and bilateral co-operation with a view to the restitution and return of cultural property to its countries of origin:...

2 Article 5(1)

The Committee shall meet in regular plenary session at least once and not more than twice every two years. Extraordinary sessions may be convened as specified in the Committee's Rules of Procedure.

3 Article 6

The Committee may set up ad hoc subcommittees for the study of specific problems related to its activities, as described in paragraph 1 of Article 4. Membership of such subcommittees may also be open to member states of UNESCO which are not represented in the Committee.
The Committee defines the mandate of any such ad hoc subcommittee.

4 Rule 10.3

"The Committee may set up working groups for studying certain problems related to those of its activities which are defined in Article 4, paragraphs 2 to 7 of its Statutes." Rule 10.4
"The terms of reference of the ad hoc subcommittees and working groups shall be defined by the Committee."

JUDAICA LIBRARIANS VISIT VILNIUS

Background

The fate of Jewish library collections in Europe represents an important chapter in any discussion of cultural treasures and their disposition during and after World War II. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg confiscated Jewish libraries and archives en masse, and shipped them to Frankfurt am Main for incorporation into the "Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage" (Institute for Research of the Jewish Question). After the defeat of Nazi Germany, hundreds of thousands of books and periodical volumes, archival folders, and ephemera from European Jewish libraries were found near Frankfurt.

Some were returned to their original owners, whether in their original locations (e.g., the Rosenthaliana Library in Amsterdam 1) or in their re-established headquarters elsewhere (e.g., the YIVO Institute, located in Vilna [Vilnius] from 1925 to 1940 and in New York City thereafter²). For most of the pillaged Jewish libraries, however, no successor institutions survived the war. The Jewish Cultural Reconstruction program was devised to distribute tens of thousands of ´orphaned´ books to Jewish libraries throughout the world.³

Not all of the confiscated collections were removed from their places of origin. For example, there are now approximately 50,000 Hebrew and Yiddish books (along with tens of thousands of newspaper issues) in the possession of the Bibliographical Centre of the National Library of Lithuania (NLL), Vilnius. These materials eluded the fate of an even greater quantity of Jewish library and archival items that had been sent from that city to Frankfurt during 1942 and 1943.

Beginning in November 1996, a series of news reports in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, and the Jewish Week (New York) brought to the attention of the general public the Vilnius collections, which in addition to books and periodicals, also include Torahs and other Jewish sacred scrolls. A coalition of American Jewish organizations was formed in December 1996 to discuss the Jewish collections at the NLL and formulate proposals that would address their disposition.

Judaica Librarians´ Delegation Visits Vilnius

In January and February 1997, two fact-finding missions to Vilnius - the first one sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the second one organized by U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) - paid brief visits to the NLL and its Bibliographic Centre. These delegations were followed by one consisting of three U.S. Judaica librarians, who visited Vilnius from March 19 to 26, 1997. The librarians´ delegation, which was sponsored by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was headed by Herbert Zafren, Director-Emeritus of Klau Library at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion (Cincinnati); the other participants were Pearl Berger, Dean of Libraries of Yeshiva University (New York), and Zachary Baker, Head Librarian of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York). They were asked to look into the following issues:

Provenance of the collections;
Quality and research value;
Physical condition and preservation needs;
Access and cataloguing;
Plans for the future.

This was the first delegation of professional Judaica librarians to be granted full and unimpeded access to the Jewish collections at the NLL.

Findings of the Judaica Librarians´ Delegation

Provenance: The largest single bloc of books - 15,000 volumes, or approximately one third of the Hebrew and Yiddish books at the Bibliographic Centre - belonged to the Hevrah Mefitse Haskalah, the largest library operating under Jewish community auspices in Vilnius. During the Nazi occupation, that library served the doomed Jewish inhabitants of Vilnius as the Ghetto Library,⁴ in 1944, after liberation, the Ghetto Library was incorporated into the short-lived Vilnius Jewish Museum. When the museum was liquidated at the end of 1948, its library was absorbed by the State Book Chamber of the Lithuanian S.S.R. - antecedent of today´s Bibliographic Centre. The director of the Book Chamber, Antanas Ulpis, ignored orders to destroy Jewish materials under his jurisdiction and consequently these were rescued, in effect, a second time.⁵
Jewish materials comprised but a small fraction of the Book Chamber´s overall collections. The Book Chamber was designated by the Soviet authorities as the central repository for the restricted library collections ("spetsfondy") of Lithuania. These restricted collections were opened up only during the era of glasnost´; the earliest published report on the Book Chamber´s Jewish collections appeared in 1987.⁶ Representatives of Jewish research establishments outside of the former Soviet Union have visited the Book Chamber on a regular basis since early 1989. Thus, the most recent press reports emanating from Vilnius can be regarded as "old news".
Books and newspapers from two institutions which currently operate outside of Lithuania - the YIVO Institute (New York) and the Telshe (Telsiai) Yeshiva (Cleveland) - were also encountered by the librarians´ delegation. The Bibliographic Centre possesses library materials bearing stamps and mailing labels from defunct libraries as far away as Warsaw and Czestochowa, Poland; however, the vast majority were originally owned by Jewish institutions and individuals in pre-war Vilnius (then under Polish rule) and Lithuania.
Quality/research value: According to the NLL´s criteria, the publications in the Jewish collections fall into three categories: (a) Lithuanian imprints, (b) Lituanica, i.e., publications with some connection to Lithuania (including items - regardless of subject matter - bearing stamps and labels indicating that they once belonged to libraries in Lithuania), and (c) materials published outside of Lithuania and lacking any connection with that country. A spot check by the Judaica librarians´ delegation indicated that perhaps 85% of the Hebrew-alphabet books in the Bibliographic Centre are readily available in Judaica libraries elsewhere - especially the U.S. and Israel - and that many of the remainder are also available in variant editions and printings. A residue of some 1,000 unique items - especially 19th and 20th century ephemera - may be found among the books. As for the periodicals and newspapers, most dating from the interwar decades, these include many issues not collected by libraries outside of Lithuania and for this reason they possess considerable research value.
Condition/preservation needs: While there are some indications of deterioration and mistreatment, perhaps the most striking observation one can make, in view of the Jewish collections´ tragic history, is that they have survived at all. Fortunately, the relatively cool and uniform climatic conditions prevailing in the former church sanctuary to some degree retarded the collections´ deterioration, over time. The NLL has ambitious plans for the physical conservation of these materials; in addition, microfilming of Lithuanian Jewish newspapers in the Bibliographic Centre - part of a project that is being coordinated by the Library of Congress (Washington, DC) - is under way.
Access and cataloguing: Handwritten cards provide catalogue access to the Jewish collections at the NLL, and the library administration hopes eventually to include this information in its automated catalogue. There is a shortage of staff with the expertise needed to catalogue Hebrew and Yiddish materials at the NLL, which currently employs only two part-time individuals with knowledge of those languages.
Plans for the future: The future of the Jewish collections at the NLL hinges on the following internal and external factors:
1. The NLL´s plans to incorporate two copies (whenever possible) of all Lithuanian publications - regardless of language - into its National Archive of Lithuanian Imprints;
2. The re-established State Jewish Museum´s claims on Lituanica, duplicates, and periodica (the museum is headed by the parliamentarian Emanuelis Zingeris);
3. The claims made by institutions outside of Lithuania (e.g., YIVO, Telshe Yeshiva) on those portions of their pre-war collections - including Lithuanian imprints, Lituanica, and non-Lithuanian imprints - that are still in Vilnius.

The NLL administration is amenable to discussing the exchange of non-Lithuanian books and duplicates in the Lituanica category, but is not prepared to agree to claims by institutions outside of Lithuania for the return of their pre-war property. The NLL administration, furthermore, regards the Torahs and other sacred scrolls as manuscripts rather than ritual objects, and is storing them in its manuscript division. (Four Torah scrolls, however, were recently released by the NLL to synagogues in Lithuania.)

Concluding Observations

After the librarians´ delegation returned from Vilnius, a report was prepared which was submitted to its sponsors in early May 1997. The report included a summary of findings and a list of recommendations aimed at enhancing international cooperation and improving access to the collections in Vilnius. The delegation´s members recognize that Vilnius is only one of several centers in Eastern Europe known to possess extensive Judaica libraries, and that work needs to be done to learn more about collections elsewhere in the region.

To what extent can library collections that did not leave their places of origin be regarded as "spoils of war"? As far as Jewish collections are concerned, the answer ought to be obvious: The systematic and largely successful attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe created a situation whereby book collections frequently outlasted their individual or institutional owners. (In a very few cases, these owners themselves were able to relocate, while their property remained behind.) The fate of the Jewish library collections in Vilnius cannot be divorced from the historical factors which brought them to their present location at the NLL´s Bibliographic Centre. Their ultimate disposition remains, for the above-enumerated reasons, yet to be resolved.

Zachary M. Baker, Head Librarian,
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

Notes:
1 Hoogewoud, Frits J.: The Nazi Looting of Books and Its American ´Antithesis´: Selected Pictures from the Offenbach Archival Depot´s Photographic History and Its Supplement. Studia Rosenthaliana 26:1/2 (1992). Pp. 158-192. [Discussion of the postwar restitution of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Amsterdam.]
2 Dawidowicz, Lucy S.: From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947. New York 1989 (ISBN 0-393-02674-4), paperbackk edition 1991 (ISBN 0-553-35248-2). [Includes the author´s firsthand account of the salvaging of Jewish books and archival documents, including above all materials belonging to the YIVO Institute, found in Germany at the end of World War II.]
3 Poste, Leslie I[rlyn]: Books Go Home from the Wars. Library Journal. Dec. 1. 1948. Pp. 1699-1704. [Overview of post-war sorting operations in Germany and distribution of books orphaned by the Nazis´ extermination of European Jewry. See also Poste´s doctoral dissertation: The Development of U.S. Protection of Libraries in Europe during World War II (Chicago: The University of Chicago, Graduate Library School, 1958).]
4 Shavit, David: Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe. Jefferson, NC 1997 (ISBN 0-7864-0203-2). [For the most complete account in English of the operations of the Vilna Ghetto Library, 1941-1943, see Chapter 6, "Vilna Ghetto". Pp. 93-112.] - Hermann Kruk (1897-1944): Bibliothekar und Chronist im Ghetto Wilna (1941-1943) (Librarian and Chronicler of the Vilna Ghetto). Übersetzt aus dem Jidd[ischen] und herausgegeben von Maria Kühn-Ludewig. Hannover 1990. [Includes a biographical essay about Kruk, director of the Ghetto Library in Vilnius, by Pinkhas Schwartz, and the annual report by Kruk, "Ghetto-Bibliothek und Ghetto-Leser (1942)" (Ghetto Library and Ghetto Readers). In German translation.] - Sharlet, Jeff: Keeper of a Civilization. The Book Peddler. No. 21. Spring 1996. Pp. 9-21. [Interview with Dina Abramowicz, former librarian of the Vilna Ghetto Library´s Reading Room; since 1947 a librarian at the YIVO Institute. New York.]
5 Fishman, David E.: Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research 1996. [Overview of the rescue and recovery of the YIVO Institute´s pre-1939 collections, emphasizing materials remaining in Lithuania; in English and Yiddish.]
6 Zingeris, Emanuelis: Knygu hebraju ir jidis kalbomis fondai Lietuvoje (Collections of Hebrew and Yiddish books in Lithuania), Knygotyra 13 (2) (1987). Pp. 86-103. [The first published description of the Lithuanian State Book Chamber´s Jewish collections; includes English and Russian summaries. A Yiddish version of Zingeris´s article: Bikher un mentshn: vegn dem goyrl fun yidishe un hebreishe bikher-fondn in Lite (Books and People: Concerning the Fate of Yiddish and Hebrew Book Collections in Lithuania), appeared in Sovetish heymland. No. 7. 1988. Pp. 70-73.]

FOR GERMANY AND THEMSELVES: THE MOTIVATION BEHIND THE NAZI LEADERS PLUNDERING AND COLLECTING OF ART. PART I

Based on the book "Art as Politics in the Third Reich" (Chapel Hill, London 1997, ISBN 0-8078-2240-X) we will publish a series of articles by the author Jonathan Petropoulos.

The core argument of the book, Art as Politics in the Third Reich, is that the National Socialist elite, although among the most malevolent and destructive figures in history, viewed themselves as arbiters of culture and devoted inordinate time, energy, and resources to artistic matters. The volume is divided into two sections: the first concerns the evolution of the cultural bureaucracy and details the involvement of the top leaders in the administration of art, artists, and related institutions. Organized chronologically, this section documents the efforts of not only Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg - individuals who had a legitimate claim to manage cultural affairs by nature of their state and party positions - but Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Baldur von Schirach, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and many others. Section I reveals the Nazi leaders´ cultural ambitions and chronicles the gradually more radical nature of their policies, as intimidation gave way to repression and purges of museums became plundering campaigns. The official cultural policies of the Third Reich, I argue, are inextricably linked to the more general program of military expansion and racially-determined genocide.

The second section of the volume, which forms the basis for this and the following articles, documents the efforts of the elite to amass private art collections and then seeks to make sense of this behavior. Reconstructing the leaders´ private collections required considerable detective work. As a doctoral candidate, I spent over three years in European archives (mostly in Koblenz, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Paris, and Amsterdam), as well as considerable time in American repositories (mainly Washington and Los Angeles), trying to move beyond the previous studies which treat the collections of Hitler and Göring. Indeed, very similar books have been written about the collections of these two leaders based upon the outstanding office of Strategic Service/Art Looting Investigative Unit reports from the immediate postwar period.1 After initial research, it became evident that other members of the Nazi elite followed the lead of Hitler and Göring. This, then, became a central challenge: to examine the collecting practices of the subleaders. Because efforts to amass art collections proved so widespread among the Nazi leadership corps, this behavior served as a means of expressing aspects of their personalities and world views. The Nazi elite approached culture with a conscious and even sophisticated understanding of its expressive potential, and therefore took an activist posture in its management. They were deeply sensitive to symbols, myth, and rituals, and used them all as forms of communication.²

While scholars have tended to focus upon their public propaganda - whether it entails radio addresses, the party congresses at Nuremberg, or the seemingly unceasing succession of other state-sponsored campaigns - their manipulation of art also provided a means for articulating important messages.³ This communication was often private or limited to the Nazi elite, and the messages were often of a different nature than those directed to the public at large. Beyond any "esprit de corps" or ego gratification, this perception of an elite was important because it was central to the character of the regime. This dichotomy of public and private provided one of the central dynamics of their rule. In this way, one can understand better many of the apparent paradoxes in their behavior: how avowed socialists amassed such enormous wealth, how these barbarous men could view themselves as cultured, and how their supposedly coordinated and efficient government gave rise to so much infighting. In short, an understanding of both the public and the private allows for a more sophisticated understanding of their rule. Art was a major preoccupation for them because it had import in both realms.

They did not so much appreciate art in itself, but rather viewed it as an opportunity to communicate their larger concerns and objectives. Indeed, this instrumental approach to art held true for both their publicly stated goals, as well as their more private ambitions. The common link in both spheres was this instrumentalization, and moreover, their preoccupation with power.

Scholars have explicated systems of meanings in myriad different ways, but anthropological and linguistic strategies have predominated recently, especially in the realm of cultural history.⁴ Acknowledging the need for a critical engagement with these newer approaches and constructs (as there are limitations to such strategies), they nonetheless prove useful to understanding the National Socialist case.⁵ If one takes care to include other methodologies - not to limit oneself to the anthropological and linguistic, but also to make use of psychology, political science, and art history, among other disciplines - one can better understand the leaders, their worldviews and their system of rule. An eclectic and interdisciplinary cultural history also prevents one of the main pitfalls of poststructuralism - the threat, in Jane Caplan´s words, "that National Socialism will be reduced ... to the level of one more spectacle in a society of commercially determined spectacles - the fear that the ultimate way of interpreting or representing the concentration camp will no longer be as a consummate human catastrophe, but as ritual or play".⁶ The goal in explaining the phenomenon of Nazi art collecting is to provide a sophisticated and penetrating analysis of the NS leaders - to move closer to an understanding of their complex collective mentalité - and not to render the subjects bloodless actors.⁷

Dietrich Orlow has noted that the history of the Third Reich "must at time read like a series of interwoven political biographies."⁸ As both political power and art collecting were so highly personal, it is indeed useful to approach the collecting phenomenon by summarizing the behavior of a few of the NS elite. The starting point, as noted above, is Adolf Hitler, as he dominated both the political and artistic spheres within Nazi Germany. His megalomania found expression in both cases, as he sought world domination while striving to amass the greatest art collection of all time.⁹ His personal collection of nineteenth-century German landscape and genre paintings, which he assembled in the early-to-mid-1930s, evolved into the makings of the "Führermuseum", the planned centerpiece of a cultural complex in his childhood home of Linz, Austria.¹⁰

By 1945, this collection included 6,755 paintings, of which 5,350 have been classified as Old Masters.¹¹ Highlights of the collection include Vermeer´s "An Artist in his Studio"; Rembrandt´s "Democritus and Heraclitus"; Leonardo da Vinci´s "Leda and The Swan"; Bruegel the Elder´s "Hay Harvest"; and Watteau´s "The Dance". Besides Old Masters, Hitler pursued German art of the 19th century: Grützner, Spitzweg, Waldmüller, Thoma, Friedrich, Runge and the Austrian artist, Hans Makart were among his favorites. There was to be no contemporary Nazi art in the "Führermuseum": "the artistic embodiment of Germany´s spiritual renewal", to quote Goebbels, would be placed in the "Haus der Deutschen Kunst" (House of the German Art) in Munich and other museums in the Reich. In the private sphere, Hitler confined nearly all contemporary Nazi works to the offices: perhaps two dozen among the thousand works which adorned his residences stemmed from the post-World War I period.¹² This suggests an opinion that Hitler often expressed to his inner circle, but not to the public: that Nazi art was of poor quality.

Hitler amassed his collection through various means. He first acquired art in a private, personal way, as he utilized royalties from "Mein Kampf" and the donations from wealthy benefactors such as Fritz Thyssen to indulge his taste in 19th century German landscape and genre painting.¹³ His personal photographer and adviser, Heinrich Hoffmann, who shared a penchant for this art, played a key role in helping him collect works in the late 1920s and 1930s.¹⁴ Personal gratification gradually gave way to megalomania, and after visiting the great Italian galleries in Rome and Florence in 1938, Hitler conceived a plan to create the "Führermuseum" in Linz. He first sought out an expert to oversee the building of the collection, and based upon the recommendation of the Berlin art dealer Karl Haberstock, he selected Dr. Hans Posse, a renowned museum director whose specialty was Renaissance and Dutch art.

At the start of 1938 Posse was unemployed, having been sacked as director of the Dresden "Gemäldegalerie" (Picture Gallery) by the Gauleiter of Lower Saxony Martin Mutschmann, the reason purportedly being Posse´s lack of political zeal and his earlier purchase of ´degenerate´ modern art.¹⁵ Hitler arranged for Posse´s rehabilitation - including the reappointment to his former post in Dresden - and shortly thereafter named him "Sonderbeauftragter des Führers" (special emissary of the Führer), a position with wide-ranging authority where he acted in Hitler´s name. The once apolitical Posse was won over quickly to the dictator´s vision. In 1938, the two met on several occasions to discuss the secret plans for the museum. The advent that year of operations to confiscate Jewish property in Austria and then in the "Altreich" moved them out of the realm of the rhetorical, as Posse and Haberstock searched through SS-guarded depots for artworks suitable for the collection. Later, the plunder from Poland and the confiscated possessions from Western European Jews (most notably a selection from the over 21,000 artworks taken from French Jews by Alfred Rosenberg´s Einsatzstab, ERR), provided them with an illicit but impressive array of objects for the "Führermuseum".¹⁶

There was considerable effort expended to make the Linz project appear legitimate. First there was the pervasive "Amtssprache" or "bureaucratised language", which was used in the hope of camouflaging deeds: e.g., many works were described as "sichergestellt" or "secured", when in fact, they were stolen from "enemies" of the Reich (most often Jews, but also Freemasons, Communists and others).¹⁷ There were also frequent (but ineffective) orders admonishing the subleaders to avoid improper utilization of artworks which fell into their hands: these pleas for propriety being of course hypocritical and selfinterested. Third, it was stressed (and undeniably true) that much of Hitler´s collection came by way of purchase. Hitler´s agents spent over 163 million Reichsmarks on artworks, making him the greatest art buyer of all time.¹⁸ These purchases were for the most part declared legally binding by postwar investigations - the art thus becoming the property of the German state.¹⁹

Besides purchase and plunder, Hitler enhanced the collection by way of gifts, as the tribute flowed from subordinates, admirers and foreign leaders. These gifts were often placed in Hitler´s residences (the Berghof, the Reich Chancellery, and his Prinzregentenplatz apartment in Munich), although during the war he safeguarded many works in castles and salt mines, and expressed his owernship by way of keeping photographic albums with him in the Führerhauptquartier.

Jonathan Petropoulos, Loyola College, Baltimore (Maryland)

Notes:
1 See, for example, David Roxan and Kenneth Wanstall, The Rape of Art: Hitler´s Plunder of the Great Masterpieces of Europe (New York 1965); Matila Simon, The Battle of the Louvre: the Struggle to Save French Art in World War II (New York 1971); Charles de Jaeger, The Linz File (Exeter 1981); Ernst Kubin, Sonderauftrag Linz: Die Kunstsammlung Adolf Hitlers (Vienna 1989); Jakob Kurz, Kunstraub in Europa, 1939-1945 (Hamburg 1989). More recently Günther Haase has used these reports, but supplemented them with some fine archival research in Kunstraub und Kunstschutz. Eine Dokumentation (Hildesheim 1991); and Lynn Nicholas has relied heavily upon them in her award winning The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe´s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York 1994).
2 See Jay Baird, To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington/Indianapolis 1989), and J.P. Stern, The Führer and the People (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1975).
3 For excellent studies on public propaganda, see Z.A.B. Zemon, Nazi Propaganda (New York/Oxford 1964), Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won: The Most Infamous Propaganda Campaign in History (New York 1978), and Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939-1945. Organizations, Policies, and Publics in Britain and Germany (London 1979). For an example of a more specifically focused study in this sphere, see Hamilton Burden, The Nuremberg Party Rallies, 1923-1939 (London 1967).
4 Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Berkeley 1989), 11.
5 Roger Chartier, who has adopted a critical approach to literary theory, for example, warns against the reductive tendencies of poststructuralism. See Chartier´s critique, "Text, Symbols and Frenchness", Journal of Modern History, 57 (1985), 682-95.
6 Jane Caplan, "Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians", in Central European History 22, nos. 3-4 (1989), 275. Other historians have also expressed support for an eclectic cultural history. See Eley, "Is all the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later", CSST Working Paper #55 (October 1990), 23.
7 For critical discussions on the origins of this project, see Volker Sellin, "Mentalität und Mentalitätsgeschichte", Historische Zeitschrift, 241 (1985), 555-98.
8 Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, 1933-1945 (Pittsburgh 1973), 7.
9 For Hitler´s ambitions for world conquest, see the discussion of his "Stufenplan" in Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler´s World View: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge 1981), and Milan Hauner, "Did Hitler Want A World Dominion?", Journal of Contemporary History, 13, No. 1 (January 1978), 15-32.
10 See note 1 above.
11 See S. L. Faison, Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 4: Linz: Hitler´s Museum and Library (OSS Report, 15 December 1945), 79.
12 In terms of his private residents, note, for example, that post-war Office of Strategic Service investigators determined that 534 works were housed at the Berghof. See S.L. Faison, Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 4, 78. This accords with the calculations of Peter Adam, who observed "In his country retreat, the Berghof, there were no contemporary works - despite the fact that he bought thousands of pieces in the official art exhibitions. But compared with the work of older masters, this number was still relatively small. Among the 3,423 art works Hitler stored away during the last years of the war in the mines of Bad Aussee, only 24 were contemporary works, among them 2 paintings by [the architect Paul Ludwig] Troost obviously kept for sentimental reasons, a picture by Albin Egger-Lienz, and one by Sepp Hilz...". Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York 1992), 119. As an example of NS art in one of Hitler´s offices, see the Ziegler´s triptych "The Four Elements", located in Hitler´s quarters in the Braunhaus. Hitler purchased vast quantities of NS art (e.g., his annual buying trips to the "Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen" in Munich), but did so on behalf of the state, rather than himself personally. See the tables listing Hitler´s purchases from the "Haus der Deutschen Kunst" in Otto Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie: Bildende Kunst und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit im Dritten Reich (Berlin 1978), 345-49.
13 Wulf Schwarzwäller, Hitlers Geld: Bilanz einer persönlichen Bereicherung (Rastatt 1986), 148.
14 Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend (London 1955), and the revised German edition, Hitler wie ich ihn sah: Aufzeichnungen seines Leibfotografen (Munich 1974).
15 Kurz, Kunstraub in Europa, 32-34.
16 For the best studies of the ERR, see James Plaut, Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 1: Activity of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in France (OSS Report, August 15, 1945), Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart 1970), and Jean Cassou, Le Pillage par les Allemands des Oeuvres d´Art et des Bibliothèques Appartenant à des Juives en France (Paris 1947).
17 For more on "Amtssprache" in the Nazi Bureaucracy, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York 1963). 48-49.
18 This is also the estimation of the art historian Jakob Kurz, Kunstraub in Europa, 18.
19 For the expenditure figure for Sonderauftrag Linz, see Janet Flanner, Men and Monuments (New York 1957), 226. For the postwar committees which determined proper ownership of art, see Michael Kurtz, Nazi Contraband: American Policy on the Return of European Cultural Treasures, 1945-1955 (New York 1985), and Hugh Craig Smyth, Repatriation of Art from the Collecting Point in Munich After World War II (The Hague 1988).

THE OVAL HALL SALON IN THE LIBRARY FOR FOREIGN LITERATURE DEVOTED TO RESTITUTION PROBLEMS

Once a month the Oval Hall Salon of the Library for Foreign Literature brings together scientists, writers, literary critics, artists, actors, musicians, theologians - everybody concerned about the fate of national and world culture. Here, in a free and friendly dialogue, the problems of general concern - regardless of age, occupation and political preferences - are being discussed.

On March 18, the guests of the Salon were representatives of TV-Kultura film studio.1 They presented short fragments of various films produced by the studio and devoted to the problem of so-called ´trophy art´. Besides the films "By Rights of Conquerors", "Zoo Story", "Tracing a Disappeared Collection" the audience was shown fragments of the studio projects which are far from completion.

The art director of the studio, Boris Karadgev, was speaking on the specific character of the creation of these films related to the fact that at the time when the studio started working on the project, all the documents on collections removed to the Soviet Union were marked ´secret´, as, though, were marked all the storages where these collections were kept. Even now people directly involved with the process of moving art collections from the territory of Hitler Germany and its allies prefer not to give real information about how this process took place. They remember perfectly well how much you might pay for unnecessary outspokenness not a long time ago, in the Soviet time. Luckily, the persistence of the authors helped them not only to get an access to confidential documents in secret storages, but also to persuade witnesses and participants of the events to take part in the creation of the films.

The chief administrator of the Moscow Art Theatre - Andrey Belokopytov, who became colonel in 1945 - was moving from Berlin the legendary gold of Heinrich Schliemann´s collection. Lieutenant Adrian Rudomino (son of the founder of the Library for Foreign Literature Margarita Rudomino) was organizing the removal of highly important books including the famous Gutenberg Bible. Captain Victor Baldin, in command of the engineer battalion, accidentally found and brought to Moscow (actually saving these masterpieces) one of the best collections of the European drawing of the 15th-19th centuries, the collection of the "Kunsthalle in Bremen". Sophia Vand-Polak, chief keeper of the town of Gorky´s Fine Arts Museum suddenly found herself after the Second World War in possession of paintings from private Hungarian collections, taken by the Nazis to Germany.

Part of the art objects, mentioned and shown in films, to some very limited extent, have become accessible to the public, as happened to Schliemann´s Gold which was exhibited in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. But, to a considerable extent, what was seen by the participants of the meeting in the Oval Hall on March, 18 could be called a sort of ´discovering anew´ something, that for long decades was considered irrevocably lost. So, special interest of the librarians, present at the Oval Hall, was aroused by the videoshooting of incunabulas and manuscripts from the Sárospatak library now located in one of the Russian provincial libraries. These materials have never been on display before.

In a vivid discussion practically everyone was fulfilled with one wish - that all cultural values, for so long believed ´missing´ and for such a long time kept in notorious "spezkhrans" (special depositories) should return to museum halls, to libraries and picture galleries.

All participants of the meeting agreed with the opinion of the film authors, supported by one of the hosts of the salon, Theodor Shanin from Manchester University, Director of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, that the Russian public opinion, as well as the opinion of the Russian Intelligentsia, can and should become the essential factor in the determination of the fate of the ´spoils of war´, that we shouldn´t reduce the circle of the ´involved´ to a small group of politicians and lawyers. Regardless what fate awaits the ´spoils of war´, the most important thing today is to return the masterpieces into cultural circulation and to organize free access to them for the experts.

Culture, as a river, springs from many sources. If one of them dries up, the loss for all is considerably greater than it seems to be at first sight. And not only people of a separately taken country - the whole of mankind suffers from the losses of cultural heritage of the countries being at war. Films, shown in the Oval Hall, remind us about something forgotten in discussions: the problem of restitution has not only a political, but also a humanitarian side. Though it is quite understandable why the accent in the Russian press is laid on political aspects.

As a result of military actions, evacuation, occupation, looting, confiscations, captures, etc, a huge number of culture and art monuments disappeared from the world´s cultural field. According to the international agreements for more than 50 years numerous researchers, lawyers, diplomats, politicians - individually and within the framework of activity of national and international organizations and commissions - conduct works on revealing, returning, and restoring of removed and lost cultural values.

Primarily because of its public importance, this work was covered in detail in all countries, except for the states comprising the socialist camp. In Russia, until recently, the question of the fate of cultural values, lost and removed during war time and the ´just after war´ period, was considered, actually, to be top secret. From this we can understand that single art pieces and the whole collections´ movements, unfortunately, cause innumerable rumors and various political speculations. Only accurate and precise information will help to stop these speculations, to put everything into the right places. The films, created by TV-Kultura studio, are produced to play their role in a truthful coverage of this problem.

Leonid Sitnikov, Editor-in-chief, TV-Kultura, Moscow

Notes:
1 TV-Kultura film studio was created in 1993 as structural part of the editing and publishing complex Kultura, launched by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. On the instructions of the Ministry of Culture the studio took part in the information support of a number of federal cultural programs; some projects were initiated by the studio itself; films produced by TV-Kultura were shown by Russian TV and by various foreign companies. The main direction of the studio´s activity is propaganda of Russia´s cultural heritage, popularization of the events, aimed at the renaissance of Russian spiritual traditions. The studio plans to start working on a cycle of TV programs about dramatic pages of the history of Russian culture.