Displaying items by tag: Jewish Heir

France will return seven paintings stolen from their Jewish owners by Nazis during World War II, part of an ongoing effort to give back hundreds of plundered works that still hang in French institutions including the Louvre. The seven paintings were all stolen or sold under duress as their owners fled Europe during the Nazi occupation. The works were to be displayed in Adolf Hitler’s art gallery, which he planned to build in his birthplace in Austria but never came to fruition.

At the end of World War II, with most of Europe in shambles, many artworks were left unclaimed and thousands of French-owned works found homes in the France’s various museums. Government efforts to return these works gained steam last year at the urging of the owners’ families.   The French government believes that there are approximately 2,000 Nazi looted artworks in state institutions; inaccurate archiving and the challenge of properly identifying paintings has made the restitution process a long one.

Six of the seven works to be returned were owned by Richard Neumann, an Austrian Jew who sold his remarkable art collection for a fraction of its value in order to flee Europe. His collection included works by Alessandro Longhi (1733-1831), Sebastiano Ricci (1659-1734), and Gaspare Diziani (1689-1767). The paintings were ultimately placed in the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne, the Agen Fine Arts Museum, and the Tours Fine Art Museum after the war.

The other painting to be returned is Pieter Jansz Van Asch’s (1603-1678) The Halt, which was stolen by the Gestapo in Prague in 1939 from Josef Wiener, a Jewish banker who was deported and later died in a concentration camp. The Dutch masterpiece hung in the Louvre for years until Van Asch’s family tracked it down online in the mid-2000s. The French Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, approved the return of the painting to the family last year.

Thomas Hemer journeyed from Nevada to Leipzig, the city where he was born 88 years ago, to fight for the legacy of his grandfather, an Egyptologist of Jewish origin forced to leave Germany after the Nazis came to power.

In 1937, Georg Steindorff sold his collection of ancient artifacts to the department of Leipzig University that he led. Hemer, his grandson, wants to stop the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany from taking them from the university museum, after a Berlin court ruled on May 26 that the sale was conducted under duress and thus invalid.

The 16-year legal battle pitted Leipzig University and Hemer against the Claims Conference, which filed a claim for the collection after German unification in 1990. In a restitution case that confounds conventions, the Claims Conference is now legal owner of the antiquities, overriding the wishes of the heir. Hemer, who served as a witness, said he’s “astonished.”

Losing the collection “would destroy an institute that my grandfather cherished,” Hemer said in an interview at the museum in Leipzig. Though alert and fit for his age, he walks with a stick and wears a hearing aid. “My grandfather was the institute,” Hemer said. “He was this museum.”

Steindorff led archaeological excursions to Egypt between 1903 and 1931. He complemented his own finds with objects that he purchased for his teaching practice and integrated into the university collection.

Clay, Ceramics
The 163 antiquities include a 4,000-year-old Nagada bowl, ancient clay figures, early Islamic ceramics and Greek and Roman objects. He sold those acquisitions to the university for 8,000 Reichsmarks (about $3,200 at the time) in 1937 and they have been there ever since, in the Egyptology museum he founded, known since 2008 as the Egyptian Museum Georg Steindorff, according to the court.

Before the sale, Steindorff had calculated the value of the individual objects at 10,260 Reichsmarks. The court said the discrepancy is a sign that the sale was not voluntary.

“In the case of sales by those persecuted during the Nazi era there is a legal assumption that these were a result of persecution and therefore liable for compensation,” the administrative court said in a press release after the ruling.

“There is some evidence that, before 1933, Steindorff intended to give his collection to the university,” the court said. “Yet in 1937 he wanted to sell it. Therefore we can’t rule out that the sale was under duress.”

Steindorff remained in Germany until March 1939. He managed to obtain a passport through connections and left for the U.S. via Bremen. He died in 1951 at the age of 90.

‘Measure of Justice’
The Claims Conference, which describes its mission as “securing a measure of justice for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution,” also has a legal remit to recover property confiscated from Jews before World War II in eastern Germany -- in cases where no heirs have stepped forward to stake a claim. According to its website, the group has used more than $1 billion of revenue from such claims to fund social, educational and research programs.

“No Steindorff heirs have come to us,” Gregory Schneider, the executive vice president of the Jewish Claims Conference, said by telephone from New York. “We didn’t know about the grandson until now. That is something we can work out separately. What is important here is that a German court has recognized that this is a forced sale.”