MEPs to hear plea for enlargement countries to return Nazi-looted art

Date: 13/03/03

By David Cronin

PROSPECTIVE EU member states should be forced to respect an international agreement on the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis, MEPs will be told next week.

German lawyer Jost von Trott zu Solz, who is related to one of the key figures in the 1944 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, will appeal for their backing on the issue at a Parliamentary hearing in Brussels on Tuesday (18 March).

He believes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are holding a trove of works seized by Nazis from their rightful owners. "I personally know two dozen paintings that I am trying to retrieve for my clients [from these four states]," he said. "I am sure there must be some hundreds altogether."

Von Trott, a second cousin of German resistance hero Adam von Trott zu Solz, who was hanged at Plotzensee prison for his role in the July plot, wants EU institutions to pressurise the four countries to actively respect the conclusions of a 1998 diplomatic conference on Holocaust-era assets in Washington. All 15 member states have signed up to its provisions, which are not legally binding, stating that they will endeavour to return art looted by the Nazis before and during the Second World War to the families who first owned them.

The Parliament's legal affairs committee will hear that the Nazis stole masterpieces by such illustrious artists as Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. One of the most notorious collectors of stolen art was Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe.

A paper drafted by Belgian Liberal MEP Willy de Clerq notes there are about 170 claims for returning looted works of art pending in courts throughout Europe, including Russia.

The former European commissioner for external relations notes: "All face the same legal problems: establishing the origins of a cultural good, assessing how to account for the legal gap in ownership between 1933 and 1945, defining the applicable jurisdiction, deciding who may be a 'good faith' purchaser and what the purchaser's rights may be and determining if any limitations period should apply."

De Clerq recommends that the Parliament should examine how an international tribunal could be set up to examine claims for restitution. He argues such a body could be formed under existing international law.

Lucian Simmons, a director of London auctioneers Sotheby's, told European Voice that there was evidence that the Nazis stored some five million works of art in more than 1,500 depots such as mines and castles in the war years. Some 2.5 million were located in what became the US occupation zone in Germany, two million in the Russian zone and 500,000 elsewhere.

One example of what happened to the works of art concerned is the collection of Ismar Littman, a Jewish lawyer in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw in Poland) before the Second World War. By the early 1930s, he had more than 6,000 works of art but, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Littman lost his legal practice and his art collection, declared as degenerate, became almost worthless overnight. In 1934, Littman took his own life. Seated Female Nude, (1927) by German artist Karl Hofer, was one of very few of his collection to escape destruction - and was reclaimed by Littman's daughter in 2002.

"It is hard to estimate how much identifiable looted art remains at large," said Simmons, who will be presenting a 14-page report on the issue to the legal affairs committee. But he said, it is known that "1.5 million books are still missing from German state libraries, notwithstanding partial restitution made by the Soviet Union in 1955".

Sotheby's, he added, has established a database of more than 5,000 victims of Nazi art theft, as well as dealers and others who collaborated with Hitler's regime. Before the auction house publishes its sales catalogues, it uses this so-called red flag database to determine if objects it is handling could have been looted by the Nazis, he added.

Prospective EU Member States should be forced to respect an international agreement on the restitution of artworks stolen by the Nazis, MEPs will be told at a Parliamentary hearing in Brussels on 18 March 2003.