The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  The beginning was easy. The Commission immediately returned the objects which had been on the train liberated by Alexandre Rosenberg and found in Abetz’s little cache at the German embassy. Soon more came in from Neuschwanstein. Mme Rosenberg not only had an inventory of the furniture but had marked each piece with an identifying number, which made trips to the terrible warehouse most productive. After these returns Paul was so grateful that he donated thirty-three works to the French museums and promised others to the Louvre. Edmond had meanwhile started proceedings against various employees who had appropriated the odd object. In the same suit, five dealers including Fabiani and Petrides were cited as having illegal possession of Rosenberg works. Petrides, claiming that he had never knowingly bought a picture stolen from a Jew, nevertheless produced two Matisses and a Utrillo, which he had obtained from Rochlitz, “a merchant known in art circles for twenty years.”13 Fabiani gave back twenty-four pictures without protest and at the same time tried to interest Rosenberg in some sort of deal related to the Vollard pictures which still languished in Canada. At least four more batches of Rosenberg works were recovered from Germany by the Commission between 1946 and 1948.

  Rosenberg had known from the earliest days through a lawyer in Zurich about the paintings which had gone to Switzerland, and had warned Henraux that the Swiss statute of limitations for claims of theft was five years. This did not leave them much time. Information relating to the confiscations had been furnished to the French embassy in Bern in December 1944, but the embassy had shown little interest in the recovery of these French assets. All available intelligence on illicit art trading in Switzerland had thus far been produced by the British Economic Warfare Office and American legation officials, who had blacklisted the principal culprits. In February 1945 British MFAA investigator Douglas Cooper was sent to Switzerland to represent not only the MFAA but also the interests of the French Recuperation Commission. British embassy officials gave him the cover title of “Technical Adviser to the British Trade Delegation,” which was negotiating with the Swiss on the now rather sticky question of German-Swiss economic relations and the disposition of German assets.

  Reverse of a looted Paul Rosenberg picture showing ERR labels

  Armed with the “Blacklist Section’s” information, Cooper began his rounds. A lawyer named Wiederkehr, listed for holding works acquired by Alois Miedl and anxious to be cleared, was most cooperative and expressed delight that he could help the Allies in their search for looted art. He told a skeptical Cooper that he had tried to inform the American consul about the paintings he held, but had not had a reply. He said he had not been suspicious about Miedl’s property until the Bretton Woods announcements regarding Nazi assets abroad, and that he had then shown the pictures to Nathan Katz, who immediately recognized them as Rosenberg property (not difficult, as this was clearly marked on the backs). He had then put them in a bank and refused Miedl’s request that he send them to Spain. It was a nice selection which included van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear and four works by Cézanne.

  As Cooper’s investigation went on, the complicated web of interrelationships woven by those dealing with the Nazis was slowly revealed. Dealer Theodore Fischer’s story changed from day to day as the pressure grew. On his premises Cooper found thirty-one pictures looted from French collections of which ten could immediately be identified as Rosenberg property. He soon discovered which pictures Herr Emil Bührle had bought, and found that Fischer not only had sold confiscated works in his auctions but had sent others to Rio de Janeiro and offered a looted Seurat to the Basel Kunstmuseum, which they had rejected as stolen goods. After these revelations the Swiss government became more cooperative and quickly agreed to freeze and require a census of “German-owned” objects. They also agreed to make the sale of such works illegal and to try to retrieve those which had been smuggled into the country. Having achieved this, Cooper left in March 1945, to return to the Italian theater.14

  Despite its promises of cooperation, the Swiss government had, by September 1945, made no effort to recover the works pointed out to them by the Allies and had not implemented the promised sanctions. Paul Rosenberg decided to go there himself. In early September he arrived in Zurich, lists and photographs in hand, and began a series of confrontations. At the Galerie Neupert he was shown his own Matisse Femme au fauteuil jaune and told that it came from a “private collection.” When Rosenberg said it had been stolen from him, Neupert claimed to have it on consignment from a sculptor called Martin. Martin told Rosenberg a long story of how he had acquired the picture from a friend in France who turned out to be in prison. Neupert admitted having seen another Rosenberg Matisse, Harmonie bleue, which he had sold to a French Jew named Aktuaryus, who in turn had sold it to Bührle.

  Next Rosenberg visited Bührle himself, who, he noted, “was surprised to see me,” having apparently chosen to believe the rumor that Rosenberg was dead. Rosenberg told Bührle that he was mistaken if he thought he could settle matters by simply repurchasing the pictures, and accused him of having knowingly bought stolen goods. Bührle replied that he would return the works to Fischer if he got his money back and that Rosenberg could then negotiate with the dealer. Fischer in turn declared unconvincingly that he had been given the pictures by Hofer as settlement for a debt and had tried to send them back to Germany once he discovered their provenance, but that the Allied delegations in Switzerland had advised him not to do so as “it would then be impossible to retrieve them.” This statement did not deter Rosenberg, and after a few days he was approached by an intermediary representing Fischer, Bührle, and now Wendland, who was terrified that the Swiss would extradite him to Germany, where he was wanted by the Allies. This trio “made new propositions” and offered a certain sum which would be paid through clearing in France. Rosenberg was sure that this move had been encouraged by the Swiss government, which wanted to avoid bad publicity. Soon he received a second offer to take back 80 percent of the pictures and leave 20 percent. But Rosenberg was on a crusade and wanted an official, government-to-government settlement.15

  Shortly after this, Cooper returned to Switzerland and also met with Herr Bührle. The industrialist told Cooper that Fischer had first claimed that the pictures were “degenerate” works from the German museums, but that his adviser and dealer Fritz Nathan had warned him that this was not true. Bührle had then consulted his lawyer, who told him that if the pictures turned out to be stolen he would “have to give them back to Fischer against compensation.” Despite all this advice he admitted that he had twice bought from Fischer, the second time on Wendland’s recommendation. At the end of the interview Cooper advised Bührle to “make the gesture of placing his pictures at the disposal of the Swiss government,” as the bad faith of both Fischer and Wendland was beyond doubt and the Allies were about to turn over all their evidence to the Swiss. Bührle agreed to “take action within the next week.”16

  The Swiss Office of Compensation, again prodded by Cooper, promised to start investigations of all the Swiss firms named by him; the Political Department assured him that a special commission of investigation would “soon” be set up under their Interior Department. A Dr. Vodoz of that agency seemed impressed by the documentary evidence produced by Cooper, but said that the claimant governments would have to retain private Swiss lawyers and take their cases to the local cantonal courts before any works could be seized. If they failed in this process, the Allied claimants would then have to take action “against individual owners within the framework of the Swiss code.” When Cooper pointed out that Sweden had set up a centralized commission to deal with loot, Vodoz smoothly replied that it was not a federation like Switzerland.

  Bührle’s “action,” which came shortly after this meeting, was also not quite what Cooper had had in mind. Bührle now claimed in a written statement not to have “had the slightest idea” that the pictures he had bought were of dubious provenance, especially as he had bought them from Fischer, “an important Swiss house o
f good reputation.” Despite his previous admissions to Cooper, he wrote that Rosenberg’s visit of September 6 was the “first time he had had exact information on the illegally removed pictures,” and that he had “spontaneously declared himself ready to cancel the sale.” This was followed by a letter to the good Dr. Vodoz, who had in the past personally helped Bührle with certain customs difficulties related to the undocumented importation of the pictures he had bought in Paris from Dequoy and which his lawyer had been sent to retrieve from Goering in 1944. Bührle informed Vodoz that he had learned “from Cooper and Rosenberg’s recent visits” that certain pictures he had bought seemed to have been looted from France and that Rosenberg had asked him to hand them over to the French embassy. This Bührle said he could not, of course, do; however, he stated, he had agreed to return them to the dealers in return for the purchase price as “it naturally is upsetting to me to have stolen objects in my collection.”17

  Meanwhile, letters on this subject arriving at the Swiss Foreign Office were answered with vague replies. In late November the OSS, joining the fray, sent Plaut and Rousseau to Bern to pursue the matter. They soon discovered that M. Peyrot des Gachons of the French embassy, who was supposed to be pressuring the Swiss, “was not inclined to take his investiture too seriously.” Nor had the Swiss government taken any further steps whatsoever. The OSS men persuaded Dr. Vodoz to produce customs records which might reveal questionable imports, and found an ex-employee of the German legation who had actually delivered the diplomatic bags full of pictures. They questioned Wendland, who began to talk. They discovered that the Swiss government had given Fischer confidential Allied documents, and that the Swiss Syndicate of Art Dealers had forbidden its members to volunteer any information on the subject. This whirlwind of activity produced a small advance: on December 10, 1945, the Swiss federal government passed a law legalizing return procedures for properties removed from the German occupied territories, but did not provide any authority for investigations or a “special commission,” one excuse being that so far only seventy-five works of art were involved. Again they promised this would be done “soon” and the French embassy “promised” it would make a claim under the new ruling.18

  But time was running out. As part of the general American withdrawal the OSS unit was scheduled for dissolution in the spring of 1946, and there was in fact little justification for further U.S. involvement, except, as Plaut wrote, “to maintain leadership in the settlement of international issues of a moral and cultural nature.” The Swiss were apparently not encumbered with such high-flown morality. After the departure of the Allied investigators they lapsed again into nonactivity, and the case was kept alive only by sporadic inquiries from MFAA officers in Germany seeking to extradite Wendland, who was eventually permitted by the Swiss to go to Rome. There he was finally arrested by American MPs in June 1946.

  Paul Rosenberg continued to press his claims through the French Foreign Office. In April 1947 he was informed that his case would be heard in Lucerne, and was given one month to prepare. This impossible time limit was not observed, and indeed it took well over a year to prepare the necessary depositions. There were eight defendants. Wendland was not among them, having long since confessed and returned the one Rosenberg picture he still had. Four of the smaller dealers now settled and surrendered theirs. The rest went to court, though Bührle had realized the case was hopeless and Miedl could not participate as he was in Spain. This left Fischer as the prime and most adamant defendant.

  The defense was far worse than the crime. Not one of the defendants denied having knowingly bought stolen goods; instead, they attempted to discredit Rosenberg’s title to the paintings on the grounds that the confiscations had been carried out with the consent of the legal government of France at the time. They even tried to twist The Hague Convention to their own ends. With the help of the French Recuperation Commission and the now disbanded OSS men, who supplied Rosenberg with the documents of the Nazi confiscation process, he and his Swiss lawyer demolished the defense. To its eternal credit the Lucerne tribunal, on June 3, 1948, ruled in Rosenberg’s favor and ordered the pictures returned.19

  Having won his fight on principle, Rosenberg did later sell the purloined pictures, and many others, to Bührle. Today they are demurely listed as “acquired from a French private collection in 1951” or the like. The introduction to a recent catalogue for a show of Bührle’s collection at the National Gallery of Art notes that “as the war neared its end he succumbed once more to the urge to buy” and discovered “thanks to Paul Rosenberg, further important works.” And, the writer innocently continues, “a brief note of 1944 (preserved by chance) informs us that in a relatively short time Bührle had purchased twelve paintings by artists from Corot to Matisse. The magnificent group documents his voracious appetite for painting and his need to experience works of art at first hand.”20

  By 1953 Rosenberg was still missing seventy-one pictures; five years later this figure had fallen to twenty. Gathering his documentation once again, he submitted a claim to the Federal Republic of Germany, which had in July 1957 passed a law authorizing monetary compensation for such losses. After two years of negotiation the Germans offered less than half the amount claimed. Paul Rosenberg having died by then, his family accepted the German offer; but this was still not the end of it. Since 1958 seven more paintings have been accounted for, if not all recovered. One had been given to the Rothschilds by mistake. In 1970 a lawyer in Cologne wrote to Alexandre Rosenberg to say that unnamed clients had his Degas Deux danseuses and would like to make a deal. The Rosenbergs had several options: they could go to court and try to get it back, and if they did, repay the German government for its value; they could buy it back; or they could accept a payment from the new owners and transfer title to them. Alexandre, tired of the endless process, chose the third course. The payment was far below market value. “I do not like so enriching the successors to thieves,” he wrote, “but have come to learn that the defense of one’s own and one’s family interests is somewhat like politics and indeed life itself. It is principally the art of the possible.”21

  Other Rosenberg pictures continue to surface in the trade. In 1974 the heirs were able to seize a Braque, Le Guéridon au paquet de tabac, at a Versailles auction. This is not an easy process: the original owner must have excellent documentation and convince the relevant enforcement agencies of the justice of his claim. If there is any warning, the picture is likely to be withdrawn by the usually anonymous consignor, as did happen in the case of another missing picture, Degas’s Portrait of Gabrielle Diot. This drawing was advertised in 1987 in a full-page ad placed by a Hamburg dealer, complete with the Paul Rosenberg provenance, but disappeared again when too many inquiries were forthcoming.

  Retrieving collections such as that of Paul Rosenberg was hard and unpleasant work. Even more so was the job of deciding whether the things for which the Nazis had paid should or should not be returned to their original owners. This nasty duty fell to the national commissions of recuperation, who had to determine if a sale had been “forced” or if collaboration was involved. Some who had sold for vast sums to the Nazis were not shy about reclaiming their former possessions, and the publicity surrounding the return of the works would make it difficult for the more discreet to hide. With much press coverage the French Commission put on an exhibition of three hundred recovered works in January 1946. Most had never been seen in public before and almost all belonged to private collectors, traditionally wary of the tax man, whose names were carefully left out of the catalogue.

  The two Rembrandts sold by wine mogul Etienne Nicolas to Haberstock were not in the catalogue at all, though they were in the show. There they were spotted by the Fraud section of French Customs, which formally requested that the Commission block their restitution to Nicolas as the agency planned to seize them and give them to the Louvre.22 Nicolas resisted for a time, referring in his correspondence to “the pictures confiscated from me by the Germans,” but soon settl
ed, informing Henraux at the Commission that he had always meant to give them to the Louvre, which of course was true.23 This was not quite enough for the government, which then fined him the exact amount he had received from the Germans on the grounds that he had “contributed materially to the impoverishment of the State.”

  In Belgium, Emile Renders had much the same experience, although it was he who brought suit and not the government. In the court’s view, his long-term bargaining with Goering for higher prices overrode the Reichsmarschall’s threats, and his pictures went to the Belgian state. Count Jaromir Czernin reclaimed his Vermeer the day after Ritchie brought it back to Austria, on grounds that it had been extorted by the Nazis. An Austrian tribunal held that this claim had no relation to the facts, and published the Count’s little thank-you note to Hitler. He appealed this decision, according to one source, with the backing of an unknown American who wanted to buy the Vermeer.24 This was rejected, and the picture now hangs in the Kunsthistorisches, which had, of course, hoped that the Führer was buying it for them.

  No one in Holland ever publicly discussed van Beuningen’s very profitable sales to Posse, but there was perhaps no need to do so: his recovered paintings and the rest of his collections were soon donated to the Boymans Museum and his name added to its title. Though it was assumed for a long time that the Koenigs drawings which Posse had bought from him had perished, the fact that they had gone to the USSR was gradually revealed by clues in the writings of East German scholars. In 1983 a Baldung Grien from the collection was offered to the Boymans by a Berlin lawyer representing an unknown Soviet client who hinted that there were more where that had come from. The offer was withdrawn when the Dutch government intervened; a few years later the drawing turned up in the hands of the American collector Ian Woodner. He resisted restitution until his death in 1991, when it was returned by his estate. The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts, successor to its recuperation commission, in 1989 published an elaborate catalogue of the 526 drawings still missing, most of which were believed to be in the Soviet Union. In 1992 this was officially confirmed by the Russian Minister of Culture, and it is assumed that they will soon return to Rotterdam.