New German Agency Dedicated To Art Restitution
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German museums are harboring hundreds of artworks looted by the Nazis and will face further claims for restitution from victims and their heirs, said Uwe Hartmann, the head of a new government agency charged with researching the provenance of art in public collections.
Museums have returned more than 1,000 objects looted by the Nazis in 63 restitution cases since 1998, Mr. Hartmann said Monday. His agency, brought to life by Culture Minister Bernd Neumann, has an annual budget of $1.56 million to help museums trace the prewar owners of art that may have been looted.
“I expect the pace of restitution to be at least the same in the next 10 years,” Mr. Hartmann said in an interview at his office in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. “It won’t slow down. Whether it will speed up is difficult to tell at this point.”
During Adolf Hitler’s 12-year rule, about 650,000 works were plundered in the biggest art heist ever, the New York-based Jewish Claims Conference estimates. Hitler appointed a commission to hunt down old masters for a planned museum in his home town of Linz, while Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering scoured Europe to expand the private collection he kept at his country estate near Berlin.
In the five years after the war, looted art was collected by the allies and returned to the country of origin, where it often ended up in museums. Though the West German government made some compensation payments to original owners in the decades after the war, many claims remained unsolved in divided, Cold War Europe.
With the founding of the new agency this month, the museums’ complaint that they don’t have the money to investigate the prewar ownership of their works “is no longer valid,” Mr. Hartmann said.
Any of Germany’s 3,400 public museums can come to him for a financial subsidy of as much as 15,000 euros that he can provide within a month when they receive a claim and need to investigate a specific work. Yet the bulk of his agency’s work, Mr. Hartmann anticipates, will be improving coordination of research and making the results more widely available to all museums.
