September 26, 2000
CONTENTS:
- IFAR Journal information
- Bushman's Body to Return Home
- Holocaust Museum, Author at Odds
- U.S. Indian Tribes to Get Kennewick Man Skeleton
http://www.ifar.org/
IFAR Journal.Volume 3, Number 2.
contents:
UPDATES AND NEWSBRIEFS:
- looted Waldmüller landscape returned to Berlin Museum
- NYS Attorney General sues art gallery for selling fake art on the internet
- Shchukin heir claims a Matisse masterpiece confiscated by Lenin
- Cultural Property Advisory Committee meets in New York
- New York amends law to allow criminal seizure of art on loan to museums (judge rules in Schiele case)
- Prison term...in Bremen-Baku art case
COPYING CHINESE PAINTINGS: FLATTERY OF FORGERY
CALDER'S ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT AND AUTHENTICITY - an IFAR evening with Sandy Rower
A LEGAL DECISION IN NEW YORK GIVES EPERTS PROTECTION FOR THEIR OPINIONS ON AUTHENTICITY
A COPYRIGHT PRIMER FOR THE PROTECTION AND USE OF FINE ART IMAGES
Book review: Playing Darts with a Rembrandt: Public and Private Rights in Cultural treasures
STOLEN ART ALERT.
Subscribe informatiuon at:
http://www.ifar.org/joun_main.htm
Bushman's Body to Return Home
MADRID (Reuters) - Spain said Monday it would send to Botswana the embalmed body of a 19th century African bushman that had been on display in a museum for decades, ending a long-running dispute over the exhibit.
The Foreign Ministry said the remains of the man -- believed to have been dug up in what is now Botswana and embalmed in 1830 by grave robbers -- would be sent to the southern African country for burial between Oct. 4 and 5.
The body is believed to have gone on display in the museum in Banyoles, near Barcelona, in 1916. Objections to the exhibit started ahead of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, when a Haitian doctor said the display was racist and tried to get African countries to boycott the Games.
The protests eventually led the mayor of the town of Banyoles to remove the body from exhibition in 1997.
The body of the bushman had been on display in an upright position, holding a spear and wearing a loincloth.
Holocaust Museum, Author at Odds
By RUSS BYNUM, Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) - A dispute over a new memoir has cast a spotlight on the powerfully enduring belief that the Nazis made soap from the bodies of Jews - something that Holocaust scholars largely dismiss as myth. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has refused to allow a book-signing for an Atlanta man whose memoir tells the story of an uncle who says the Nazis forced him to make soap from victims at Auschwitz. Ben Hirsch said the museum doesn't want to be seen as endorsing the soap-making stories in his book, ``Hearing a Different Drummer.'' Museum officials said a senior historian read the book and questioned the accuracy of the soap-making passages.
``Singling out a memoir for a book signing implies a level of endorsement of its contents,'' said Mary Morrison, a spokeswoman for the museum. ``The combination of all available evidence doesn't draw one to the conclusion that this happened.''
Historians have never been able to prove, or disprove, that the Nazis used human fat to make soap. Many say the tales are probably just rumors so gruesome that they are still circulating nearly 60 years later.
But Hirsch, whose parents and two siblings died in concentration camps, said his book offers new evidence - excerpts from unpublished memoirs that his uncle typed in broken English.
``How dare you say that it didn't happen when you say there's not enough proof,'' Hirsch, 68, said Monday. ``I just can't imagine anybody writing a memoir and saying they made soap if they didn't. It's not something to be proud of.''
Historians have documented many Nazi atrocities - of Jews killed in gas chambers and used as live subjects in science experiments. Their hair and gold fillings were removed for industrial use. And in at least one instance, the skin of Jews was used to make lampshades.
One Holocaust scholar said the museum has good reason to distance itself from Hirsch's soap story: The tale could give new ammunition to those who insist the Holocaust was a hoax.
``Holocaust deniers have seized upon the soap story as proof of demonstrating the unreliability of Holocaust survivors,'' said Christopher Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina. ``I don't think they can afford to compromise themselves on this.''
Raul Hilberg, considered the dean of Holocaust scholars, said rumors that the Nazis made soap from human fat started circulating in Poland in 1942, the same year they first appeared in American newspapers.
Testimonial accounts of soap-making tend to be secondhand at best. Hilberg said he cannot recall a single account from a survivor who saw human soap being made. He said he doubts the soap stories, in part, because the Germans would have found such a product repulsive.
``The idea of washing oneself with soap made of human fat, aside from the fact they didn't like Jews and didn't want any contact with them, it was considered sick,'' he said.
Hirsch's memoir, which remains on the shelves at the museum's bookstore, mostly recalls his experience as a U.S. soldier in post-World War II Germany. But he uses one chapter to criticize scholars for rejecting stories of human soap. He quotes a typewritten manuscript by his uncle, Philipp Auerbach, a chemist who said Nazis made him manufacture soap using human remains at Auschwitz. One excerpt reads: ``As chief of the soap-production I had to take care of the production of fat and to make controls in the Slaughter-house. Nearly every week I have been three or four times there in order to get the waste of fat and of the bowels for the soap-manufacture.''
Hirsch also recalls how he helped a rabbi in 1970 bury four bars of soap at Atlanta's Greenwood Cemetery. He says the soap had been found by a Jewish soldier who helped liberate a concentration camp at the end of World War II. The soldier's wife had them buried after finding them in her basement decades later. For those who ask, the Holocaust museum distributes a fact sheet saying the story that Nazis used corpses for soap is a rumor that has never been substantiated.
``This one soap story keeps rolling around,'' said Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University history professor who recently prevailed in a legal dispute against a British scholar whom she accused of denying the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews. ``Soap became sort of a metaphor - they killed them and made soap out of them - to show how horrible the Nazis were.''
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On the Net:
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org
U.S. Indian Tribes to Get Kennewick Man Skeleton
SEATTLE (Reuters) - The U.S. Interior Department on Monday ended a four-year dispute over a 9,000-year-old human skeleton found in southern Washington state, awarding it to five American Indian tribes that claimed it as one of their ancestors. Dubbed Kennewick Man after the town where it was found in the Columbia River, the controversial skeleton underwent DNA tests to try to fix its racial origin, with tribes insisting it was native and some whites claiming it was a wayward Viking.
Scientists had opposed native efforts to claim the 380 bones, since tribal representatives have vowed to rebury them, precluding further study on one of the earliest known human skeletons in the United States.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced the decision, saying the bones were ``culturally affiliated'' with the tribes and that the federal park on which they were found had been deemed aboriginal land by the Indian Claims Commission. Bone fragments sent to Yale University, University of Michigan and University of California-Davis for tests failed to yield DNA for analysis, according to the Interior Department, which instead relied on a mix of oral history and scientific data.
The bones have been held in Seattle at the University of Washington's Burke Museum for the last two years.