November 20, 2000

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR'S KIN SEEK PAY FOR LOOTED ART

Sunday,November 19,2000
By CHRISTOPHER FRANCESCANI
Oskar Schindler saved thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi death camps in World War II - but it was Rembrandt who rescued Sybilla Katz Goldstein and her family.
Goldstein's dad, Nathan Katz, a Dutch art dealer, traded Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man: Member of the Raman Family" to Nazi strongman Hermann Goering to ensure his family's safe passage to Switzerland. The painting was later recovered and sold by the family, but dozens of other works by Old Masters that the Nazis looted when they stormed the Katz home are still missing - and Goldstein plans to do something about it. Armed with newly declassified U.S. government documents that prove her family's art collection was pillaged by the Nazis and channeled through Switzerland, Goldstein will challenge the landmark plan to distribute $1.25 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors. Goldstein is one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of survivors who lawyers and activists expect to pack Judge Edward Korman's courtroom in Brooklyn Federal Court tomorrow to contest a multi-tiered distribution plan for the settlement money being paid by the Swiss banks. For years, Holocaust survivors and heirs have battled the banks for the assets they or their parents deposited for safekeeping as the Nazis stormed across Europe. Until just recently, Swiss bankers were demanding impossible-to-produce death certificates and other documentation before they would pay out claims. Under the distribution plan, about $800 million of the $1.25 billion settlement would go to death-camp survivors who prove they hid money and assets in the banks. The remaining $450 million would go to wartime slave laborers, refugees and victims whose possessions were looted by the Nazis. The laborers and refugees would be paid small cash settlements, according to the plan, but the Looted Assets class money - about $100 million of the $450 million - would go to charity "because of the difficulty and expense" of tracking down and verifying all the stolen property.
http://www.nypost.com/news/6199.htm

From: Dan Chure danchure@easilink.com
To: Museum Security Network securma@xs4all.nl
Subject:

Fossil Wood Theft

'Buried treasure' theft revives Alaska fossil debate

By DOUG O'HARRA
ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS
SUTTON, Alaska -- Call it buried treasure from prehistoric Alaska: two large chunks of petrified wood that grew in a coastal forest at least 55 million years ago. Fairbanks paleontologist Kevin May and others recovered the fossilized trunks, probably ancient sequoias, while working in old coal pits north of this town along the Glenn Highway last summer. May thought they'd make a great exhibit at the University of Alaska Museum. "The specimens would have been here at the museum for hundreds of years," May said later. "You could see the rings in them. . . . They were very nice trees."
But when May came to retrieve them this past Labor Day, the petrified trees were gone, pirated along with a set of tarps printed with the museum's name. After watching hundreds of people collect fossils over the summer, May suspects somebody stole the trees intending to sell them. The 7-by-2-foot slabs would have weighed hundreds of pounds each but were accessible to anyone with a pickup. "I don't get it," he said. "But there's nothing you can do about it."
The incident illustrates how the old Wishbone Hill coal digs have unearthed an array of overlapping and sometimes conflicting interests: ongoing studies by scientists, fossil hunting by regular people, off-road motoring and hiking by Matanuska Valley locals, plus the need to reclaim certain abandoned coal pits under a state and federal program while preserving access to both fossils and future coal reserves. "It's a very complicated thing," said paleontologist Anne Pasch, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Anchorage and coordinator of scientific studies at the fossil beds. "I would like to see the fossil beds protected from harm."
But how? Should access be restricted? Can people even gather fossils there without violating state law? And what happens if coal mining becomes profitable again? That last issue worries Usibelli Mines Inc., which leases about 7,000 acres covering the best fossil grounds, dirt bike paths and an estimated 14 million tons of coal. As a result, the company has "some trepidation" about the area's growing popularity, according to Steve Denton, vice president for engineering.
These old-growth trees and the modern debate about what to do with them arise from the Chickaloon Formation, a mile-thick collection of sandstone, mudstone, shale and coal that stretches throughout the Matanuska Valley. From 1917 through 1967, miners in several operations removed more than 6 million tons of coal from surface pits and underground shafts in the Sutton area. When the local market for coal crashed in the 1960s, the major mines shut down, leaving a series of moonscape depressions with steep faces that offered extraordinary exposure of geological layers normally far underground. Amateur collectors, students and scientists have been going to the pits for decades.
But paleontologists have recently confirmed that the rea has far more scientific value than anyone realized. Over the past few years, teams from the University of Alaska have documented one of the world's best-preserved petrified forests, with dozens of trunks standing in place in cliff faces alongside needles, leaves and seeds from a lush subtropical landscape that existed in the era after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Last summer, May and others also documented fossilized animal tracks in the same general area, showing for the first time that some of the earliest large mammals lived in Alaska. But sorting out what should happen next isn't a simple matter. The land lies within the state's Matanuska Valley Moose Range, with moose habitat, recreation and coal mining among its designated uses. It includes thousands of acres of active coal leases. Complicating the issue, Wishbone Hill isn't listed on the state's official inventory of prehistoric sites, the Alaska Heritage Resources Survey managed by state archaeologists and used for analyzing pending land-use issues.
One of the most popular activities has been fossil collecting by rockhounds. But the practice almost certainly violates state law at least some of the time. Under Alaska's Historic Preservation Act, all "historic, prehistoric and archaeological resources" on state land must be turned over to the state. Protected items can't be sold or collected without a permit. The law definitely applies to the fossils littering the ground north of Sutton, said archaeologist Joan Dale, who oversees the state's inventory of historic sites. Even so, state and federal agencies have long allowed and even condoned individuals' collecting small plant fossils for pleasure.

AN ARCHEOLOGICAL BLITZ SAVES `2ND POMPEII' ART

RISING WATER FROM TURKEY'S AMBITIOUS DAM PROJECT SWALLOWS A 2,000-YEAR-OLD GEM OF ANTIQUITY, PROMPTING AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM TO RACE TO RESCUE ITS PRICELESS ROMAN RELICS.

By Tom Hundley
Tribune Foreign Correspondent
November 19, 2000
BIRECIK, Turkey -- The river's waters were rising 10 inches every 24 hours, and daytime temperatures soared above 100 degrees last July as an international team of 170 archeologists set out to rescue art treasures from a buried Roman-era settlement in southeastern Turkey. With no margin for error, they toiled round the clock for weeks to salvage mosaics, wall paintings and other artifacts from the rising flood of the Euphrates River as it backed up behind a new dam. "This was, without doubt, one of the most ambitious rescue operations ever undertaken," said Rob Early, project manager for the Oxford Archaeological Unit, a British group that specializes in these kinds of urgent interventions. "The quality of what we have recovered is stunning. In my opinion it has been a huge success." Some experts are now calling Zeugma, a 2,000-year-old Roman garrison on the banks of the Euphrates, a "second Pompeii." The floor mosaics that have been salvaged are among the most exquisite in existence, rivaling the collection at the Bardo in Tunis, considered the finest in the world.
More:
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/article/0,2669,SAV-0011190449,FF.html

How The Sunday Times cracked the Enigma code

Nick Fielding
THE Sunday Times has negotiated secretly for weeks to ensure the safe return of the three vital rotors from the historic Enigma code machine that was stolen from Bletchley Park. This involved placing codewords in the personal columns of The Times, the creation of a secret internet page and the burial of a video at a graveyard in central England. A police operation, involving officers from Thames Valley police, the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, has been under way since Enigma G312 was stolen from a display case at the former government codebreaking centre last April. Last night Dennis Yates, 57, of Sandiacre, Derbyshire, was charged in connection with the theft and is due to appear before magistrates in Milton Keynes tomorrow on charges of blackmail and handling stolen goods.
More:
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/11/19/stinwenws02039.html

Antiques dealer charged with Enigma blackmail

By Richard Alleyne
AN antique dealer will appear in court today charged in connection with the theft of a Second World War Enigma coding machine. Dennis Yates, 57, a former cattle farmer, will appear before magistrates in Milton Keynes, Bucks, charged with blackmail and handling stolen goods. The father of three was arrested on Friday after an eight-month joint investigation by the National Crime Squad and the local police. The encryption machine, one of only four in existence, went missing from Bletchley Park, the home of Britain's codebreakers, during an open day on April 1. The machine is valued at Ł100,000 but is regarded as being priceless in historical terms. It was recovered after being posted, minus its three main rotors, to Jeremy Paxman, presenter of BBC's Newsnight.
More:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=002691129943794&rtmo=QwH0aSSR&atmo=lllllljx&pg=/et/00/11/20/nenig20.html