(Times of London, June 3, 1999)
Holocaust widow set to win back UKP.3m painting; a
breakthrough over Nazi loot
(Discovering
truth about the auctions of despair)
(An
everyday tale of theft and murder)
(Claim
sets a precedent)
Peter
Watson and Sharne Thomas report on a breakthrough over Nazi loot
Holocaust widow set to win back UKP.3m painting
A WIDOW who claims that the Nazis took a UKP.3.3 million Van Gogh from her family is expected to win its return from a German museum in a landmark ruling. Gerta Silberberg, 85, who lives in the Midlands, would become the first British relative of Holocaust victims to reclaim artistic treasures sold by desperate Jews at forced “Jew auctions” in Nazi Germany before the Second World War. Tomorrow’s ruling is expected to trigger scores more ownership claims for works of art.
Mrs Silberberg is seeking the return of the Van Gogh sketch L’Olivette now in the National Gallery in Berlin. Her father-in-law Max Silberberg was compelled to sell the drawing among 143 pictures - worth an estimated UKP.20 million at today’s prices - at a series of forced auctions in Berlin. Hundreds of such auctions were held between 1933 and 1938, in addition to those who fell victim to wartime looting. Silberberg was later sent to a concentration camp and died in the Holocaust.
Tomorrow Professor Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage, the umbrella organisation for German museums, will ask his board for special authorisation to restore property to Holocaust survivors and their families, side-stepping the need for lengthy legal proceedings. If granted the unilateral power, he has indicated that he will decide for Mrs Silberberg. It is the latest in a series of efforts by Holocaust survivors to recover billions of pounds in lost property, cash deposits and art from German institutions, Swiss banks and other organisations worldwide. If the museum decides to hand back the Van Gogh, it will put intense pressure on other public institutions to follow the example, potentially losing millions of pounds worth of art suspected of being looted. Disputes could involve tens of thousands of original and current buyers and major auction houses worldwide. Wolfgang Kahlcke, a Foundation spokesman, said last night that he expected Mrs Silberberg to win her case. “This is a very important case, the first of its kind. In clear-cut cases, like this one, the President wants authority to act quickly. The claimants are often old and time matters.” In such cases, the museum would either return the artwork or offer to buy it, he said. “In this case, however, a Van Gogh drawing would be very expensive, more than we have funds for.” Details about the “Jew Auctions” have become available only in the past two years, since the records have been declassified. Very little is known about them and details are still emerging, not least because many works were seized a second time by Russian troops who entered Berlin with the fall of the Third Reich, surfacing only decades later in collections in the former Communist bloc. They are a sensitive subject in Germany. Not only do they throw fresh light on the callous treatment of the Jews even before war broke out, but they reveal the extent to which ordinary Germans were aware of what was happening to Jews as early as 1935. Details were first obtained by Professor Wolfgang Dressen, a university teacher in Dusseldorf, who went to the local tax office in Cologne and smuggled out, under a long coat, a 150-page folder with every scrap of information about one case.
The Silberberg collection was sold off at four auctions - furniture, books, ceramics and the paintings. The best 50 pictures were sold by the Berlin auctioneer Paul Graupe, a Jew. He was a close business colleague of Swiss-based Hans Wendland who arranged for the exchange of works of art with Walter Andreas Hofer, art buyer for Hermann Goering. Wendland was close to Karl Halberstock, who bought art for Hitler.
Dr Constance Lowenthal, director of the Commission for Art Recovery, a subsidiary of the World Jewish Congress, said: “The upcoming Berlin decision will be highly important. The art from these auctions is scattered. No one knows how big this problem is, but we suspect it is huge.”
Mrs Silberberg escaped with her husband Alfred to Britain from Breslau in 1937. She is determined to seek restitution of dozens of other paintings. Her German lawyer, Dr Jost von Trott zu Solz, confirmed that a Cezanne in St Petersburg and a Pissarro in a private collection in America could become involved.
Peter Watson and Sharne Thomas on the destruction of a great
collection
Nazi
legacy of art treasure chaos
GERTA SILBERBERG’S problems arise from the rapacious Nazi laws of the 1930s designed to marginalise Jews and expropriate their property, cash and art treasures. The family collection was put together by her father-in-law, Max Silberberg, a wealthy industrialist from Breslau - now Wroclaw in Poland. He was co-owner of the M. Weissenberg company that produced magnesite, a crucial element in the production of steel. A shrewd and discerning art enthusiast with a taste for French and German Impressionism, Silberberg used his profits to put together one of the greatest German art collections of the time, including works attributed to Van Gogh, Cezanne, Manet, Renoir, Delacroix, Degas and Matisse. Worth an estimated UKP.20 million by today’s prices, the collection featured in German art magazines such as Kunst und Kunstler in the 1920s.
When the Nazis seized power in 1933 they quickly “Aryanised” the magnesite cartel and Silberberg was forced out of his job. By 1934 it became clear he would have to sell his artworks to survive, and the collection was sent for sale at auctions organised by the Chamber of Culture. The cream of the paintings - two Van Gogh drawings, two Cezannes, two Delacroix and works by Manet, Renoir and Pissarro - went under the hammer of the Berlin auctioneer Paul Graupe. The Jewish auctioneer left Germany for New York but Silberberg was held in a concentration camp and died during the Holocaust. His son Alfred and daughter-in-law Gerta fled to Britain just before the war. Many of the paintings were dispersed around the world. One Cezanne is believed to be in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and others in the United States and Germany.
At least one appears to have made its way to Britain, where it featured in an angry exchange in the letters pages of The Times in 1944. Responding to claims that a work attributed to the French Impressionist leader Edouard Manet, Madame Manet dans la Serre, and other items in his collection were “lamentable paintings wrongly attributed to famous artists” H.J.P. Bomford, a Wiltshire art collector, wrote to the Editor on November 30 of that year: “The portrait of Madame Manet comes from the Silberberg collection, Breslau, and was purchased from the Ullstein collection.” The identification and recovery of any artworks were complicated by the fact that Germany was split in two after the war, and that Breslau lay within the former communist bloc.
Widowed in 1984, Gerta Silberberg continued to live quietly in the Midlands with little hope of locating the lost artworks until the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the discovery of new archives documenting what happened to other collections she instructed a Berlin lawyer, Dr Jost von Trott zu Solz.
He employed art historians to trawl the newly available archives and they revealed that two pictures, a Hans von Maree and the Van Gogh work L’Olivette had been in the National Gallery in Berlin since 1935 after being bought at the Graupe auction. Another important work, Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Printemps of 1897, last appeared on the art market in 1997.
Mrs Silberberg’s lawyers have confirmed the Pissarro is “on our agenda” but she herself has shunned publicity partly to avoid angering the Germans before Friday’s decision on the Van Gogh. Last night she said: “The whole issue brings back many disturbing memories for me.”
STRIPPED of their jobs and livelihood, German Jews sold off their prized possessions in hundreds of “Jew auctions” between 1933 and 1938. Everything from paintings to porcelain was sold: auction catalogues identified the items as “non-Aryan property”. The extent of the Nazis’ wartime theft of European art has long been known, but only now are details emerging of how the Jews were forced to sell off their prized possessions.
For the past six years, Anya Heuss, a historian with the Jewish Claims Conference in Frankfurt, has been researching Nazi art looting.
The auctions took place across Germany, particularly in Berlin and Munich, centres of the art trade. Although a relatively small percentage of the tens of thousands of items that passed through those auctions were of museum quality, many of them could now be the subject of claims and counter-claims through the courts. Until 1938, when the Nazis began to seize property outright and send their owners to the death camps, Jews were compelled to sell their treasures at auction to survive.
Dr Heuss said: “They had lost their jobs. They had to live and sold their pictures. You can’t eat pictures.”
But, she added, the owners received a fraction of the works’ true value: “That was because the market in general was depressed as so many Jews were having to sell their collections. They didn’t get much.”
Adolf Hitler was so fanatical about collecting art that his personal curator, Hans Posse, corresponded with his personal assistant almost daily and in minute detail about works Hitler wished to “acquire”. Many were intended for a proposed museum in Linz, which was intended to be the largest in the world. Durer was a particular passion of Hitler’s - although he risked the destruction of 27 drawings that he took with him to the Eastern Front.
It is only since 1989 that German law has acknowledged that works consigned to these forced auctions should also be regarded as “looted”.
One specialist in the subject said: “The owners would not otherwise have sold. So these auctions were a mode of theft.”
MAX SILBERBERG was a well respected man in Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw). He owned an engineering factory that turned out machine tools for the deep coalpits scattered around the Silesian region. From the 1920s he started to use some of his profits to build up a remarkable collection of Impressionists and Expressionists. Works by Paul Klee and Van Gogh, Matisse, Millet, Pissarro, Picasso and Cézanne all found a place in the collection, much of it hung densely on the walls of his large manor house.
In 1933 Silberberg’s privileged world - of stately limousines and domestic staff - started to crumble. Silberberg was an assimilated Jew, in many respects more German than Jewish, but the Nazis did not wait long before stripping him of his worldly goods. First, Jewish doctors and civil servants were pushed out of their professions. Then Jewish shops were attacked without police intervention. The Silberbergs with their wide circle of acquaintances, part of the cream of Breslau society, began to sense that they, too, were living on the edge.
Within months of the Nazi takeover, Silberberg was forced to resign from his factory and make way for an Ayran German. Jews, as well as Poles, Germans and Czechs had always been part of Breslau life: they owned the best department stores; the publishing houses; Jewish architects gave the city its face. By the mid-1930s the Nazis were well on their way to wiping out Breslau’s Jewish community. The Silberbergs had to live. They sold their house and garden, lost the car, scaled down their lifestyle, and by 1935 they were ready to sell the collection, not only the paintings but also sculptures (including one by Matisse) and rare books. It was time to have mobile assets. The children (including Gerda) wanted to emigrate; Max and his wife wanted to stay. The children left and lived, the parents stayed and died: a Holocaust story.
Humiliations were piled on day by day. Jews were forbidden to shave, to shop in German stores, to sit on benches, to use public transport. In 1938 pillars of smoke spewed from the city’s New Synagogue. There was no escape.
Anja Heuss, an art historian from the Jewish Claims Conference, says that the details of Silberberg’s last years are at best fuzzy but wholly predictable. “Since he was still living in Breslau in 1941, escape or emigration was no longer possible. One has to assume that between 1941 and 1944 he was deported and murdered.” Auschwitz is a short train ride from Breslau.
The art collection, too, failed to survive. Like that of other great Jewish Breslau collections, those of the Littmanns and the Levins, the paintings were bought up by museum directors and private bidders.
THE return of the Silberberg Van Gogh would be likely to lead to a steady stream of museum-quality artworks appearing on the market. If the National Gallery in Berlin hands over the painting there will be pressure on other public institutions to follow its example. Successful claimants may be forced to sell pieces returned to them because of steep insurance costs or the number of heirs. That would cause much excitement in a market in which museum-quality art is in short supply.
However, the descendants of many of those who were killed during the Holocaust may be unaware that Dürers once owned by Hitler had been taken from their family. As the legal process of proving ownership and persecution is long and difficult, such works are likely to trickle on to the market.
Such is the scale of the Nazi theft that the Jewish Claims Conference has identified more than 1,000 looted objects in museums in the former East Germany. The organisation, which represents the heirs of original owners and pursues looted works when no direct descendant can be found, has lobbied Berlin’s National Gallery for two years over the Silberberg Van Gogh.
Anya Heuss, an historian with the conference, believes that the museum is about to meet their demands. “If they are going to give it back to Gerta Silberberg or the Jewish Claims Conference, that will set a precedent.”
Willi Korte, an investigator into the theft of artworks during the
Second World War, said: “German museums have not really taken a close
enough look at their collections in terms of ‘What did we acquire
after 1933?’ “