Art Theft, Nazi Looting, and the Complicit Art Market

Introduction: War, Plunder, and the Art Market

Jennette Greenfield's chapter "Art Theft and the Art Market," from her 2007 book The Return of Cultural Treasures, highlights the complicity of the art market in circulating artistic treasures with a suspect history. Historically, the right to plunder a defeated nation has been considered one of the spoils of war — a principle practiced by conquerors from Napoleon to Hitler. Because both of those figures were ultimately losers, historically speaking, there were efforts in the aftermath of their reigns to restore the taken treasures to their rightful owners. Where the victors did the pillaging, however, the struggle for proper restoration has often been far more difficult. Even so, many of the treasures looted by the Nazis have been scattered across the world and never returned to their rightful owners.

Nazi Looting and the Failures of Postwar Restitution

It is bitterly ironic that a regime that claimed moral and national superiority on the basis of racial and ethnic heritage engaged in such extensive looting of other nations' art and even of private collections. As late as 1984, according to Greenfield (2007), several thousand treasures were discovered in a cave. Unfortunately, by that date, most of the potential claimants lacked the documentation necessary to establish their claims, despite the existence of the 1969 Final Settlement of Heirless Property Law. In practice, very few objects were returned under that law, and despite Germany's de-Nazification and its reputation for reckoning with its past, there is ample evidence that significant efforts were made to evade demands to return stolen objects to their rightful owners.

This problem is not unique to Germany, however. Another surprising aspect of stolen art ownership is that even when the ideologies that gave rise to the theft — such as beliefs in racial inferiority — were broadly condemned, there were still attempts to retain the treasures after the fact. The profound benefits these objects can bring in the form of museum tourism provided strong incentive to hold onto them. In the case of Nazi-stolen artifacts, some were held in private collections while others were simply hidden away from public view.

Giving back art treasures often symbolizes an admittance of wrongdoing that many nations are unwilling to make. Jonathan Petropoulos, in his 2017 article "The Restitution of Looted Art: Art Dealer Networks in the Third Reich and in the Postwar Period," published in the Journal of Contemporary History, examines how art dealers during the Third Reich played a critical role in profiting from such looting. Although there has been substantial scrutiny of the ways people profited from the Third Reich — spanning from medical science to banking — art theft remains an under-studied area, as both Petropoulos (2017) and Greenfield (2007) argue in their respective works.

Conclusion: The Political and Personal Stakes of Restitution

Connecting art with its rightful public and private owners has proved to be an arduous and emotional task. For many, the decision to pursue restitution carries political as well as personal meaning, given the circumstances of the original capture. This is perhaps most poignantly illustrated in the acts of Nazi looting and the subsequent attempts at restoration. Restitution is not merely a legal or logistical matter — it is an acknowledgment of historical injustice, and it demands that nations and institutions confront the ways in which they benefited, directly or indirectly, from some of history's most systematic cultural plunder.

References

Greenfield, J. (2007). The return of cultural treasures. Cambridge University Press.

Petropoulos, J. (2017). The restitution of looted art: Art dealer networks in the Third Reich and in the postwar period. Journal of Contemporary History, 52(3), 546–565.