by Marc Masurovsky A Parisian curator once said about the Vichy regime: It was the revenge of good taste. You could apply this statement to Nazi cultural policy from 1933 to 1945. Restoring good taste in a society corrupted by Jews, Freemasons, Bolsheviks and sexual perverts, according to Nazi propaganda. La revanche du goût. The leitmotiv for State-sponsored plunder of art objects from collectors and dealers mainly of Jewish origin. This plunder lasted for 12 years and stretched throughout Europe, going hand in hand with persecution, racial extermination, and world war. Why are we still tal ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky Since 2011, the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) has periodically addressed the problematic of quantifying the thefts of art works, art objects, and other items of esthetic value, looted between 1933 and 1945 under National Socialist rule, during WWII and the Holocaust. After the conflict, there was no internationally-sanctioned and organized audit of cultural losses suffered by the victims of National Socialist and Fascist aggression on the European continent. Therefore, experts and amateurs alike have wallowed in the murky waters of estimations of human and materi ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky The idea is not new and evolved at the end of WWII, when Allied forces and local resistance and partisan units stumbled on mountains of looted Jewish property, consisting of household goods, decorative objects (including furniture and textiles), musical instruments, libraries, works of art (paintings, works on paper, sculpture, etc.), precious stones and jewelry, precious metals, and financial instruments. These recoveries across Central and Western Europe created an urgent need to identify who the despoiled owners were, find out if they were alive, if family members and r ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky There are historical documents that tend to capture the imagination and leave us dangling for answers and solutions. However, archives can be fickle, in that they are structured like labyrinths of clues, false leads, erroneous analyses and deductions, amongst which one finds pure gems. You just have to endure the pain of hitting your head against a brick wall one too many times until, at the last minute, when you are ready to throw in the towel, you read a document with a throw-away sentence or paragraph on page 20 and you have that aha moment. Yes! Nothing like that has ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933. The subsequent Nazi era lasted until May 9, 1945, when the National Socialist Third Reich signed an unconditional surrender to the combined Allied military forces which brought an end to a six-year global military conflict known as the Second World War (1939-1945). In the winter of 1933, there were at least 400 American companies and businesses operating inside Nazi Germany, most of which were subsidiaries of American-based corporations. There were also American-based banks and fi ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky The United States entered the Second World War after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941. Up to that point, it had remained ostensibly neutral, American companies continued to operate through their subsidiaries in Axis-occupied Europe and Nazi Germany. When the US first entered the global conflict in late 1941, its primary focus was on Japan and its military campaigns against the Pacific Islands and the Asian mainland, with China taking the brunt of its assault in what appeared to be a systematic attempt to eradicate the local Chi ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Axis criminals and profiteers engaged in murder, extortion, torture, theft, executions, black market operations, and espionage activities during the German occupation of those countries. In the face of Allied military successes and faced with bolder Resistance operations, they looked to Spain as a refuge. For that, they needed cash and connections to cross into Spain and resume their activities or go into hiding. These individuals often carried fungible items like currencies, securities, gold (preferably) and silver bars, gold coins ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky If you search for a definition of the word “solidarity”, this is what you find: “Unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.” In other words, “solidarity” requires unity of feeling or action amongst individuals and entities that share a common interest and support one another. It also implies that they all work together to achieve a common objective. Let’s apply the concept of “solidarity” to the interwoven notions of cultural plunder, art looting, and the restitution, repatriation, return of ..read more

bt Marc Masurovsky France and the demarcation line (1940-1942) During the German occupation of Western Europe (1940-1945), one of the major activities of the occupying forces and their local collaborators was plunder, looting, outright theft of Jewish-owned property, regardless of its form and shape, from residential and commercial property deeds to industrial know-how (patents, licenses, royalty agreements and trademarks), to financial instruments (stocks, bonds, shares) to artistic, cultural and religious objects. Let’s not forget those highly fungible precious stones and metals ..read more

by Marc Masurovsky Part of the Khmunu Manuscript One of HARP’s goals is to break down the research silos that separate Holocaust researchers from cultural heritage protection specialists and experts on “indigenous” and “colonial” objects. For that reason, we endeavor periodically to showcase items which do not fit into the “Nazi-era paradigm” and see what we can learn from their fragmentary and oh so incomplete histories. Can the methods used to tease out ownership details from items displaced during the Nazi era help us with fleshing out the fragmented stories surrounding archaeolo ..read more