Note: This post tiers off an earlier one where I discussed my failed attempt to obtain compensation for my family from the French Ministry of Culture for artworks confiscated from my father’s first cousin by Nazi authorities at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940. As I explained in Post 105, I’m my father’s cousin’s closest surviving blood relative. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi’s primary agency of plunder, spearheaded the seizure of artworks in Bordeaux but was also heavily involved in the plunder of libraries and archives throughout the areas the Nazis occupied. Surprisingly, many of the books wound up in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland], the town in Silesia where my father was born.
Related Posts:
POST 105: FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN ‘S NAZI-CONFISCATED ART: RESTITUTION DENIED
POST 126: MY GREAT-AUNT FRANZISKA BRUCK, FLORIST TO THE LAST GERMAN KAISER
POST 127: MY GREAT-AUNT ELSBETH BRUCK, “LA COMMUNISTE,” A DDR APPARATCHIK
This story begins in 2014 when I spent 13 weeks in Europe traveling from Poland to Spain exploring places associated with my Jewish family’s diaspora. This included visiting the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, Berlin’s westernmost borough, where the surviving papers of two of my renowned great-aunts, Franziska Bruck (1866-1942) and Elsbeth Bruck (1874-1970), are archived; both have been the subject of recent posts. I photographed all the documents, pictures, and personal effects in the files for later study.
Upon my return to the states, I tried to make sense of what I’d obtained. Obviously, the letters were most useful though some were handwritten in Sütterlinschrift or Kurrentschrift, historical forms of German handwriting that are indecipherable to me as well as most contemporary Germans; fortunately, I know a few older German friends and relatives who learned Sütterlin in school who were able to translate these letters for me.
The most informative letter, however, was a typed one, composed by one of my father’s first cousins, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck in East Berlin. In this letter written in 1946, Hansi explained that a painting by her recently deceased brother Fédor Löwenstein had posthumously sold for 90,000 French Francs. (Figure 1) Realizing this represented a significant amount of money at the time, I began to suspect Fédor was an accomplished artist. I already knew of his existence from photographs and other letters found among my great-aunt’s papers. (Figure 2) Additionally, knowing Fédor had died in 1946 in Nice, France, I’d previously obtained his certificat de décès, death certificate, when I visited L’Hôtel de Ville in Nice, Nice’s City Hall.
I began my investigation in Nice by contacting the lady I know at L’Hôtel de Ville asking if she could find and send me Fédor’s obituary. This acquaintance did one better and sent me several web links with information about Fédor Löwenstein. Unbeknownst to me during my 13 weeks in Europe the Musée des Beaux-arts in Bordeaux, France had featured three of Fédor’s oil paintings on display between May 15th and August 24th. Naturally, had I known about this special exhibit, I would have detoured there to see the artworks.
The exhibit catalog (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) included a lot of detail on Fédor and his paintings, and their history. (Figure 3) The exhibit and the new information confirmed what I already suspected, namely, that Löwenstein had not been an ordinary painter. He was born on the 13th of April 1901 in Munich. He studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1923, he moved to Paris, France, attracted by the artistic influence of the capital. Between the two world wars, an artistic movement dominated there referred to as École de Paris, the School of Paris, which was not an actual school. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew. His early works reflected the influence of cubism, and his subsequent creations evolved towards abstraction, although his personal style was on the border between the two. In 1936, Fédor joined the Salon des Surindépendants, an association of artists who no longer wanted an admission jury and questioned the restrictions imposed by the new regulations of the Salon des Indépendants of 1924.
Fédor Löwenstein is often referred to as a Czechoslovakian painter because his father’s family was from there. The Munich Agreement concluded on the 30th of September 1938, provided for the German annexation of land on the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany called the Sudetenland, where more than three million, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. Undoubtedly the signing of this agreement in the city where Fédor was born and involving the country where his father’s family originated inspired him to paint one of his iconic works, “La Chute,” “The Fall.” As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, “The composition and iconographic vocabulary of the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica. . .”
When France entered the war on the 3rd of September 1939, Löwenstein, like many artists, left Paris. As a foreigner, he had to hide to escape the exclusion laws. Briefly, some background on this. During the interwar period, France was one of the more liberal countries in welcoming Jews, many of them from eastern Europe. However, in the wake of a significant influx of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the French government began to reassess their “open-door” policy. By 1939 the authorities had imposed strict limitations on immigration and set up several internment and detention camps for refugees, such as Gurs and Rivesaltes, in southern France. Various of my German ancestors got caught up in these detentions.
In the case of Fédor, however, he went to Mirmande in the Drôme Valley, more than 400 miles south of Paris, on the advice of a fellow artist, a place he’d previously stayed in 1935 and 1938. At the time, Miramande was a village in ruins that became a refuge for many Parisian artists of foreign origin. All seemed to lead a peaceful existence there except for the difficulties obtaining art supplies. In any case, sometime in May 1940, Fédor left Miramande for Paris to select works of art to be shipped to a gallery in New York City via the port of Bordeaux. These works would eventually be seized there in December 1940 by the Nazi authorities.
Bordeaux is located in Aquitaine, a historical region in southwestern France. Quoting from the exhibit catalog: “Considered a sensitive and strategic coastal area, the Atlantic coastline was governed in a special way by the army, and access to it was forbidden. Very quickly, the military authorities blocked the shipment of all goods then leaving the port of Bordeaux. December 5 [1940] seems to have been the date of an important seizure operation by the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), two sets of goods on their way out were confiscated.” This included Fédor Löwenstein’s consignment of works destined for America.
A little more history. German forces invaded France on May 10, 1940, and by June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany that went into effect on June 25, 1940. Under the terms of the armistice, Germany annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and occupied the remainder of northern and western France. However, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied until November 1942. There a French collaborationist government, referred to as the Vichy Regime, governed. However, the suppression of the demarcation line in November 1942 caused the artist colony gathered in Miramande to break up. From then on, it was the French Resistance network that protected the refugees of Miramande, allowing many Jewish painters to escape.
By the fall of 1943, Fédor was already ill and traveled to Paris under a false identity to consult a specialist at the Curie Institute, though his disease was not diagnosed. His mastery of the French language, his support network, and his discretion about his religion were undoubtedly responsible for his survival during the Nazi occupation. Shortly after the war on the 4th of August 1946 he was hospitalized and died a few days later of Hodgkin Lymphoma in Nice.
The 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux (livret_lowenstein.pdf (musba-bordeaux.fr) was prompted by the rediscovery of three looted works of art, entitled “Landscape (Composition (Paysage)) (Figure 4),” “The Poplars (Les Peupliers),” and “The Trees (Arbres)” painted by Fédor Löwenstein that had been confiscated by the Nazis. As previously mentioned, the three works displayed were part of a consignment that F. Loevenstein, as Fédor signed his works, tried to send to an American gallery in New York. Seized at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940, they were sent to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, to be stored in the so-called “Salle des Martyrs,” “Martyrs Room” (Figure 5), a chamber to which works in a style repudiated by the aesthetics of the Third Reich, were relegated. It was only at the end of 2010 that the connection between these works that were held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne housed at the Centre Pompidou and the Löwenstein seizure at Hanger H in the port of Bordeaux was made.
Researchers Alain Prévet, Thierry Bajou, Edouard Vasseur, along with the curator of the Bordeaux exhibit Mme. Florence Saragoza, about whom more will be said below, identified the paintings. They accomplished this using two negatives preserved in the Archives of the National Museums that showed views of the Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume. The researchers undertook detailed digitization of these negatives, painting by painting, and reconciled this with data that had been recorded by Rose Valland, then curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 6) In the list that Rose Valland had drawn up in March 1942, she listed eleven works—six watercolors being grouped together in one lot—that had been stolen from Fédor Löwenstein. At least two of the artist’s paintings are visible in one of the photographs taken of the Salle des Martyrs.
The Salle des Martyrs of the Jeu de Paume became the central repository of the works of art confiscated in France by the Nazi services, the contents of which were made available to the ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce). The ERR was one of the primary Nazi Party organizations dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII. It was led by the ideological henchman of the Nazi Party Alfred Rosenberg, from within the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union.
The Löwenstein works mentioned by Rose Valland and rediscovered in 2010 had also been catalogued by the ERR agents. They were listed under ERR file numbers Löwenstein 4 (Landscape), Löwenstein 15 (The Poplars), and Löwenstein 19 (The Trees). Following the war, the works were kept at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. The researcher Alain Prévet previously mentioned involved in the identification of the Löwenstein works has shown that the works were inventoried in 1973 as coming from an anonymous donation. The Bordeaux catalog notes the following:
“According to the minutes of the session of the Commission des Musées Nationaux of December 6, 1973, this ‘donation’ was in fact a regularization of artistic goods that had been ‘lying around’ in the Louvre; works that had ‘remained unclaimed, some of them for forty years,’ in a storeroom of the national museum. Because of the lack of knowledge of the real provenance of these works, it was decided to register them as ‘anonymous gifts’. . . works that had been deposited in the Louvre during the Occupation, following the Nazi spoliations, were . . . part of this collection. . .”
As the Bordeaux exhibit catalog notes, Löwenstein’s works, which are conserved to this day at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou “. . .bear the stigma of their aesthetic condemnation: a large red cross indicating that they were among others destined to be discarded. The files drawn up by the ERR bear the mention vernichtet, ‘destroyed’. . .The curator at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland, confirms this fatal destiny on July 20, 1943: ‘Scholz and his team continue to choose from among the paintings in the Louvre’s escrow and stab the paintings they do not want to keep. This is how they destroyed almost all of Masson’s works, all of Dali’s. The paintings in the Löwenstein, Esmont (sic), M[ichel]-G[eorges] Michel collections are almost all shredded (…)’’. . . On July 23, she added: ‘The paintings massacred in the Louvre’s sequestration were brought back to the Jeu de Paume. Five or six hundred were burned under German surveillance in the museum garden from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.. . .’” That Löwenstein’s three paintings escaped destruction is astonishing and is probably due to the fact they were classified as “paintings of lesser importance.”
Contained within the materials on the Löwenstein exhibit was the name of the curator who organized the show, Mme. Florence Saragoza, previously mentioned as one of the people involved in identifying Fédor’s works from the negatives of the Salle des Martyrs.
Intriguingly, also included within the Bordeaux museum’s promotional materials was the following statement in French:
“Si près de soixante-dix ans après la fin du conflit, de nombreux cas de restitution d’objets d’art restent en attente, trois d’entre eux sont désormais sortis de l’ombre et attendant maintenant l’identification des ayants droit de Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) pour être remis à leurs propriétaires légitimes.”
Translated :
“While nearly seventy years after the end of the conflict, many cases of art object restitution remain pending, three have now emerged from the shadows and are now awaiting the identification of the rightful owners of Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) to be returned to their rightful owners.”
This is a significant “concession.” Oftentimes, heirs of Jews whose works were either confiscated by the Nazis or whose sale was forced at a deeply discounted price and/or that eventually and illicitly wound up in museums spend years litigating their cases against these museums or private owners. The fact that the France Government’s Premier Ministre’s Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation or “CIVS” acknowledged that it was looking for the rightful heirs of goods taken illegally by the Nazis suggested the process of receiving compensation or acquiring possession could theoretically be short-circuited.
As I explained in detail in Post 105, I was able to establish contact with Mme. Florence Saragoza (Figure 7) who was literally brought to tears to learn that someone from Fédor Löwenstein’s family still exists. Florence, who I hold in the very, very highest esteem helped me file a claim in 2014 with the CIVS for compensation on behalf of my family; this involved requesting compensation for 25 pieces of art seized and/or destroyed.
For orientation, my father and Fédor were first cousins (Figure 8), so I would be Fédor’s first cousin once removed. Being intimately acquainted with my family tree and knowing that neither Fédor nor his two siblings ever had any children, I quickly realized I’m his closest surviving blood relative. Notwithstanding this fact, as I deeply lamented in Post 105, when the CIVS finally rendered their decision in June 2021, they refused to acknowledge I had any rights to compensation for the destruction and confiscation of Fédor’s artworks. Suffice it to say, because France is ruled by the principles of civil law rather than common law, my rights have been supplanted by Fédor’s siblings, who are obviously no longer alive, or by the heirs named in his sibling’s wills. The living heirs are referred to as “universal legatees,” and their rights according to French law supersede my own. That said, there is still some gray area based on which a French lawyer I’ve hired is contesting the decision. Stay tuned for further updates.
Following their determination in 2021, the CIVS notified me that one of Fédor Löwenstein’s painting entitled “Composition” had been shipped to the Jewish Museum of New York for an exhibit entitled “Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art,” scheduled to run between August 20, 2021, and January 9, 2022. This was one of the paintings I had filed a claim for with the CIVS. Even though I’d been denied restitution by the French Minister of Culture, I took an avid interest in how the CIVS would handle the process going forward. For this reason, I ordered the exhibition catalog which, during Covid, took many months to arrive.
Tucked into the book was a surprising picture labeled as having been taken in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]. This is the town where my father and many of his immediate family were born and where the family business, the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel, operated through three generations. The photo shows crates containing thousands of books. According to the caption, in 1943 the Nazis established a research and sorting operation for plundered libraries in Ratibor. Eventually more than two million books were transported there. The photograph was included in the photo records of the Offenbach Archival Depot. (Figure 9) The Depot was a central collecting point in the American Sector of Germany for books, manuscripts and archival materials looted, confiscated, or taken by the German army or Nazi government from the occupied countries during World War II.
The relocation of the ERR’s Book Control Center (Buchleitstelle) from Berlin to Ratibor in mid-1943 was prompted by the increased Allied bombing of Berlin, and a desire by the Nazis to save the books, at least until they’d had time to sort and save those they could use for propaganda. More on this below.
While I’d previously been unaware how my father’s hometown had been used during the war, Patricia Kennedy Grimstead, an academic from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, has written extensively on the subject. In a seminal paper entitled “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg” she goes into great detail on her findings. According to Grimstead, the ERR Silesian research center in Ratibor “. . .was the recipient of archives and books the Nazis plundered as part of a vast ideological, political, and cultural policy. Unlike art, archival and library seizures were not for display, prestige, or profit. If they bolstered Hitler’s imperial pretensions or exposed the evils of ‘Bolshevism,’ then by all means they should be sought. . .Specialists catalogued, analyzed, and preserved the materials, treating them not only as the heritage of ‘enemies of the Reich’ but as raw material for propaganda for ‘operational’ use’” Books that did not meet these criteria were burned in spectacular bonfires or sent to pulping factories. (p. 391)
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, in a section on “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder,” in January 1940 Hitler informed all offices of the Nazi Part that Alfred Rosenberg, head of the ERR, “. . .should be assisted in assembling a library for the planned new educational and research institute of the Party, the Hohe School, to be located at the Chiemsee in Bavaria. The library would contain 500,000 volumes. . .Preparations for the Hohe School also included other branches within the Reich, such as a ‘Center for Research on the Jewish Question’ in Frankfurt.”
The Jewish Museum exhibit catalog emphasizes this same point: “The segregation of Jews was enforced in a variety of ways. One distinctive strategy was to treat Jewish culture as the subject of historical inquiry, much as one might study a rare but obsolete specimen. Hitler called this an ‘anti-Semitism of reason,’ or ‘scientific anti-Semitism,’ which explicitly identified Jews in racial terms, rather than by religious affiliation. By the late 1930s research centers, institutes, and university departments had been founded throughout Germany and Austria to accommodate this burgeoning field and to inspire looting of works that were to be ‘saved’ expressly for the purpose of spurious academic research. Prominent among these was Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (IEJ). It housed an estimated five hundred thousand books and manuscripts stolen from synagogues, Masonic temples, and private collections. Key to his mission was to set up a great Nazi university on the Chiemsee, in Bavaria, from the spoils of his plunder, including masterworks of both art and literature that would be instrumental in forming the curriculum.” (p. 54)
In this lengthy post, I reviewed and augmented what I had previously discussed in Post 105 regarding my failed attempt to obtain restitution on behalf of my family for paintings seized by the Nazi’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) from my father’s first cousin. In the process, I learned more about this agency’s role in plundering books that wound up in Ratibor where my father was born. Following the capitulation of Ratibor at the end of WWII, many of the books confiscated by the Nazis in Western Europe were later moved by the Soviets to Minsk, capital of Soviet Belorussia. To this day, an estimated half a million of these books have not been returned to their countries of origin and are referred to as “twice plundered” books.
REFERENCES
Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. 20 Aug. 2021-9 Jan. 2022, Jewish Museum, New York.
Alexander, Darsie & Sam Sackeroff. Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art. Yale University Press, 2021.
“Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: A Policy of Plunder.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/offenbach-archival-depot/einsatzstab-reichsleiter-rosenberg-a-policy-of-plunder
Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres. 15 May-24 Aug. 2014, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.
“France.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/france
Grimstead, Patricia Kennedy. “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, Winter 2005, pp. 390-458.
Musée des Beaux-arts de Bordeaux. Fédor Löwenstein, destin tragique d’un élève d’André Lhote.
Photographs of the Operations of the Offenbach Archival Depot. United States National Archive, 541611, https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/541611?availableOnline=true&typeOfMaterials=Photographs%20and%20other%20Graphic%20Materials
“Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsleiter_Rosenberg_Taskforce
