Note: Following the restitution of Fédor Löwenstein’s three surviving Nazi-confiscated paintings to me, the Centre Pompidou’s Musee National d’Art Moderne (MNAM) sent me a dossier with documents about their history. In this post, I highlight some of the findings about the paintings’ dramatic and involved past and explain how an archivist and curator discovered they were looted art.
Inasmuch as great art should ever belong to a single individual, the three paintings confiscated by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux on December 5, 1940, from my father’s first cousin Fédor Löwenstein that survived their destructive onslaught are now mine. In Post 189, I discussed the Restitution Ceremony that took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on September 16, 2025, where the formal turnover of the paintings took place, an event eleven years in the making. (Figure 1)
Following the handover, Dr. Camille Morando, the person at the Centre Pompidou responsible for the documentation of the museum’s collections, sent me a digital file with documents detailing the history of the three paintings. Being a nerd for this type of information, I spent some time reviewing and making sense of it. Most of it is written in French, a language I’m reasonably fluent in. I thought I would share with readers insights and findings from the portfolio.
First, let me review some of what is known about Fédor Löwenstein. (Figure 2) Readers are referred to earlier posts for more detail. Though born in 1901 in Munich, Germany, he is typically referred as a Czechoslovakian artist because his father’s family hailed from there and he held Czechoslovak nationality. Since his two younger siblings were born in Danzig, Germany (today: Gdańsk, Poland), respectively, in 1902 and 1905, Fédor likely never lived in Czechoslovakia. Regardless, there is no question he felt an affinity for his father’s homeland.
The Munich Agreement of 1938, a pact between Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy, that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia, was intended to prevent a war. It failed. Following the pact, Fédor painted “La Chute,” The Fall (Figure 3), in the style of Picasso’s Guernica. This iconic work reflected his anguish at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
Fédor studied at “L’ecole des arts decoratif de Berlin” (School of Decorative Arts in Berlin) then at “l’Academie des Beaux-Arts de Dresde” (Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden). In 1923 he moved to France where he spent the remainder of his life. Fédor Löwenstein was one of many Czechoslovak artists who lived and worked in Paris during what was known as the First Czechoslovak Republic that existed from 1918 to 1938.
Following his arrival in Paris, Fédor started exhibiting at the Autumn Salon in the mid-1920s, first under the name of Fédor Lovest, of Czech nationality, then later as Fédor Loevenstein of Czechoslovakia. He mostly exhibited still lifes, though in 1927 and 1933, he added paintings of nudes.
The fact that Fédor painted nudes is personally intriguing. Let me explain. Between the 1950s and 1980s, my parents would regularly visit Nice, France, where Fédor Löwenstein died in 1946, but where Fédor’s younger sister, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff, née Löwenstein, lived until her death in 1986. (Figure 4) During one of those visits, Hansi gave my father a pastel of a nude that to this day hangs in my mother’s bedroom. The work is framed so the signature is concealed, but it is logical to consider it might have been drawn by Fédor. One day, I intend to find out.
With his closest friends among the Czechoslovak artists, he regularly displayed his paintings between 1936-1938 with this group. His French friends included Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as well as students from the circle of his mentor André Lhote. Lhote ran a summer art academy in the medieval hilltop village of Mirmande in the Drôme department of southeastern France, where Fedor spent time in 1935 and 1938, then again later as discussed below.
The Nazis captured France in about six weeks (10 May- 25 June 1940) during the Battle of France, starting with the invasion on May 10, 1940, and culminating with the fall of Paris on June 14. This was followed by the signing of an armistice on June 22, 1940, which effectively divided and occupied the country. This resulted in the establishment in the south of the so-called “Free Zone,” the collaborationist Vichy French government led by Marshal Philippe Petain.
Shortly before the occupation of Paris, on the advice of Marcelle Rivier, one of Lhote’s students since 1928 and later Fédor’s lover (Figure 5), he relocated to Mirmande in the Free Zone. However, before leaving, Fédor made a final attempt to ship twenty-five of his canvases by boat from the Port of Bordeaux. They were destined for an exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. They never made it there as I’ll explain.
Fédor’s works are characterized as a blend of Cubism and abstract art. A 2014 catalog accompanying an exhibition in Bordeaux of three of his surviving works ponders the question whether the ongoing war was responsible for the evolution of Fédor’s painting style or whether the war accelerated a development already in process. Regardless, two of Löwenstein’s supporters from the Paris art scene, Robert Delaunay and André Lhote, are quoted in “Ce Soir” in 1937 characterizing him as “one of the most inspiring abstract painters.” (Pravdova 2016: p. 60, footnote 6)
In Mirmande Fédor continued working in difficult conditions. Then, on November 11, 1942, German troops occupied Vichy France in Operation Case Anton. No longer safe in Mirmande, in early 1943, disguised as a peasant woman and with the help of Marcelle Rivier and other members of the French Resistance, he was taken to Notre-Dame d’Aiguebelle Abbey, a Trappist monastery located 50km south of Mirmande. Concealed Jews were put to work there on various maintenance tasks related to upkeep of the monastery. In Löwenstein’s case, he painted tiles, a task for which he had no enthusiasm and was ill-suited. He eventually escaped from a work party he’d been assigned to and returned to Mirmande in Spring 1943, obviously feeling it was safe again.
By Fall 1943, Fédor was sick with an unknown ailment. He secretly traveled to Paris to consult a renowned hematologist at the Curie Institute using the pseudonym “Lauriston.” His condition remained undiagnosed and he continued to deteriorate. He seemed largely unconcerned with being arrested while in Paris because of his fluency in French and the fact that he was discrete about his Jewish background. In truth, he appears to have traveled to Paris several times during the Nazi occupation.
An article included in the dossier given to me by Dr. Morando is the catalog mentioned above that was written for an exposition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (Figure 6) in 2014 in which Löwenstein’s three martyred works were featured. It includes an intriguing footnote (number 24) suggesting Fédor used the pseudonym “Lauriston” as a cynical poke at the Gestapo since they had their Paris headquarters at “93 de la rue Lauriston.”
Family pictures I obtained in 2014 from the archives of the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, located outside Berlin, where the personal papers of two of Fédor’s aunts are archived, were taken in Nice. Given his declining health, it is clear he’d decided to spend his final days with his family there. The pictures were taken after the war ended because his youngest brother Heinz, who spent the entire war imprisoned or escaping from German stalags and was liberated sometime between March and May 1945, appears alongside Fédor in the postwar images. (Figures 7-8) Regular followers will recall the multiple posts I’ve written about Fédor’s brother Heinz. (Post 137; Post 137, Postscript; Post 163; Post 163, Postscript; Post 181; Post 194)
Fédor died in Nice on August 4, 1946, of Hodgkin lymphoma and was buried in the Cimetière Caucade. His mother passed away in 1949 and was entombed alongside her son. While their graves were eventually “evacuated” after the family stopped making payments required to keep them interred, their respective headstones survive as reminders of their existence. (Figure 9)
Included in the dossier that Dr. Morando sent me is the first page of a letter that was written to Mme. Sonia Delaunay on August 21, 1946, following Fedor’s death. Recall the Delaunays were friends and supporters of his from his days in Paris. Written by someone named “Ullmann,” the person told Mme. Delaunay that Fédor had passed away and wrote that “Je perds un ami et le monde un artiste dont la valeur sera peut-etre un jour reconnue.” Translated, “I lose a friend and the world an artist whose importance may one day be recognized.” This day has finally arrived.
With the above as background, having woven in historical events with findings from the file sent by Dr. Morando, let me briefly chronicle the paintings’ journey as documented in the dossier.
The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the “Special Task Force” headed by Adolf Hitler’s leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, was one of the main Nazi agencies engaged in the plunder of cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. A particularly notorious operation by the ERR was the seizure of art from French Jewish and a number of Belgian collections from 1940 to 1944. The plunder was brought to the Jeu de Paume building in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris for processing by the ERR’s “Special Staff for Pictorial Art,” the so-called the Sonderstab Bildende Kunst.
The twenty-five pieces of art Fédor Löwenstein tried to ship to New York on the eve of Germany’s capture of Paris are recorded as having been seized by the ERR at Hanger H at the Port of Bordeaux on December 5, 1940. Fedor had a premonition they would never arrive, a concern he expressed in writing to his girlfriend Marcelle Rivier. Following their seizure Fédor’s artworks were sent to the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 10)
At the Jeu de Paume, the paintings were relegated to the so-called “salle des martyrs,” a space where works rejected by Nazi esthetics of the time, “degenerate art” as they were referred to, were stored pending destruction. The fact that this fate awaited the three paintings I recovered in September 2025 is evidenced by the large red crosses chalked across their surfaces. They were slated to be “vernichtet,” destroyed. And yet, by some miracle, three of Löwenstein’s paintings confiscated in 1940 survived.
The documentation on the three Löwenstein paintings suggests that after being shuttled back and forth between the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume during the Nazi era, they wound up at the Louvre where they languished for many years. The many moves between the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume occurred for various reasons including the obsession by the Nazis to remove or destroy the degenerate art before a planned visit to the Jeu de Paume by Nazi dignitaries. It is well known that the space of the Jeu de Paume was rehung to highlight artworks for high-ranking Nazis who would regularly visit to “shop.” Hermann Göring, for example, one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, is known to have visited the Jeu de Paume twenty times between November 1940 and November 1942 to select paintings for his personal collection. (Figure 11)
Some paintings considered to be degenerate were not destroyed because they could be traded to dealers or collectors for works more in line with the Nazi aesthetic. As Prévet & Thierry note, “These works, whose style was disapproved of by Nazi aesthetics, were often preserved only because of their market value and the possibilities they offered for exchange with older works that conformed more closely to official aesthetics.” (2012:34)
In any case, this is likely how many works of unknown provenance wound up in the Louvre.
The status of Löwenstein’s paintings was not “legally” resolved until 1973. Through administrative machinations, they were officially added to the modern art collections of the National Museum of Modern Art (Musee National d’Art Moderne) as an “anonymous donation.” Shortly before the museum’s relocation in 1977, the paintings were moved to the reserves of the Centre Pompidou where my wife and I first saw them in 2024. (Figure 12)
The identification of the three paintings, now mine, Les Arbres, Composition, and Les Peupliers, as looted art did not take place until December 2010. This was thanks to the work of archivists and curators, namely, Alain Prévet, head of the Archives of the National Museums, and Thierry Bajou, chief curator of artifacts of the French Museums. It is worth briefly relating how these two men were able to recognize Löwenstein’s paintings as looted art.
As Didier Schulmann, former Director of the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou (Figure 13), wrote in 2012, it was a case of the “purloined letter syndrome,” based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, where the answer was right in front of people. (Schulmann 2012: 29).
Preserved in the Archives of the National Museum are thirteen negatives showing views of the rooms at the Jeu de Paume taken during the Nazi occupation exhibiting numerous pieces of art seized by the ERR; these include two negatives specifically showing the “salle des martyrs” (Figures 14-15) where the works deemed degenerate were hung. Using these negatives, Prévet & Bajou describe the process they followed:
“This work initially involved a detailed digitization of the negatives, work by work. Each operation was accompanied by specific brightness adjustments to optimize the legibility of each artwork. Next, we performed an anamorphosis (Figure 16) to correct the distortions related to perspective. From this stage, it was then possible to identify a number of works and confirm attributions suggested elsewhere.”
Next, they referred to a list that the noted art historian Rose Valland recorded in her notebook on March 10, 1942 (Figure 17), of modern art displayed in the Jeu de Paume on this date. It was the translation of a list drawn up by the German authorities that provided a brief description of the pieces of art with dimensions and the name of the owners from whom the artworks had been confiscated. Ironically, while this list was known to historians, astonishingly no one had ever cross referenced it with the photographs of the Jeu de Paume. Ergo, Didier Schulmann’s remark cited above of the “purloined letter syndrome.”
“We also used a website recently launched by a team of American researchers led by Marc Masurovski, which reproduces all the records compiled by the ERR during the looting. This website provides a directory of the looted individuals and the works that passed through the Jeu de Paume, enriched with photographs of the seized works, when available, taken by ERR agents. We found most of the works visible on the negatives there, but some of them, now identified, remain known only through these negatives when they were not specifically photographed by the Germans.
This is how we were able to identify works by Fédor Löwenstein, whose works were looted in December 1940 in Bordeaux. In a list from March 1942, Rose Valland enumerates eleven of the twenty-five works looted from the artist (six watercolors being grouped together as one lot) (see Figure 17), and she mentions two others, around 1944, not explicitly in the ‘Aulnay train,’ but at least remaining in Paris. At least two canvases are visible in one of the photographs, but had never been linked to this artist, particularly because the Germans intended to destroy them. [EDITOR’S NOTE: These paintings correspond to “La Ville Moderne” and an untitled work (see discussion and figures below)]
The connection between visible works and those of a little-known artist, believed to have been destroyed according to the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) records, was made possible in part by a preliminary study of Löwenstein ‘s style, some of whose works appear similar to those of Paul Klee, but also by comparing the works still to be identified with those of Löwenstein listed in the ERR records. Comparing our hypotheses with the online catalog of the National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM) allowed us to find mention of three works by this artist (Figure 18), which were not illustrated at the time, one of which was clearly visible in one of the two photographs of the ‘room of martyrs.’” (2012: 34-35) [EDITOR’S NOTE: The visible painting was Fédor Löwenstein’s Composition] (Figure 19)
The so-called “Aulnay train” was a train loaded with looted art the Germans had designated for urgent shipment on August 2, 1944, from Paris as the city was about to fall to Allied troops (i.e., the Allies liberated Paris on August 25, 1944). It was supposed to be the last shipment, but alerted by Rose Valland, the Societe nationale des chemins de fer francais (SNCF), the National Company of the French Railways, blocked the train on August 27 at the train station of Aulnay-sous-Bois; as a result many of the artworks the train contained were restored to their rightful owners. None of Löwenstein’s works, however, were aboard this train since the Germans had already decided to destroy them. As a related aside, none of Löwenstein’s artworks was individually photographed by the Germans, likely for the same reason that the Germans intended to destroy his works.
Based on a comment in Rose Valland’s notebook, footnote number 40 in the catalog accompanying the 2014 Löwenstein exhibit in Bordeaux implies Rose Valland didn’t realize Löwenstein was a painter but rather thought he was a collector. (see Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres (exh. cat))
Two of the Löwenstein’s paintings show “signs of laceration along the edges, where they were torn from their stretchers.” (Ministère de la Culture 2025) Documentation in the MNAM dossier sent by Dr. Morando indicates these edges have been repaired. However, since the red crosses bear witness to the “dramatic marks of history,” their “stigmata” remain. (Ministère de la Culture 2025) (Figure 20)
The Löwenstein painting Prévet & Bajou refer to as clearly visible in one of the ERR photos of the “salle des martyrs” is the one titled “Composition (Paysage).” Fascinatingly, it is tucked in a corner alongside works by Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse. Clearly, lofty company to be grouped with! (see Figure 15)
To remind readers, I filed my claim with the French Minister of Culture for compensation and restitution of Löwenstein’s artworks in 2014 with Florence Saragoza’s assistance; Florence was the curator of the 2014 exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux where the martyred works were first shown. The claim mentioned 25 art pieces but over the years I never got a clear answer where this figure came from. A footnote in the French original of the paragraphs quoted above finally provided the answer. The web address to the database developed by Marc Masurovski, cited above, includes the two original pages of the list developed by the ERR listing the names, dates, art medium, and dimensions of the 25 artworks seized from Fédor Löwenstein. (Figures 21a-c) The paintings are catalogued under ERR record numbers Löwenstein 4 (Composition), 15 (Les Peupliers), and 19 (Les Arbres). These correspond to the three paintings I retrieved in September 2025. As readers can see, all 25 of Löwenstein’s listed works were crossed out, and marked “Vernichtet” (“destroyed”), even the three that survived.
The online catalog of the National Museum of Modern Art cited by Prévet & Bajou (http://collection.centrepompidou.fr.artworks) no longer includes the three Löwenstein paintings in their inventory.
One last observation about Prévet & Bajou’s discoveries. In the second picture taken by the ERR in the “salle des martyrs,” the curators discovered two other canvases in Löwenstein’s style, the first corresponds to the painting entitled “La Ville Moderne,” the Modern City (Figure 22), the second is untitled because too little of it is visible. (Figure 23)
Alain Prévet recounts the astonishing discovery: “No one had recognized the Löwensteins before. It was through studying the negatives of these two images, preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that we were able to identify them.”
Once Löwenstein’s three paintings were positively identified as looted works, they were removed from the inventory of the MNAM (Musee National d’Art Moderne) in 2011 and transferred to the register of artworks confiscated by the Nazis, called the MNR (Musée Nationaux Recuperation) pending their return to heirs. Since their restitution in September 2025, they have now been removed from the MNR database. (Figures 24a-b)
Briefly, some history on the MNR. At the end of the Second World War, roughly 61,000 artworks looted from French territory were recovered in Germany and returned to France. About three-quarters of them were restored to their rightful owners, 13,000 were sold by the French state, and roughly 2,200 were placed under the care of national museums, often regional institutions. Legally, the French state is only a temporary custodian of these works. As such, they are not considered part of the permanent public collections of France’s national museums. This latter group, made up of approximately 2,200 artworks as just stated, are referred to by the acronym MNR, Musée Nationaux Recuperation. The MNR designation signals a complex history. At the MNAM, where these three surviving Löwenstein paintings resided until Prévet & Bajou came along were labeled as R26P (Les Peupliers), R27P (Les Arbres), and R28P (Composition), not by MNR numbers since they were only recognized as looted works in 2010.
It is pointless to imagine how well-known Fédor Löwenstein might have become during his life if circumstances had been different. However, in an article written in 2016 by Anna Pravdova, entitled “Vernichtet! Three rescued paintings by Fédor Löwenstein,” published in the “Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague,” she notes an intriguing fact. Following his death, the property of the Nierendorf Gallery in New York, where Fédor had intended his consignment of 25 paintings to be shipped, was purchased in its entirety by the Guggenheim Museum. It’s enormously satisfying that by dint of owning Fédor’s surviving paintings, I am playing a role in helping my ancestor gain the recognition he never obtained in life, even though his artworks may never hang in the Guggenheim.
REFERENCES
Löwenstein, Fédor. Fédor Löwenstein (exh. cat.), 1962, Gallerie Blumenthal, Paris. (includes André Lhote quote from Ce Soir, Nov. 27, 1937)
Löwenstein, Fédor. Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946), trois œuvres martyres (exh. cat), 15 Mai-24 Août 2014, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.
Ministère de la Culture. (2025, September 16). Tracking the ghost paintings of Fédor Löwenstein, lost to Nazi looting. [Press release].
Pravdová, A. (2016). Vernichtet! Three rescued paintings by Fédor Löwenstein. Bulletin of the National Gallery in Prague, XXVI, 55-60.
Prévet, A, Bajou, T. La récente identification de tableaux spoliés à l’artiste Fédor Löwenstein, in Florence Saragoza (ed.), L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux, 2012, p. 33-35.
Saragoza, F. (ed.) (2012). L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux.
Schulmann, Didier. (2012). Fédor Löwenstein, le pillage et la liquidation des ateliers des artistas juifs pendant l’occupation, in Saragoza (ed.), in Florence Saragoza (ed.), L’Art victime de la guerre. Destin des œuvres d’art en Aquitaine pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Bordeaux, 2012, p. 29-32.
Note: In this post, I tell the story of how after eleven years I prevailed in my quest to have three surviving paintings seized from my father’s first cousin Fédor Löwenstein by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux in December 1940 returned to me. I include pictures from the formal restitution event that took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris on the 16th of September 2025 and share French and English versions of the 18-minute speech I delivered on the occasion. Along with previous posts I’ve written on this longstanding saga, this post provides readers with some of the history of the seizure along with the story of how I eventually succeeded in my pursuit.
While this is a story eleven years in the making, the tale had its genesis almost 85 years ago in December 1940. This is when 25 paintings destined for an art gallery in New York were seized at the Port of Bordeaux in France by the Nazis from my father’s first cousin, Fédor Löwenstein. (Figure 1) As I’ve previously reported the Nazis shipped them to the Jeu de Paume in Paris where they were slated to be “vernichtet,” German word for destroyed, as examples of so-called “degenerate art.”
Miraculously, three of Fedor Löwenstein’s confiscated works of art survived (Figure 2), although in 1973 they were conveniently integrated into the collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, housed in the Centre Pompidou as an “anonymous donation.” This “error” was only uncovered in 2010. Following this revelation, the French Minister of Culture began the search for the legitimate owner. However, before the Minister of Culture could find me, I contacted them.
As I’ve previously written about in Post 105 and Post 160, I learned about the three surviving paintings in 2014 while doing some forensic genealogy in Berlin. Coincidentally, 2014 is the year that the three seized paintings were first displayed in the city where they were initially seized, in Bordeaux at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. When I learned about the paintings, I immediately contacted the curator of the exhibit, Mme Florence Saragoza (Figure 3), who helped me file a restitution claim. I was eligible to file this claim by dint of the fact that as Fédor Löwenstein’s first cousin once-removed, I’m his closest surviving relative; Fédor never had any children nor did either of his two siblings.
Because France has a civil law system rather a common law system, my claim was trumped by those of two so-called “universal legatees” and denied. It was subrogated by the French Minister of Culture’s Commission pour l’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations (CIVS) without the legatees ever having even lifted a finger, done any work or research, or even been aware of the artist. To say this was galling is an understatement. To rectify this outrageous situation necessitated a lengthy, costly, and litigious process that took eleven years to resolve. It was only because the French Ministry of Culture was offering a substantial sum of money as compensation for the 22 presumably destroyed works of art, compensation I was willing to forego to obtain possession of the paintings, that Fedor Löwenstein’s works of art now belong to me.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that money does not factor into compensation claims filed by Jewish heirs. Afterall, the only justice many such people are ever apt to obtain for the crimes perpetuated against their ancestors are financial. In my case, this was not possible. That said, I’m satisfied that the path going forward will lead to my ancestor Fédor Löwenstein obtaining some of the accolades he never received in life. He failed to achieve this recognition because he died prematurely at age 45 of Hodgkins Lymphoma and because the Nazis denied him this validation.
Regular readers know that over the years I’ve written about my compensation claim involving the French Minister of Culture’s CIVS, often venting great frustration. I direct first-time readers to these earlier posts, namely, Post 105 and Post 160.
The Restitution Ceremony was held on the 16th of September 2025 on the fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou in the Grand Salon. (Figure 4) Because the Centre Pompidou has just begun a five-year renovation, the museum was empty save for the approximately 50-75 people who attended the event. Several distinguished guests participated and spoke at the event, after which I was given the floor to say a few remarks. I delivered an 18- minute speech in French, a language I’m reasonably fluent in.
Restitution ceremonies comparable to the one I was the center of are rare events. Without exaggerating, they tend to be noteworthy and newsworthy. Ordinarily, the French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati would have presided over the Restitution Ceremony. Unfortunately, the date of the ceremony coincided with the period after September 8th in the wake of the French government’s collapse after Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly, forcing French President Emmanuel Macron to seek a new prime minister. Because there was no official French Minister of Culture on the 16th of September, the ceremony was instead presided over by the M. Laurent Le Bon (Figure 5), President of the Centre Pompidou, and M. Luc Allaire (Figure 6), Secretary General of the Ministry of Culture, on behalf of the Minister of Culture.
Je tiens à vous remercier chaleureusement de votre présence à cette cérémonie.
Citoyen américain, je me nomme Richard BROOK. Je vais vous raconter en quelques mots la raison de ma présence, mon lien avec l’artiste Fédor LÖWENSTEIN et comment j’ai appris son existence.
Je suis aujourd’hui à Paris pour reprendre possession de trois tableaux de Fédor LÖWENSTEIN.
Ces tableaux font partie des 25 œuvres saisies par les nazis au port de Bordeaux en décembre 1940 alors que Fédor tentait de les envoyer à une galerie d’art à New York. Les nazis considéraient ces œuvres comme des exemples de ce qu’ils appelaient « l’art dégénéré ». Après leur saisie, elles furent expédiées au Jeu de Paume en attendant d’être détruites. On présume pour exposition que les 22 autres œuvres saisies à Fédor ont effectivement été détruites. La preuve que le même sort attendait les trois tableaux survivants se trouve sur la surface des toiles. En effet, de grands « X » y ont été tracés, signifiant qu’ils devaient être « vernichtet », le mot allemand pour « détruit ».
J’aime à imaginer que votre héroïne française, MME Rose VALLAND, a joué un rôle essentiel dans la sauvegarde des trois œuvres qui se trouvent devant vous. Elle était le seul membre du personnel du Jeu de Paume à avoir été maintenue en poste par les nazis pendant leur occupation de Paris.
Fédor LÖWENSTEIN est souvent considéré comme un artiste tchécoslovaque. La famille de son père était en effet originaire de ce pays. Il est évident que Fédor ressentait un lien profond avec la patrie de son père. L’une des peintures les plus célèbres de Fédor s’intitule « La Chute ». Elle s’inspire de la signature des accords de Munich le 30 septembre 1938. Ces accords ont démantelé la Tchécoslovaquie de l’époque et conduit à l’annexion des Sudètes par l’Allemagne. Cette peinture s’inspire de « Guernica », le tableau anti-guerre de Picasso datant de 1937.
Fédor LÖWENSTEIN est né en 1901 à Munich. Il était l’aîné de trois enfants. Sa mère, née Hedwig BRUCK, était ma grand-tante (mon nom de famille BROOK est la version anglicisée de BRUCK). Hedwig était la tante de mon père; Fédor et mon père étaient donc cousins germains. On ne sait pas très bien à quel point ils se connaissaient. Fédor et sa mère sont morts à Nice avant ma naissance en 1950. Cependant, enfant, j’ai rencontré le frère et la sœur cadets de Fédor, Jeanne, affectueusement surnommée « Hansi », et Heinz. Mon père était proche d’eux.
Je suis le descendant direct le plus proche de Fédor LÖWENSTEIN encore en vie. Ni Fédor, ni son frère, ni sa sœur n’ont eu d’enfant. La France étant un pays de droit civil, j’ai dû mener une bataille juridique de près de 11 ans pour récupérer ces trois tableaux. En effet selon la loi française, les droits de deux « légataires universels » priment sur les miens. Cependant, mon avocat a réussi à convaincre la CIVS (Commission pour l’Indemnisation des Victimes de Spoliations) que mon long travail de recherches et mes actions nécessaires et indispensables à la mise à jour des 3 tableaux devaient être également indemnisés. Cela n’a en en effet été possible que parce que j’ai été le premier à découvrir que la CIVS cherchait à restituer les tableaux de LÖWENSTEIN à ses descendants. C’est également moi qui ai déposé la demande initiale.
J’ai pu obtenir la possession des tableaux en renonçant à toute compensation financière offerte par la CIVS pour les 22 tableaux détruits. Cette somme est considérable. Au risque d’offenser quelqu’un, j’ai le sentiment d’avoir obtenu gain de cause sans l’intervention de la justice. Il serait peut-être exagéré de dire que cela ressemble presque à une victoire à la Pyrrhus… Deux légataires universels sont indemnisés et récompensés pour un travail que j’ai accompli et payé. Qu’il soit permis de dire que dans un pays régi par la common law, cela ne se serait pas produit.
Permettez-moi de vous raconter brièvement comment j’ai découvert l’existence de Fédor LÖWENSTEIN. Mon père ne parlait jamais de sa famille, à l’exception de sa sœur bien-aimée Suzanne, arrêtée à Fayence en août 1942 et assassinée à Auschwitz. J’ai découvert le reste de la famille de mon père grâce à mes propres recherches généalogiques.
Au cours de ces recherches, j’ai découvert que les documents personnels de deux tantes de Fédor, deux autres grands-tantes célèbres, étaient archivés au Stadtmuseum de Berlin. En 2014, j’ai pris des dispositions pour examiner et photographier tous les documents et toutes les photos. La collection comprenait plusieurs photos de Fédor. J’ai rapidement compris qu’il était le frère aîné de Hansi et Heinz, que j’avais rencontrés quand j’étais enfant.
Il y avait également plusieurs lettres, toutes écrites en allemand, langue que je ne maîtrise pas. La plupart étaient manuscrites et presque impossibles à déchiffrer. Mais quelques-unes étaient dactylographiées, principalement par la sœur de Fédor, « Hansi ». À mon retour aux États-Unis, j’ai traduit ses lettres dactylographiées, les seules que je pouvais lire, à l’aide d’une application de traduction. Dans une lettre datée d’août 1946, Hansi écrivait qu’elle avait vendu à titre posthume l’une des peintures de Fédor pour 90 000 francs français. Cela semblait être une somme énorme en 1946.
Déterminé à en savoir plus sur Fédor LÖWENSTEIN, j’ai contacté en 2014 une connaissance travaillant à la mairie de Nice. Je lui ai demandé si elle pouvait trouver la nécrologie de Fédor. Elle m’a plutôt envoyé des liens vers plusieurs articles. Le plus instructif concernait une exposition qui avait eu lieu en 2014 au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux et qui présentait ces trois tableaux. Vers 2010, le Centre Pompidou a découvert que les œuvres de Fédor LÖWENSTEIN lui avaient été confisquées pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L’exposition à Bordeaux était la première exposition publique consacrée à cette découverte.
Par coïncidence, 2014 est la même année où ma femme Ann et moi avons passé 13 semaines en Europe. Nous avons voyagé en voiture du nord-est de la Pologne au sud de l’Espagne, visitant des lieux associés à la diaspora de ma famille juive. Si nous avions su qu’il y avait une exposition, nous aurions certainement fait un détour par Bordeaux.
Les documents que j’ai reçus identifiaient Mme Florence SARAGOZA comme la commissaire de l’exposition et fournissaient une adresse électronique. Je l’ai immédiatement contactée. Elle m’a répondu deux jours plus tard. Je me souviendrai toujours de sa réponse. Elle m’a dit, en substance, que le fait d’apprendre qu’un membre de la famille LÖWENSTEIN avait survécu l’avait émue aux larmes. Florence – nous nous appelons désormais par nos prénoms – m’a gracieusement proposé de m’aider à déposer une demande d’indemnisation. Compte tenu de sa connaissance de Fédor, son aide m’a été précieuse. Je serai éternellement reconnaissant à Florence pour son aide désintéressée et compatissante au fil des ans. J’ai la plus haute estime pour Florence.
Il y a quelques autres personnes que je tiens à remercier. Tout d’abord, ma femme, Ann FINAN, qui a été ma plus grande supportrice et admiratrice tout au long de ces 11 années difficiles. Elle m’a aidé à créer mon blog sur l’histoire de ma famille (bruckfamilyblog.com), où j’ai écrit plus de 200 articles depuis ses débuts en 2017.
Après le rejet initial de ma demande par la CIVS début 2020, j’ai rédigé un article de blog très critique pour dénoncer cette décision. Une de mes cousines américaines éloignées a lu cet article et m’a immédiatement appelé. Elle m’a suggéré de contacter son avocat à New York. Sa branche de la famille est impliquée depuis longtemps dans une procédure complexe visant à obtenir une indemnisation pour une très importante collection de tableaux volés à son oncle à Berlin. J’ai immédiatement appelé son avocat. Il m’a mis en contact avec un avocat français formé aux États-Unis, Pierre CIRIC, qui s’occupe de demandes d’indemnisation similaires à la mienne. Pierre s’est montré extrêmement aimable, m’a fourni gratuitement de nombreux conseils juridiques et m’a mis en contact avec mon avocate française, Maître Caroline GAFFODIO. Sans Caroline et Pierre, je ne serais pas ici aujourd’hui.
Enfin, je tiens à remercier deux membres du personnel de la CIVS, David ZIVIE et Muriel DE BASTIER. Même si nous n’avons manifestement pas toujours été d’accord au fil des ans, je n’ai jamais eu l’impression que les décisions de la Commission étaient motivées par autre chose que des contraintes juridiques.
Je voudrais terminer cette présentation par une brève anecdote concernant Heinz, le frère de Fédor. Je ne l’ai rencontré qu’une seule fois, mais je me souviens de lui comme d’un homme très charismatique. Je me souviens qu’on mentionnait ses exploits pendant la guerre. Comme le font souvent les enfants, j’ai confondu réalité et fiction. J’ai toujours cru qu’il avait aidé des Juifs incarcérés à s’échapper des centres de détention. Grâce à un gentleman anglais, j’ai appris la vérité il y a quelques années.
Heinz était membre du Royal Pioneer Corps anglais. Il s’est engagé alors qu’il se trouvait en Palestine. Il a été capturé par les Allemands en 1941 pendant la bataille de Grèce et incarcéré dans divers stalags. Il s’est évadé quatre ou cinq fois. Son histoire mérite vraiment d’être racontée dans un livre, et il est d’ailleurs mentionné dans plusieurs ouvrages écrits par d’anciens prisonniers de guerre. Le public se demande peut-être pourquoi je termine mon exposé sur cette note. Tous les récits de guerre concernant Heinz soulignent à quel point il était doué pour falsifier des documents afin d’aider les prisonniers à s’échapper. Je ne doute pas que, comme Fédor, Heinz et probablement Hansi aient appris à peindre et à dessiner dès leur plus jeune âge.
Le public se demande sans doute ce qu’il adviendra des peintures de Fédor LÖWENSTEIN. J’ai accepté la demande de la Commission de les laisser en France pendant les prochaines années et pour les exposer au MAHJ (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme) et à l’Orangerie ici à Paris, peut-être au Centre National Jean Moulin à Bordeaux lieu de leur spoliation. Ils seront au cœur d’expositions consacrées à l’art dégénéré. Une fois les expositions terminées, je déciderai de leur destination finale. Je suis désormais dépositaire d’une longue histoire qu’il ne nous faut pas oublier, je m’y emploie. A vous de me soutenir dans cette tâche
Merci de votre attention ! Y a-t-il des questions ?
ENGLISH
Ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to warmly thank you for attending this ceremony.
I am an American citizen named Richard BROOK. I will briefly explain why I am here, my connection to the artist Fédor LÖWENSTEIN, and how I learned of his existence.
I am in Paris today to reclaim three paintings by Fédor Löwenstein.
These paintings are among the 25 works seized by the Nazis at the port of Bordeaux in December 1940 while Fédor was attempting to send them to an art gallery in New York. The Nazis considered these works to be examples of what they called “degenerate art .” After their seizure, they were sent to the Jeu de Paume to await destruction. It is presumed that the 22 other works seized from Fédor were indeed destroyed. The proof that the same fate awaited the three surviving paintings can be found on the surface of the canvases. Large “X” marks were drawn on them, signifying that they were to be “vernichtet,” the German word for “destroyed.”
I like to imagine that your French heroine, Mme Rose Valland, played a key role in saving the three works before you. She was the only member of the Jeu de Paume staff to be retained by the Nazis during their occupation of Paris.
Fedor Löwenstein is often considered a Czechoslovakian artist. His father’s family was indeed from that country. It is clear that Fedor felt a deep connection to his father’s homeland. One of Fedor’s most famous paintings is entitled “The Fall.” It was inspired by the signing of the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938. These agreements dismantled Czechoslovakia at the time and led to the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany. This painting was inspired by “Guernica,” Picasso’s anti-war painting from 1937.
Fedor Löwenstein was born in 1901 in Munich. He was the eldest of three children. His mother, née Hedwig BRUCK, was my great-aunt (my surname BROOK is the Anglicized version of BRUCK). Hedwig was my father’s aunt, so Fédor and my father were first cousins. It is not clear how well they knew each other. Fédor and his mother died in Nice before I was born in 1950. However, as a child, I met Fédor’s younger brother and sister, Jeanne, affectionately nicknamed “Hansi,” and Heinz. My father was close to them.
I am the closest living direct descendant of Fédor LÖWENSTEIN. Neither Fédor, nor his brother, nor his sister had children. As France is a civil law country, I had to fight a legal battle lasting nearly 11 years to recover these three paintings. Under French law, the rights of two “universal legatees” take precedence over mine. However, my lawyer managed to convince the CIVS (Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation) that my extensive research and my actions, which were necessary and essential for updating the three paintings, should also be compensated. This was only possible because I was the first to discover that the CIVS was seeking to return the LÖWENSTEIN paintings to his descendants. I was also the one who filed the initial claim.
I was able to obtain possession of the paintings by waiving any financial compensation offered by the CIVS for the 22 destroyed paintings. This sum is considerable. At the risk of offending someone, I feel that I have won my case without the intervention of the courts. It might be an exaggeration to say that this is almost like a Pyrrhic victory… Two universal legatees are compensated and rewarded for work that I did and paid for. Let me say that in a country governed by common law, this would not have happened.
Let me briefly tell you how I discovered the existence of Fédor LÖWENSTEIN. My father never spoke about his family, except for his beloved sister Suzanne, who was arrested in Fayence in August 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz. I discovered the rest of my father’s family through my own genealogical research.
During my research, I discovered that the personal documents of two of Fédor’s aunts, two other famous great-aunts, were archived at the Stadtmuseum in Berlin. In 2014, I made arrangements to examine and photograph all the documents and photos. The collection included several photos of Fédor. I quickly realized that he was the older brother of Hansi and Heinz, whom I had met when I was a child.
There were also several letters, all written in German, a language I do not speak. Most were handwritten and almost impossible to decipher. But a few were typed, mainly by Fédor’s sister, “Hansi.” When I returned to the United States, I translated his typed letters, the only ones I could read, using a translation app. In a letter dated August 1946, Hansi wrote that she had sold one of Fédor’s paintings posthumously for 90,000 French francs. That seemed like an enormous sum in 1946.
Determined to find out more about Fédor LÖWENSTEIN, in 2014 I contacted an acquaintance who worked at Nice City Hall. I asked her if she could find Fédor’s obituary. Instead, she sent me links to several articles. The most informative one was about an exhibition that had taken place in 2014 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, which featured these three paintings. Around 2010, the Centre Pompidou discovered that Fédor Löwenstein’s works had been confiscated during World War II. The exhibition in Bordeaux was the first public exhibition dedicated to this discovery.
Coincidentally, 2014 was the same year that my wife Ann and I spent 13 weeks in Europe. We traveled by car from northeastern Poland to southern Spain, visiting places associated with my Jewish family’s diaspora. If we had known about the exhibition, we would certainly have made a detour to Bordeaux.
The documents I received identified Ms. Florence SARAGOZA as the exhibition curator and provided an email address. I contacted her immediately. She replied two days later. I will always remember her response. She told me, in essence, that learning that a member of the LÖWENSTEIN family had survived moved her to tears. Florence—we now call each other by our first names—graciously offered to help me file a claim for compensation. Given her knowledge of Fédor, her help was invaluable. I will be eternally grateful to Florence for her selfless and compassionate assistance over the years. I hold Florence in the highest regard.
There are a few other people I would like to thank. First of all, my wife, Ann FINAN, who has been my biggest supporter and admirer throughout these difficult 11 years. She helped me create my blog about my family history (bruckfamilyblog.com), where I have written more than 200 articles since its inception in 2017.
After my claim was initially rejected by the CIVS in early 2020, I wrote a highly critical blog post denouncing the decision. One of my distant American cousins read the post and immediately called me. She suggested I contact her lawyer in New York. Her branch of the family has long been involved in complex proceedings to obtain compensation for a very important collection of paintings stolen from her uncle in Berlin. I immediately called her lawyer. He put me in touch with a French lawyer trained in the United States, Pierre CIRIC, who handles compensation claims similar to mine. Pierre was extremely kind, provided me with a great deal of legal advice free of charge, and put me in touch with my French lawyer, Maître Caroline GAFFODIO. Without Caroline and Pierre, I would not be here today.
Finally, I would like to thank two members of the CIVS staff, David ZIVIE and Muriel DE BASTIER. Even though we clearly did not always agree over the years, I never felt that the Commission’s decisions were motivated by anything other than legal constraints.
I would like to conclude this presentation with a brief anecdote about Heinz, Fédor’s brother. I only met him once, but I remember him as a very charismatic man. I remember people talking about his exploits during the war. As children often do, I confused fact with fiction. I always believed that he had helped imprisoned Jews escape from detention centers. Thanks to an English gentleman, I learned the truth a few years ago.
Heinz was a member of the English Royal Pioneer Corps. He enlisted while he was in Palestine. He was captured by the Germans in 1941 during the Battle of Greece and imprisoned in various stalags. He escaped four or five times. His story really deserves to be told in a book, and he is mentioned in several works written by former prisoners of war. The audience may wonder why I am ending my presentation on this note. All the war stories about Heinz emphasize how skilled he was at forging documents to help prisoners escape. I have no doubt that, like Fédor, Heinz and probably Hansi learned to paint and draw from an early age.
The public is no doubt wondering what will become of Fédor LÖWENSTEIN’s paintings. I have accepted the Commission’s request to leave them in France for the next few years and to exhibit them at the MAHJ (Museum of Jewish Art and History) and the Orangerie here in Paris, and perhaps at the Centre National Jean Moulin in Bordeaux, where they were looted. They will be the focus of exhibitions devoted to degenerate art. Once the exhibitions are over, I will decide on their final destination. I am now the custodian of a long history that we must not forget, and I am committed to this task. It is up to you to support me in this endeavor.
Thank you for your attention! Are there any questions?
Note: This brief post is a prelude to upcoming posts where I will talk about thrilling events that took place during a five-week European vacation my wife and I recently took.
My wife Ann and I recently returned from a five-week trip to Europe that had us leaving from San Diego and traveling to or through parts of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Italy (Figure 1), and France. We visited multiple out-of-the-way places connected to my Jewish family’s history. This required renting a car and driving long distances through often unfamiliar territory and on small backroads. This occasionally led to unexpected adventures and mishaps. Suffice it to say, our vacations are not conventional and are in some ways reminiscent of the semi-structured travel we took through Europe in our youth. Realistically, our advancing age makes it unlikely we’ll take more such trips in the future.
Notwithstanding the pace of our vacation, I had two primary aims during this trip. The first was to revisit the town where my father, Dr. Otto Bruck, was born in 1907, Ratibor, Germany [Racibórz, Poland]. As I’ve frequently discussed, my family owned a hotel restaurant in the town from ca. 1850 to 1925 known as the Bruck’s “Prinz von Preußen” Hotel. The hotel survived the Second World War intact save for the burned roof, but sadly following their rise to power the Communist authorities dismantled the establishment to “harvest” bricks to rebuild Warsaw. I have old cutlery monogrammed with the three generations of my Bruck family that owned the hotel and decided to donate them to the local museum. I also bequeathed a small briefcase of my father’s surviving dental tools. (Figure 2) While my father never practiced dentistry in his birthplace, coincidentally, the Muzeum w Raciborzu has an entire floor of its exhibit space devoted to old dental machines and equipment so donating my father’s dental instruments there made sense.
The second purpose of my trip to Europe was to attend a restitution ceremony in Paris to retrieve three paintings from the French Ministry of Culture that were seized by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, a man named Fedor Löwenstein. (Figure 3) Following their confiscation, the three surviving paintings, among 25 originally expropriated, were shipped to the Jeu de Paume in Paris where they remain unrecognized as seized works until the early 2010s. Over the years, I’ve written multiple posts about my compensation claim originally filed in 2014. After 11 long contentious and litigious years, I finally achieved the goal of reclaiming the paintings. (Figure 4) The restitution ceremony took place on the 16th of September 2025 at the soon-to-be renovated and now empty Centre Pompidou in Paris, and my wife and I participated in this event where I delivered a formal speech in French, a language I speak passably well. (Figure 5)
In upcoming posts, I will tell readers more about these two events.
Sandwiched between these happenings, which occurred towards the beginning and end of our vacation, my wife and I met a great many other people I’ve encountered through my blog or developed a friendship with over the years. These rendezvous will be the source of additional forthcoming posts. I look forward to relating to readers some delicious little tales connected to our vacation that expand on posts I’ve previously written or that explore new topics.
Note: In this post, I draw a connection between two “encounters” my family had with the Nazi war criminal Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. This gives me an opportunity to discuss where so-called “decadent art” confiscated in France by the Nazis, including from my father’s first cousin, wound up and explore Göring’s role as leader of the “artistic underworld” during the Nazi Occupation.
From the window of his dental office (Figure 1) in Tiegenhof (today: Nowy Dwór Gdański, Poland) in the Free City of Danzig, my father Dr. Otto Bruck witnessed and recorded increasingly large crowds of Danzigers (i.e., residents of the Free City of Danzig, basically a city-state) parading in support of Nazi candidates in 1933, 1934, and 1935. This culminated in the participation by Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring in the 1935 procession. (Figure 2) My father’s unique pictures of the event that took place on April 5, 1935, capture one “interaction” of my family with this psychopath who played a key role in issuing orders that led to the Final Solution.
I recently discovered another indirect interaction of Göring with my family, specifically to artworks that once belonged to one of my ancestors. Though a remote connection, I’ve chosen to link it to my father’s 1935 “encounter” with Göring because it represents the culmination of an almost 11-year journey to repatriate on behalf of my family artworks confiscated by the Nazis from my father’s first cousin in December 1940 at the Port of Bordeaux in France. As the closest and only surviving heir, the task of recovering the paintings in question has of necessity fallen to me. While I have finally prevailed in my quest to have the three surviving paintings returned, I grapple with the existential question of whether I’ve simply attained success at the expense of obtaining justice? I’ve not satisfactorily answered this question, though one of my lawyers characterizes my achievement as “nothing less than a miracle.” I would only say that since France is governed by a civil law system, obtaining justice would have been an impossible bar to clear and would have jeopardized the success I have achieved.
Let me provide more background. One of my father’s first cousins was named Fedor Löwenstein, the oldest of Rudolf Löwenstein and Hedwig Löwenstein, née Bruck’s three children; Hedwig Bruck was my father’s aunt and likely the one he was closest to. Fedor Löwenstein has been the subject of several previous posts. He passed away before I was born so I never met him. However, I met his two younger siblings, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff, née Löwenstein and Heinz Löwenstein as a young boy in Nice, France. (Figure 3)
As detailed in Post 105, in 2014 I uncovered a letter at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, outside Berlin, that Hansi wrote in 1946 to another aunt, Elsbeth Bruck, following her older brother’s death earlier that year. She mentioned that one of his paintings had posthumously sold for 90,000 French Francs, a sizeable amount of money at the time. In the process I discovered Fedor had been an accomplished artist.
After further investigation, I learned that France’s ministère de la culture, the French Ministry of Culture had uncovered three paintings by Fedor Löwenstein at the Centre Pompidou in the early 2010s that had been confiscated by the Nazis at the Port of Bordeaux in December 1940 and sent to the Jeu de Paume (more on this below); the three paintings were among a cache of 25 of his works originally seized on their way to New York, the remainder presumed to have been destroyed by the Nazis as examples of so-called “decadent art.” According to the information I discovered in 2014, France’s ministère de la culture is looking to return rediscovered stolen art to surviving heirs.
Let me provide more context. In 2014 my wife and I spent 13 weeks in Europe driving from northeast Poland to south-central Spain visiting places associated with my Jewish ancestors’ diaspora. Coincidentally, that year, soon after the Centre Pompidou recognized Fedor Löwenstein’s works to be stolen art, they were exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. (Figure 4) Given our extensive travels that year, had we known about Fedor Löwenstein and the exhibition, my wife and I would certainly have detoured there to see the artworks. Regrettably, I only learned of the exposition following my return stateside.
Online materials identified the curator of the exhibit, a Mme Florence Saragoza. Two days after learning about her, we were in communication. In her response, she wrote words that resonate with me to this day and probably will for the remainder of my life. Paraphrasing, she wrote words to the effect that learning that a descendant of Fedor Löwenstein survives brought tears to her eyes. While Florence and I have never met, a situation we hope to rectify at the upcoming restitution ceremony in Paris later this year, I consider her a friend who has aided and always supported my repatriation claim. I have tremendous admiration for her.
Given my background as an archaeologist, it was coincidental that at the time we first communicated Mme Saragoza was the Director of the Musée Crozatier in Le Puy-en-Velay, France, an archaeology, Velay crafts, fine arts, and science museum. (Figure 5) Today, Florence is the Director of the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum in Albi, France. Florence’s familiarity with Fedor Löwenstein’s art given her involvement as curator of the 2014 Bordeaux exhibition was exceedingly helpful when she offered to help me file my claim with France’s ministère de la culture’s CIVS.
to recommend measures to compensate for material and bank-related anti-Semitic spoliations that occurred in France between 1940 and 1944, exclusively based on referrals from heirs;
to recommend measures to compensate for the anti-Semitic spoliation of cultural property in France between 1940 and 1944, at the request of any person concerned or on its own initiative;
to recommend the restitution of cultural property looted in the context of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution, including outside France, between 1933 and 1945, when this property is held in a public or similar collection.
Let me shift gears and discuss the Jeu de Paume in Paris where works of art confiscated by Nazis from Jewish painters, private collectors, gallery owners, and art dealers living in France were shipped.
According to their mission statement, today, the Jeu de Paume is “. . .an art center that exhibits and promotes all forms of mechanical and electronic imagery (photography, cinema, video, installation, online creation, etc.) from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It produces and coproduces exhibitions but also organizes film programs, symposiums and seminars, as well as educational activities. Jeu de Paume also publishes a few art publications each year. With its high-profile exhibitions of established, less known, and emerging artists, this venue ties together different narrative strands, mixing the historic and the contemporary.”
The Jeu de Paume, however, did not begin as an art center. It was constructed in 1862 in the Tuileries Garden as an area in which to play an early variant of tennis, the so-called jeu de paulme, literally the “palm game.” Nowadays, this sport is known as real tennis or court tennis, while in France it is called courte paume. Originally an indoor precursor of tennis played without rackets, thus the “game of the hand,” rackets were eventually introduced.
The relevance of the Jeu de Paume for the purpose of the present post was its use from 1940 to 1944 as the place to store Nazi plunder looted by the regime’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce. This was the Nazi Party’s organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII. It was under the command of the Nazi Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg. The plundered works included masterpieces from the collections of French Jewish families like the Rothschilds, the David-Weills, the Bernheims, and noted dealers including Paul Rosenberg who specialized in impressionist and post-impressionist works. As mentioned above, the works of Fedor Löwenstein confiscated in December 1940 in Bordeaux were among those that wound up at the Jeu de Paume (Figure 6), 25 pieces of art according to the information gathered by Florence Saragoza from contemporary documents and included in my repatriation claim.
Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring directed that the looted art would first be divided between Adolf Hitler and himself. Towards this end, Göring visited the Jeu de Paume twenty times between November 1940 and November 1942. (Figures 7-8) The art dealer Bruno Lohse (1912-2007), art historian and specialist in Flemish and Dutch masters of the 17th century, attracted Göring’s attention because of his art knowledge. (Figure 9) He essentially became Goring’s envoy in charge of enriching his collection by tracking down the most beautiful works in French art collections. (Polack & Prevet, 2014) In conjunction with each of Göring’s visits, Lohse staged special expositions of newly looted art objects, from which Göring is known to have selected at least 594 pieces for his own collection; the remaining pieces were destined for Adolf Hitler’s unrealized art museum, the so-called Führermuseum, in Linz, Austria.
Figure 10 is a plan view of the Jeu de Paume. Salle 15, room 15, was specifically referred to as the “Salle des Martyrs,” the “Martyrs’ Room.” This is the room that was designated for so-called “degenerate art,” that’s to say modern art deemed “unworthy” in the eyes of the Nazis and slated for destruction. Much of the art dealer Paul Rosenberg’s professional and private collection wound up here, as did some, perhaps all, of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings.
Joseph Goebbels was the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He had privately decreed that the degenerate works of art should be sold to obtain foreign currency to fund the building of the Führermuseum and the wider war effort. Göring used this decree to personally appoint a series of ERR-approved dealers to liquidate the looted art and then pass the funds to him to enlarge his personal art collection. Much of the looted art designated as degenerate was sold via Switzerland. Unsold art, including works by Picasso and Dali, as well as my lesser-known relative Fedor Löwenstein, were destroyed in a bonfire on the grounds of the Jeu de Paume on the night of 27th of July 1942. This unparalleled vandalism was unfortunately not unprecedented; the Nazis had perpetuated a similar outrage in Berlin in 1939 when they destroyed 4,000 works of German “degenerate” art.
In a March 2014 article entitled “Bruno Lohse and Herman Göring,” the authors Emmanuelle Polack and Alain Prevet, discuss the art market in Paris under the Nazi Occupation. They characterize it as undeniably flourishing, the “. . .euphoria (being) . . .a reflection of a massive influx of goods taken from people of Jewish faith and from all opponents of the Third Reich.” The authors characterize Göring as the true leader of this “artistic underworld.” They use the French word “rabatteur” to describe essentially the “beaters” and “canvassers” Göring surrounded himself with, people such as Bruno Lohse, to flush out collections of great value.
I’ve included three photographs (Figures 7-9) in this post that immortalized at least two of the 20 twenty visits Hermann Göring made to the Jeu de Paume. They are attributed to German staff working for the ERR, either Rudolph Scholz or Heinz Simokat, both photographers at the Jeu de Paume. The one of Göring and Lohse is described as follows: “Comfortably installed on a sofa in a museum office, requisitioned for the benefit of the Parisian service of the ERR, under the satisfied gaze of Bruno Lohse, Hermann Goring carefully examines a monograph devoted to Rembrandt, most likely one of the publications of the German art historian Wilhelm R. Valentiner, a great painter’s specialist since his thesis in 1904.”
Preserved in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (FR-MAE Centre des archives diplomatiques de La Corneuve, 20160007AC/7) are 14 negatives showing the rooms of the Jeu de Paume museum taken after November 1, 1940. This date corresponds to when the museum was made available to the ERR to store the confiscated works of art plundered by this organization in France. The shots were likely also taken by the photographers working at the Jeu de Paume. The photographs have been optimized thanks to a specific digitization of the details. This has allowed for the identification of 232 works of art. Among the 14 negatives are two photographs of room 15, the Salle des Martyrs. More on this below.
A list exists of the works present at the Jeu de Paume at the beginning of 1942. The notes were compiled by Rose Valland (Figures 11a-f) and sent to her boss Jacques Jaujard on March 10, 1942; Rose Valland was an unpaid museum employee and the only one retained by the Nazis upon their takeover of the Jeu de Paume and was a clandestine member of the French resistance. The list translated into French, most probably surreptitiously, is an inventory drawn up by the ERR staff. It has the advantage of including a description of the looted works and providing the names of the people from whom they were plundered. The comparison of this list with the works visible on the two photographs of room 15 has made it possible for museum staff to identify many works that were previously unknown or poorly attributed. Figures 11b-c include a few details of some of Fedor Löwenstein’s confiscated works of art from Rose Valland’s list.
As confiscated art passed through the building, Rose Valland eavesdropped on German conversations and covertly kept notes on where the looted pieces were being shipped. Her records were instrumental in the recovery of tens of thousands of artworks, many of which were returned to rightful owners. Yet about 70 of the paintings belonging to the French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, for example, are still missing.
Let me conclude this post by mentioning two ERR photographs of room 15, the Salle des Martyrs, where some of Fedor Löwenstein’s confiscated paintings were hung. Until recently, I was uncertain how many photographs of the Jeu de Paume existed. One picture I had stumbled upon, then lost track of, showed Rose Valland standing in the Salle des Martyrs. (Figure 12) Relocating this picture was of paramount interest because clearly visible in the background is one of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings, the one known as “Composition (Paysage),” which happens to be one of the three paintings I’ll be repatriating. (Figure 13)
Unable to relocate this image on my own, I asked one of my acquaintances at the CIVS if she could help me track it down. Of passing interest to readers but of great personal interest is that Rose Valland has been “photoshopped” into the Salle des Martyrs. If she was ever photographed there, such a picture does not survive; I’ve included an authentic one of Rose standing elsewhere in the Jeu de Paume. (Figure 14) The one I’d come across was based on a photo of Rose taken elsewhere where she was “inserted” into room 15. I include a copy of that original. (Figure 15)
The two contemporary authentic photos of the Salle des Martyrs both show Fedor Löwenstein paintings. So-called View 1 (Figure 16) includes two Loewenstein paintings. Photographed is a fragmentary section of an unknown painting (Figure 17), and a second one titled “La Ville Moderne,” “The Modern City.” (Figures 18a-b) Regrettably, the latter two were lost or destroyed. View 2 (Figure 19), the one where Rose Valland has been photoshopped into the image, includes the still existing painting “Composition (Paysage).” This is one of the three paintings I will be repatriating.
Besides the painting “Composition (Paysage),” I’ll also be acquiring artworks entitled “les Peupliers” (Figure 20) and “Arbres.” (Figure 21) Neither of these paintings is pictured in the ERR photographs. Having personally seen the three paintings, it is obvious the Nazis intended to destroy them as evidenced by the fact that now faintly visible red Xs were scrawled across their painted surfaces. Whether Rose Valland played a role in saving Löwenstein’s paintings is unknown.
“History of CIVS.” Premier Ministère, Commission pour la restitution des biens et l’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations antisémites (Commission for the Restitution of Property and Compensation for Victims of Anti-Semitic Spoliation), Updated 19 April 2024.
Note: In this very lengthy post, I discuss my father’s first cousin’s whereabouts during World War II, based on newly acquired information. As with other recent posts, I obtained the details from a reader whose uncle, serendipitously, was imprisoned in the same German prison camp in Lamsdorf, Silesia [today: Łambinowice, Poland] as my father’s relative. While researching his uncle, the reader came across the names of Heinz Löwenstein and his alias Henry Goff. Readers will discover than Heinz’s surname is spelled three ways, “Löwenstein,” “Loewenstein,” and “Lowenstein.”
To better understand all the places where my father’s cousin wound up, I’ve explored some of the historical events related to WWII. I’m disinclined to apologize for presenting this detailed background because of its relevance to Heinz’s story so I trust readers will understand and gloss over parts that are of limited interest.
I had the pleasure of meeting my father’s charismatic first cousin Heinz Löwenstein (1905-1979) once as a boy while vacationing with my parents in Nice, along France’s Côte d’Azur. (Figure 1) Since my father rarely spoke of his relatives, it would be many years before I would work out the ancestral connection. At the time I met Heinz, he had come to Nice from Haifa, Israel where he was living with his girlfriend to visit my father and his sister, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein (1902-1986). (Figure 2) In time, I would learn that Heinz and Hansi were my father’s two closest cousins, born around the same time as he was.
On the rare occasions when my father spoke of his family, the stories were always understandably suffused with a huge note of sadness so, in retrospect, I’m not sure I was ever told the unabridged story. Absent a complete telling of actual events, I may have embellished or fabricated some of what I thought I heard. My recollection in the case of Heinz is that he survived World War II by escaping from a Nazi detention camp, or that he had himself intentionally captured for the purpose of helping other detained Jews escape, admittedly heroic and rather vague accounts. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize how implausible these scenarios seem but growing up they were believable. Paradoxically, what I’ve recently learned is not so far removed from what I imagined as a child.
Heinz’s story is a tangled web that I will attempt to unravel and present to readers in a comprehensible manner, though some may be left wanting, as I am. But then I modulate my disappointment by reminding myself I’m reconstructing a story without the benefit of the protagonist’s own words that took place almost 80 years ago. Of course, there will be some things that are unknown and unknowable.
I introduced Heinz Löwenstein to readers way back in Post 16 when I discussed what I knew about his mother, my great-aunt, Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck (1870-1949), and his two siblings, Fedor Löwenstein (1901-1946) and Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein (1902-1986). (Figure 3) Heinz’s older brother Fedor may sound familiar as he was the subject of Post 105. (Figure 4) That post relates to my ongoing efforts to obtain compensation on behalf of my family from the French Ministry of Culture for paintings confiscated by the Nazis from Fedor in December 1940 at the port of Bordeaux that have languished in a French storeroom for more than 70 years.
Though I met Heinz as a child, as previously mentioned, prior to researching him I knew virtually nothing about his life. A salacious story circulated that his girlfriend was the wife in a couple Heinz lived with in Haifa (Figure 5); everybody was apparently fine with this odd arrangement. The only other thing I vaguely recall is what I’ve already alluded to, namely, that Heinz survived the war by being an “escape artist,” though what exactly this means was never clear.
Fast forward to the beginning of February of this year. Through my blog’s webmail, I received an intriguing email from an English gentleman, Mr. Brian Cooper (Figure 26), who I would later learn lives in Maidstone, County Kent, England, telling me he had come across Heinz Lowenstein (without an umlaugh over the “o”) in connection with his research on prisoners of war. As I’ve already mentioned and will illustrate, Heinz’s tale is a complicated one. Accompanying his email was a very precise timeline of Heinz’s time as a prisoner of war with primary source documents substantiating his findings. As an aside, the detailed level of research Brian has undertaken exemplifies the standard to which I try and hold myself accountable when researching and writing my posts.
As I will explain in more detail below, there are two threads Brian found in Post 16 that convinced him “his” Heinz Lowenstein was the same person as “my” Heinz Löwenstein. First, his Heinz Lowenstein used the alias “Henry Goff,” Goff being his married sister’s surname. Second, he learned that my Heinz Löwenstein had the same date of birth, the 8th of March 1905, as the prisoner of war records indicate for the Heinz Lowenstein he is researching.
I immediately asked Brian why he was interested in Heinz Lowenstein. Though very familiar with this branch of my extended family, I assumed there was an ancestral connection of which I was unaware. Astonishingly, it turns out Brian’s uncle, Harold William Jackson from the 2nd Battalion Northamptonshire Regiment, captured in 1940 in France, was interned in one of the same Stalags as Heinz had been held, namely, Stalag VIIIB/Stalag 344 in Lamsdorf, Silesia [today: Łambinowice, Poland]. (Figure 27) Much more on this below but suffice it to say that unlike Heinz who was at multiple Stalags and work labor camps throughout his captivity, Brian’s uncle seemingly was only a “resident” at Stalag VIIIB until January 1945 when the Nazis began marching the still able-bodied prisoners of war west as the Red Army was approaching. To date, Brian has only been able to trace his uncle’s movements to this point and is hopeful of finding the diary of a fellow inmate who might have recorded what happened to his uncle on the march westward.
As mentioned above, attached to Brian’s first correspondence was a detailed timeline of Heinz’s movements following his capture during the 1941 Battle of Greece. I’ve summarized much of this in the table found at the tail end of this post and intend the discussion that follows to primarily focus on the events that led to Heinz’s involvement in this conflict and his journeys and escapes following his capture and what they tell us. However, before launching into this, let me very briefly review the little I knew of Heinz’s life prior to being contacted by Brian.
Heinz Kurt Löwenstein was born in the Baltic port city of Danzig, Germany [today: Gdańsk, Poland] on the 8th of March 1905. I don’t know anything about his childhood. I’m next able to track him through his marriage certificate to a divorcee, Rose Nothmann née Bloch, which took place in Danzig on the 22nd of October 1931; Rose was eleven years Heinz’s senior. There is an illegible notation in the upper righthand corner of the marriage certificate indicating Heinz and Rose got divorced, which initially led me to believe they were divorced in Danzig. The only other pre-World War II entry I can find linking Heinz to Danzig are two listings in a 1933 Address Book. One identifies him as the inhaber, owner, of a so-called Reklame-Büro, an advertising office, named after his deceased father, Rudolf Loewenstein (Figure 6); as I discussed in Post 71, Heinz’s father died in a plane crash on the 22nd of August 1930 while on a business trip to then-Czechoslovakia. The second listing identifies Heinz Loewenstein, yet a third different spelling of his surname, as a Propagandist, promoter, for this Reklame-Büro. (Figure 7)
Based on this scant evidence, I theorize that Heinz, his sister Hansi, and their mother Hedwig departed Danzig sometime after 1933. I know that Heinz’s mother and sister wound up in Nice, France, but am unable to document that Heinz accompanied them. Having met Heinz in Nice sometime during the 1950s, obviously I knew he’d survived World War II. At the time he lived in Haifa, Israel but, as I would discover on my own much later, he had changed his name to “Hanoch Avneri.” Thanks to the intervention of a fourth cousin who lives in Haifa, with great difficulty I obtained a copy of Heinz’s burial certificate from Haifa Hevra Kadisha, a burial society in the State of Israel, showing he died on the 10th of August 1979. (Figure 8)
Until Brian Cooper provided documentary evidence, I had no idea how Heinz had survived WWII. The primary source of information on Heinz Lowenstein’s whereabouts and movements during the war can be found in the UK National Archives. Specifically, records created or inherited by the War Office’s Armed Forces Services containing “German Record cards of British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War and some Civilian Internees, Second World War,” are pertinent. Three entries related to Heinz Lowenstein, or his alias “Henry Goff,” can be found in catalogue WO 416. The National Archive website provides a summary of these German Record cards, but Brian obtained complete copies of the originals, which form the basis for the detailed synopsis he compiled of Heinz’s wartime activities.
The most informative German Record card in terms of tracking Heinz Loewenstein’s locations during the war is record number WO 416/412/223 (Figures 9a-d), alternately referred to as his Personalkarte, his personnel card. The information contained therein is summarized at the table at the end of this post, but in the following discussion I will highlight the most important details and place them in a broader, historic context.
Heinz’s Personalkarte, intriguingly including his picture, along with his father’s first name, his mother’s maiden name, his religion, and his date and place of birth, all previously known to me, confirm this was my father’s first cousin. Unknown to me was his service number (i.e., 8576), his service (i.e., Palestinian Army), the regiment or squadron he was a member of (i.e., Corps of Signals), his profession (i.e., electrician), the place he was captured (i.e., Greece), the date of his capture (29th April 1941), his POW number (i.e., 8576), and the camp name and number where he was initially interned (i.e., Stalag XVIIIA which was located in Wolfsberg, Austria).
The name and address of Heinz’s next of kin, Rose Löwenstein, is also given, confirming that Heinz and Rose were likely still married when they emigrated to Palestine and probably got divorced there following Heinz’s return from the war. As an interesting aside, the notation on Heinz and Rose’s marriage certificate that they got divorced, likely in Palestine, somehow made its way back to Danzig to be recorded on their 1931 certificate. In my limited experience, this is not unprecedented. About ten years ago, I was able to track down a second cousin presently living in Germany but born in Spain, by dint of a notation made on his 1946 Barcelona birth certificate stating he had gotten married in Haag, Oberbayern, Germany in 1982.
Based on the new information, I surmise Heinz either moved temporarily from Danzig to Nice, France with his sister and mother or moved directly to Palestine from Danzig. After emigrating to Palestine, he likely soon became a British citizen as others moving there during the 1930s did. Readers will notice the year “1935” lightly penciled in to the right of his nationality, perhaps corresponding to his arrival in Palestine.
Following his move to Palestine, he likely volunteered for the British Army. Two POW lists published, respectively, in September 1944 (Figure 10) and April 1945 (Figure 11) indicate the regiment/unit/squadron Heinz was a member of, “3 L. of C. Sigs.” This refers to the “3 Line of Communication Signals [Royal Corps of Signals, often simply known as Royal Signals].” For readers, like me, unfamiliar with the work of this squadron, this unit is responsible for providing full telecommunications infrastructure for the Army wherever they operate. Signal units are among the first deployed, providing battlefield communications and information systems essential to all operations.
Heinz’s Personalkarte shows he was captured on the 29th of April 1941. Before discussing where he is likely to have been captured, let me provide readers with a general overview of the Battle of Greece. (Figure 12) The Battle of Greece, also known as the “German invasion of Greece” or “Operation Marita” was the attack of Greece by Italy and Germany during World War II. It began on the 28th of October 1940 with the Italian invasion of Greece via Albania, then a vassal of Italy. Greece, with the help of British air and material support, repelled the initial Italian attack and counterattack in March 1941.
Realizing that the bulk of Greek troops were massed along the Greek border with Albania and that Italy was in trouble, German troops invaded from Bulgaria on the 6th of April 1941, opening a second front. The Greek Army was quickly outnumbered even with the reinforcement of small numbers of British, Australian, and New Zealand forces. The Greek forces were outflanked by the Germans at the Albanian border, forcing their surrender. British, Australian, and New Zealand forces were overwhelmed and forced to retreat southwards down the Greek peninsula, with the goal of evacuation. For several days, Allied troops were able to delay the German advance, allowing ships to be positioned to evacuate the units defending Greece. Still, by the 27th of April the German Army captured Athens, and reached Greece’s southern shores by the 30th of April. The conquest of Greece was completed a month later with the capture of the island of Crete. An intriguing footnote is that Hitler later blamed the unsuccessful German invasion of the Soviet Union on Mussolini’s failed conquest of Greece.
Knowing that Heinz was taken prisoner on the 29th of April, Brian reasons that he was seized in or near Kalamata on the Peloponnesian peninsula. (see Figure 12) Based on testimony from others, we know that POWs were quickly moved to a prison compound at Corinth (Figure 13) where, if what has been published is correct, some 4,000 prisoners were held in extremely poor conditions. Brian sent me a chapter of a book entitled “Friends Ambulance Unit, 1939-1943: Experiences in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Egypt, Greece and Germany,” by H. Martin Lidbetter. Let me quote a few passages from this book describing the deplorable state of things in the detention camps.
Regarding prison life in the hospital in Kalamata: “The place was a stinking mess, and we cleaned it up. Nobody was getting anything to eat, and two hours after we started, we served biscuit porridge and tea for breakfast, and gave the patients regular meals afterwards. . .The men were in a shocking state, and we cleaned them, dressed their wounds, nursed them.”
“On the 13th May we and the patients were moved by train to Corinth, where in almost tropical heat we were marched to an enormous Dulag (Transit Camp) which was to be our home for many weeks. Here the food was terrible, but it was possible to buy extras from the Greeks. For water we had to queue for hours at a well just outside the camp.”
“The experiences of the next few months in transit camps brought the biggest tests of endurance in maintaining human relationships that anyone in the Unit had undergone. To retain, when terribly hungry, the customary human decency was difficult indeed. To keep clean and presentable when water was scarce, even for drinking; to carry on with one’s duties calmly and normally, even when faint and weak through lack of food; to divide rations impartially; to resist the temptation to pick scraps of food from the rubbish bins—all these things called for a continual and maintained efforts.”
Regarding the transfer from Corinth to Salonika (Figure 14), tracking the same path Heinz likely followed: “On Saturday, 7th June 1941, after nearly a month in the Corinth camp, we moved to Salonika. We marched from camp soon after 2am bringing up the rear of the last of four contingents each consisting of about 800 men, so that we could help any whose physical health bordered on collapse. We marched 7 ½ miles to the nearest railhead north of the Corinth Canal which was one of the few parts of the railway not wrecked by recent military action and took to cattle trucks. Our particular trucks were designed to transport 34 men each, when not carrying cattle. During one part of our journey there were 52 of us and our kit crammed into one such wagon.”
The prisoners stopped briefly in Athens before continuing northwards. However, when they reached the tunnel below the Brallos Pass (see Figure 12), north of the town of Gravia, the prisoners had to dismount because the tunnel had been rendered unusable by explosives during the recent retreat by Allied soldiers. Thus began what is referred to as “The March,” the destination of which was the town of Lamia 40 miles north. This involved a long slog uphill, followed by a precipitous downhill walk in unpleasantly hot weather.
When the prisoners eventually arrived at the Dulag in Salonika, they saw what their treatment would involve: “There was a large transit camp holding about 4,000 prisoners. The first days we paraded with thousands of men in the burning sun for hours; many fainted and had to be carried off. Food was no more than a piece of bread or a biscuit, with thin soup and German ersatz tea.”
There was not enough food of any kind, both in the hospital and the barracks in which we lived. The supply of water was irregular and unfit for use without boiling. All we had was some very thin soup with modules of very tough meat—probably horse meat—and hard bread which was almost inedible. . .None of the beds had any mattresses, only the steel under mattresses, so we lay on our clothes to soften them and spent the night swatting the fleas and lice, and bedbugs which crawled up the legs of the beds to bite us or dropped from the ceiling.
In the hospital there were typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, and diphtheria cases, and later the dreaded beriberi, which claimed several victims—this was caused by lack of vitamins in the diet which is contained in Marmite.
It was very hot, and I did not sleep a single night except for a few nights in early October before we left for Germany.”
A Facebook account about the “Battle of Kalamata 1941” estimates that by September 1941, 12,000 POWs had passed through the “Salonika Transit Camp Frontstalag 183,” on their way to the central Europe Stalags They included many nationalities—Scots, English, Australians, New Zealanders, Serbs, Indians, Palestinian Jews, Cypriots, Arabs, and Greeks. Many of the POWs died, and a few daring ones escaped. By 1942, following the transfer of the POWs to the Stalags, the Salonika transit camp had been converted to detaining Greek Jews before they were transported to the Nazi death camps.
From Heinz’s Personalkarte we know he was initially imprisoned in Stalag XVIII in Wolfsberg, Austria after being transported by cattle truck from the Salonika Transit Camp. (Figure 15) In a book written by John Borrie, entitled “Despite Captivity: A Doctor’s Life as Prisoner of War,” a map shows the route by which the author arrived in Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf in October 1941 (Figure 16), where Heinz ultimately also wound up. John Borrie appears to have arrived in Lamsdorf via a slightly different route than Heinz, who we know first spent time in Wolfsberg in southern Austria. A different German Record card for Heinz Lowenstein, WO 416/228/460, records his transfer from Stalag XVIIIA in Wolfsberg, Austria to Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf on the 8th of July 1941. (Figure 17-18) This corresponds to the earliest date on Heinz’s Personalkarte, German Record card WO 416/412/223, and corresponds to the date he was inoculated against typhoid, perhaps upon his arrival at Stalag VIIIB.
In the case of three of these transfers to work labor camps, the fixed places to which Heinz was assigned are specified, namely, working at an airfield, working at a paper factory, and working on road construction. His work assignments were interrupted on three occasions by stays at the hospital at Stalag VIIIB. Given the arduous nature of the work, the unsanitary conditions at the Stalags, the lack of food, and the sometimes-brutal treatment at the hand of guards, it’s not surprising POWs were in poor health.
The most interesting thing recorded on Heinz’s Personalkarte is the solitary confinements he was made to endure for neglecting or disturbing work operations and for two escapes. Remarkably, Heinz’s escape from work labor camp designated as “E479” in Tarnowitz is recorded in a book by Cyril Rofe entitled “Against the Wind.” Cyril himself escaped from a work camp that was subordinate to Stalag VIIIB on his third attempt, eventually making his way to Moscow before being repatriated via Murmansk. I quote at length from Cyril Rofe’s description of Heinz’s escape:
“The first pair to escape were Joe Powell and Henry Löwenstein. Tall and ginger haired, Löwenstein had been brought up in Danzig and spoke perfect German. They had already been on one working party, which had been no use from their point of view. They had managed to get themselves sent back to the Stalag and then volunteered to come to Tarnowitz. As soon as they arrived, they wanted to be away. They were not fussy about their clothes, and it was easy enough to collect together all they needed. By the end of February they were ready to go. [EDITOR’S NOTE: BASED ON HEINZ’S PERSONALKARTE, WE KNOW HEINZ AND JOE WERE READY TO MAKE THEIR ESCAPE ATTEMPT AT THE END OF JANUARY 1943 RATHER THAN THE END OF FEBRUARY 1943]
On the morning of their escape they wore their civilian clothes under their battledress and overcoats. When groups left camp the men were always counted by the duty clerk, who handed them over to the guards, who also counted them. The guards were then responsible for the men until they handed them back to the duty clerk in the evening. The group to which Powell and Löwenstein belonged were working on the line just outside Beuthen station, about 10 miles from the camp, and travelled there and back by train each day. At the end of the day the Unteroffizier in charge always counted them before they got on the train for the return journey.
Joe Powell and Löwenstein had no difficulty in getting away at Beuthen. [Figure 19] Finding a quiet corner they slipped out of their Army clothes and walked away as civilians. They boarded a tram outside the station and travelled to Gleiwitz, where they caught a train to Danzig. None of the guards noticed their absence during the day. When the train arrived in the evening the men fell in quickly, the Palestinian corporal counted them rapidly and gave the full number as present. Before the guards had a chance to check the count the men broke off and clambered on to the train.
The Unteroffizier said nothing. Judging by his subsequent behaviour he had his suspicions but was not anxious to confirm them. He was a wily old fellow. When they reached camp he counted the men quickly, gave the same number as he had taken over in the morning and dismissed the men before the duty clerk had completed his check. The men broke off and entered the camp, while the clerk accepted the Unteroffizier’s figure as correct. The Unteroffizier had covered himself against blame.
Every night there was Appell (roll-call) in each of the barracks, the men falling into five ranks to be counted. That night Kaplan came around as usual with the Feldwebel and a guard, whose duty it was to count the men by walking along in front of them, checking that there were five in each file. Kaplan had it all carefully arranged. When he and the two Germans entered the barrack in which Joe and Löwenstein had slept, the men in the front rank were standing close together to prevent the guard from noticing the two empty places at the end of the rear rank. Kaplan talked to the Feldwebel, blocking his view while the guard started his count. As soon as he had passed the first few files, two men in the rear rank ducked low, ran quietly long the back, fell in again at the other end, and were counted a second time. The guard reported the correct number present and the Feldwebel was satisfied.
This was on Monday night. The next morning Kaplan, who arranged all the work lists for each day, marked the two escapees down on the light-duty list, so that they did not have to report for work at Beuthen. Kaplan kept them covered up until the following Friday, on which day I myself was working at Beuthen. During the lunch-hour the Unteroffizier came into the hut and asked for Löwenstein and Joe, the second by the name he had adopted. On being told they were sick he grinned all over his face and went out again. Apparently the Feldwebel had telephoned to ask if they were there.
When we arrived back at camp we heard that during the morning a telephone call had come through to the Feldwebel enquiring whether he had had anybody escape from the camp. On his answering in the negative, he learned that the police in Danzig had picked up two men using those names who claimed to have escaped from Tarnowitz. When the Feldwebel checked up he found the two men were missing and nobody had the slightest idea when they had left or how.
An officer came to investigate. The Feldwebel accused Kaplan of being responsible for this outrage, affirming that it was Kaplan’s duty to work with him, not against him and threatened to get even with him. This was right up Kaplan’s street. Not only did he inform the Feldwebel that he actually had helped the men to escape, but he added that he considered it his duty as a British solider to help anybody else who wished to escape and that he would do so whenever he could. Furthermore, he said, it was the Feldwebel’s job to guard us, not his, and the Feldwebel need expect no more cooperation from him until he apologized! Fortunately the officer agreed that Kaplan had only done his duty and managed to preserve the peace.
Kaplan had told them that Joe and Löwenstein had escaped on Monday, although he did not tell them how, and that he had covered them up ever since. They flatly refused to believe such a thing was possible until Kaplan showed them how he had done it.
There were no repercussions in the camp, except that thereafter the Feldwebel counted us himself at night, and for some days he and Kaplan were not on speaking terms. Kaplan refused to have anything more to do with the worklists. The result was chaotic, and within a week the Feldwebel was back begging to be ‘friends as before.’ This sounds fantastic, but it happened. Only a Kaplan could have brought it off, but knowing Kaplan one did not expect less. He was tall and bulky, and when one saw him ordering the Germans around he looked a veritable Gulliver among pygmies.”
A few observations about Cyril Rofe’s description of Joe Powell and Henry Löwenstein’s escape from Tarnowitz. As Rofe states, the repercussions for Joe and Heinz’s escape from the work labor camp were minimal. Heinz’s Personalkarte shows he spent only seven days in solitary confinement after he was returned to Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf. The repercussions could have been much worse if the two prisoners had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo when they were recaptured, particularly in the case of Heinz who was Jewish. The Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, rather than the Gestapo ran the POW system, so in a sense POWs were safer inside the Stalags, particularly in the case of Jewish prisoners.
The Wehrmacht resisted all efforts by the Gestapo to gain access to and control over the POW system until mid-1944 when Hitler appointed Gottlob Berger to head up the POW system, when it fell under Heinrich Himmler’s control. However, in practice nothing changed. The military camp commandants and staff remained in place and continued to manage the camps as originally instructed by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). Berger appears to have had too much on his plate to deal with his new responsibilities in a manner that would have pleased Hitler and Himmler. This said, some POWs did disappear from the Stalags during the war.
One final confirming observation. Rofe, while wrong about the month Joe and Heinz were ready to make their escape, correctly notes that they escaped on a Monday and were recaptured on a Friday. The dates on which Monday and Friday in February 1943 fell match the dates on Heinz’s Personalkarte showing when he was on the lam, February 1st through February 5th.
Following the end of the war, Joe Powell, or “Jack” as he was familiarly known, completed a liberation questionnaire, “General Questionnaire for British/America Ex-Prisoners of War.” Brian was able to obtain a copy of this document, which he shared with me. One question deals with the main camps or hospitals in which he was detained, but the question that most interested me is one in which Jack briefly detailed his escape attempt with Heinz. I quote: “From Beuthen working party in civilian clothing together with a fellow prisoner, a German Jew, Heinz Löwenstein. Captured Danzig by railway police.” (Figure 20a-b) He claims to have been free for three days during this escape, which differs slightly from Rofe’s account.
An administrative entry appearing on Heinz’s Personalkarte dated the 6th of December 1943, states Heinz was transferred from Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf to Stalag 344 in Lamsdorf. (see Figure 9b) For some reason, the Nazis redesignated Stalag VIIIB as Stalag 344 but they are the SAME Stalags. I suspect an identical notation was made on the personnel cards of all POWs.
An entry was made on the 13th of August 1943 and then again on the 21st of August, following Heinz’s third escape and recapture, specifically from work labor camp E494 in Oppeln, Germany [today: Opole, Poland], when he was sentenced to six days in the brig. (see Figures 9b-c)
There are two other curious notations, respectively, dated the 15th of September 1943 and the 10th of June 1944 that appear related to another escape attempt. I will discuss these further below. Another administrative entry from April 1944 prohibits POWs from having sexual relationships with German women. (see Figure 9d)
Following Heinz’s release from the brig in August 1943 after his third escape, possibly in September 1943 or slightly later, it is almost certain that Heinz made a successful fourth escape from Stalag VIIIB/Stalag 344 or one of its subordinate work labor camps. The evidence for this comes from War Office record WO 224/95 (Figure 21a-d) which places him at Camp Siklós in Hungary in November 1943. What to make of the two notations mentioned above on Heinz’s Personalkarte from Stalag VIIIB dated the 15th of September 1943 and the 10th of June 1944, when we know positively he was already in Hungary, is a complete mystery.
ASKED FOR A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION, BRIAN COOPER SUGGESTS THE FOLLOWING WITHOUT ANY CONCRETE EVIDENCE THIS IS WHAT TOOK PLACE. ON PAGE 3 OF HEINZ’S “PERSONALKARTE,” FIGURE 9C, UNDER THE CATEGORY “KOMMANDOS,” IF THE GERMANS WERE AWARE THAT HE HAD ESCAPED YET AGAIN, THEY WOULD HAVE ADDED A NOTATION TO THIS EFFECT. BECAUSE THEY DID NOT DO SO BRIAN THINKS THE GERMANS MANAGING STALAG 344 CONTINUED TO BELIEVE THAT HE WAS A POW THERE UNTIL 1945. ACCORDING TO BRIAN, A NOT SO INFREQUENT OCCURRENCE WAS THAT A POW WOULD EXCHANGE IDENTITIES WITH ANOTHER POW TO INCREASE THEIR OPPORTUNITIES FOR ESCAPING UNDETECTED. THE SEPTEMBER 1943 AND JUNE 1944 ENTRIES MAY HAVE BEEN ATTEMPTS BY THE SUBSTITUTE POW TO OBTAIN REPLACEMENT DOG TAGS TO “TEST” WHETHER THE GERMANS HAD BEEN FOOLED BY THE SUBSTITUTION.
Record WO 224/95 is a Visit Report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) written on the 16th of November detailing prison conditions at the Camp Siklós Hungarian detention center inspected on the 8th of November 1943. While referred to as Camp Siklós the holding facility had in fact been moved from Siklós to Szigetvár on the 12th of August 1943 due to the poor conditions prevailing at Siklós. Attached to this report is a list of 16 British internees, presumably, all POW escapees, including “Henry Lowenstein.” It’s unclear at what point Heinz was arrested in Hungary but no later than the 8th of November he was in Hungarian hands. Szigetvár, incidentally, was the castle estate of Count Mihaly Andrassy, and incarceration conditions there were excellent.
The ICRC visit to Camp Siklós (Szigetvár) was conducted in its capacity as a Protecting Power which was formalized in the Geneva Convention of 1929. Protecting powers were allowed to inspect prisoners of war camps, interview prisoners in private, communicate freely with prisoners, and supply books for the prison library. The term “Protecting Power” is simply defined. It is a state which has accepted the responsibility of protecting the interests of another state in the territory of a third, with which, for some reason, such as war, the second state does not maintain diplomatic relations. I won’t discuss them but Stalag VIIIB at Lamsdorf was visited on numerous occasions by a Protecting Power.
Now, I will again digress to provide some historical context of Hungary’s situation vis a vis Nazi occupation at the time that Heinz was detained there.
In March 1944, Hungary was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Before the Nazi invasion, there was no state of war between Hungary and the United Kingdom, so any British POW escapees, if caught by the Hungarian authorities, would expect no more than internment by Hungary as a neutral power. There was no concern that British POWs would be returned to German control. Based on the existing War Office records, Heinz escaped from Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf and somehow made his way to Hungary before the Nazi occupation, though a few entries previously mentioned on Heinz’s Personalkarte are confusing in terms of the timeline when this occurred.
Now we get to the murkiest part of Heinz’s story. From one moment to the next, he goes from being “Heinz Lowenstein” to being “Henry Goff.” (To remind readers, the surname “Goff” was Heinz’s sister’s married name.) As a Hungarian internee, Heinz is known as “Henry Lowenstein,” but when he falls into German hands a second time following Germany’s occupation of Hungary, he uses the alias “Henry Goff.” Since the Hungarians clearly knew Heinz’s real identity, they may have chosen not to share it with the Germans. Regardless, from this point forward, as far as the Germans are concerned, Heinz is known as “Henry Goff.” This is confirmed by War Office record WO 416/141/191. (Figure 22) This record matches his actual date of birth, but now shows him born in Manchester, England. The Germans, knowing no better, allocate him a new POW number, No. 156116. From Heinz’s standpoint, the change of surname and birth place was presumably an insurance policy because of his faith. Together with his new POW number, he presumably thought that his chances of survival improved.
Regardless of how Heinz again fell into German hands in Hungary, WO 416/141/191 tells us that he was returned to the Stalags in Austria. Precisely when this occurred is unknown, but by the 28th of July 1944, Henry Goff is transferred from Stalag XVIIA in Kaisersteinbruch, Austria to Stalag XVIIB in Gneixendorf, Austria. (Figure 23)
The British camp leadership at Stalag XVIIA and/or Stalag XVIIB was aware that Heinz Lowenstein was there but was known as Henry Goff. We know this to be the case from the POW list published by the British War Office in April 1945, record WO 392/20. (see Figure 11) This information was likely transmitted in a coded message to the War Office. According to Brian, some men were trained in anticipation they might be captured and then used to write coded messages that could be embedded in normal correspondence.
Alternatively, Brian thinks the news of Heinz’s name change may have arrived in London via the International Committee of the Red Cross. Possibly this information, along with how Heinz fell into the hands of the Germans a second time, may be found in the archives of the ICRC. Additionally, the archives may also hold information on how British POWs were transported from the “Salonika Transit Camp Frontstalag 183” to the Stalags in Germany in 1941. Search applications to the ICRC are only open a few times a year with the next opportunity to submit a request being on September 22nd. During the next open period, I will apply to obtain any ICRC records related to Heinz Löwenstein and Henry Goff.
On the 8th of April 1945, 4,000 of the POWs at Stalag XVIIB were forced by the Nazis to begin an 18-day 235-mile march to Braunau in Bavaria, Germany. (Figure 24) The remaining 900 men were too ill to make the march so were left behind in the hospital and were liberated by the Red Army on the 9th of May. It’s unknown whether Heinz was well enough to travel, but if he marched to Braunau he would have been liberated by the Americans. If so, he could have been repatriated to Palestine via United Kingdom or via Italy. On the other hand, if he was left behind at Stalag XVIIB he might subsequently have been released to the British 8th Army in Austria, then possibly moved south into Italy for direct repatriation to Palestine.
Brian has unsuccessfully tried tracking down Heinz’s military personnel file to obtain answers to open questions. He submitted a Freedom of Information request to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) to see if they know where service records for WWII Palestinian recruits are held, whether the records were left in Jerusalem when the British mandate over Palestine ended in 1948 or repatriated to the UK. The MOD claims the only way to determine this would be to examine every service record to establish where each service personnel was recruited. Not a very satisfactory response.
At Brian’s suggestion, I contacted the Israel Defense Force and Defense Establishment Archive (IDF Archive) inquiring about Heinz’s military personnel file, and about my father’s service records from his time in the Pioneer Corps (i.e., my father Otto Bruck was also a member of the English Army though at the opposite end of the Mediterranean theater in Algeria.) The IDF Archives referred me to the Pioneer Veterans Association, who responded in Heinz’s case that his military records “are somewhere in Jerusalem.” The search continues.
I will now bring this lengthy blog post to a close with a short commentary. First, I’m deeply indebted to Brian Cooper for all the new information and primary source documents he brought to my attention regarding my father’s first cousin’s whereabouts during WWII. Frankly, I’m astonished at all the materials related to Heinz he was able to track down. It never occurred to me to check the records of UK’s Ministry of Defence since I had no suspicion that he’d ever been in the English Army. After learning Heinz was once a member of the Royal Corps of Signals, I was rechecking the handful of photos I have and found one of him with his mother and brother taken in Nice, France after the war on the balcony of the apartment where his mother lived. Heinz is wearing a battle dress tunic jacket in which one can barely detect the Royal Signals insignia. (Figures 25a-b)
Regretfully, I never asked my father questions about his ancestors, which he might have been disinclined to answer given how painful many aspects of his past were. Thus, it comes as a pleasant surprise I’ve been able to fill in some holes in what I know about Heinz Löwenstein. It confirms in a general way my childhood belief that he was an escape artist. Though the consequences as a Jew of escaping so many times could have been dire, in all instances his punishment was light. Knowing this perhaps Heinz viewed it as a game to try and outwit the enemy? While I will never obtain the answer to this and other questions, what I have learned enhances my respect for this courageous man.
HEINZ LÖWENSTEIN TIMELINE (1905-1979)
DATE
EVENT
PLACE
SOURCES & REMARKS
8th March 1905
Birth
Danzig, Germany [today: Gdańsk, Poland]
1905 birth certificate
22nd October 1931
Marriage to Rose Bloch
Danzig, Germany [today: Gdańsk, Poland]
1931 marriage certificate
ca. 1935
Moved to Palestine, likely became a British citizen, & volunteered for the British Army (Pioneer Corps)
Palestine
29th April 1941
Taken prisoner at the end of the Battle of Greece likely near Kalamata on the Peloponnesian Peninsula
Greece
First held as a prisoner in Corinth, then moved to Salonika before eventually being sent to Austria for incarceration (WO 416/412/223)
8th July 1941
Given inoculation against typhoid fever at Stalag XVIIIA (Wolfsberg, Austria)
Wolfsberg, Austria
WO 416/412/223
28th July 1941
Transferred from Stalag XVIIIA (Wolfsberg) to Stalag VIIIB (Lamsdorf)
Wolfsberg, Austria;
and
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/228/460
5th September 1941
Assigned to work labor camp E230 in Görlitz at the Fliegerhorst (airfield)
Görlitz, Germany [today: Zgorzelec, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
23rd September 1941
Krankenhaus im Lager (in hospital)
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
29th October 1941
Assigned to work labor camp E29) in Wawrowitz, Kreis Troppau at the Zuckerfabrik (sugar factory)
Wawrowitz, district Troppau [today: Vávrovice, Opava District, Czech Republic]
WO 416/412/223
16th December 1941
Assigned to work labor camp E358 in Oppahof-Stettin, Kreis Troppau
Oppahof-Stettin, Kreis Troppau [today: Štítina, Opava District, Czech Republic]
WO 416/412/223
18th June 1942
Assigned to work labor camp E453 in Stramberg, Kreis Neutitschein (Neu Titschein)
Stramberg, Kreis Neutitschein (Neu Titschein) [today: Štramberk, Nový Jičín District, Czech Republic]
WO 416/412/223
2nd October 1942
Placed in solitary confinement for 5 days for neglecting work and disturbing work operations
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223;
During this punishment Heinz got sick and was hospitalized
6th October 1942
Krankenhaus im Lager (in hospital)
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
19th November 1942
Assigned to work labor camp E412 in Krappitz, Germany at the Papierfabrikenwerke (paper mill)
Krappitz, Germany [today: Krapkowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
15th January 1943
Assigned to work labor camp E479 in Tarnowitz, Germany
Escapes from work labor camp E479 in Tarnowitz, Germany, catches a train in nearby Beuthen, Germany, which he takes to Danzig, Germany
Tarnowitz, Germany [today: Tarnowskie Góry, Poland]; and Beuthen, Germany [today: Bytom, Poland]; and Danzig, Germany [today: Gdańsk, Poland]
Heinz walks away from the work labor camp in Tarnowitz, walks to nearby Beuthen to catch a train to Danzig, where he is eventually recaptured by Rairway Police and returned to Stalag VIIIB in Lamsdorf (book by Cyril Rofe entitled “Against the Wind”)
8th February 1943
Placed in solitary confinement for 7 days for his escape from work labor camp E479 in Tarnowitz
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
2nd March 1943
Assigned to work labor camp E456 in Oppeln, Kalkau-Wiessen, Germany at the Landesstrassenbauamt (State Highway Department)
Oppeln, Germany [today: Opole, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
6th May 1943
Krankenhaus im Lager (in hospital)
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
9th June 1943
Assigned to work labor camp E494 in Gleiwitz, Germany at the Firma Braukmann
Gleiwitz, Germany [Gliwice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
13th July 1943 to 21st July 1943
Escapes from work labor camp E494 in Gleiwitz, Germany
Gleiwitz, Germany [Gliwice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
21st July 1943
Recaptured after 8 days on the lam; serves six days of solitary confinement
Location unknown
WO 416/412/223
13th August 1943
Returned to Stalag VIIIB
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
15th September 1943
Entry whose meaning is unclear; Heinz may have escaped yet again and been recaptured or escaped for good
WO 416/412/223
16th November 1943
Henry Lowenstein’s name appears on a “List of British Prisoners of War on the Estate of Count Mihaly Andrassy, Szigetvár, Hungary”
Szigetvár, Hungary
WO 224/95 & WO 392/10
6th December 1943
“Transferred” from Stalag VIIIB to Stalag 344 in Lamsdorf, Germany (In late 1943, Stalag VIIIB was redesignated as Stalag 344)
Lamsdorf, Germany [today: Łambinowice, Poland]
WO 416/412/223
I surmise this entry is an administrative one made on the Personalkarte of all POWs
28th July 1944
Using an alias “Henry Goff” born on the 8th of March 1905 in Manchester, England, he is transferred from Stalag XVIIA in Kaisersteinbruch, Austria to Stalag XVIIB in Gneixendorf, Austria
Kaisersteinbruch, Austria; Gneixendorf, Austria
WO 416/141/191 & WO 392/20
Post-WWII
Changes his name from Heinz Löwenstein to “Hanoch Avneri”
Israel
Personal correspondence
10th August 1979
Death
Haifa, Israel
Burial Certificate from Haveri Kadisha
20th August 1979
Burial
Haifa, Israel
Burial Certificate from Haveri Kadisha
REFERENCES
Borrie, John. Despite Captivity: A Doctor’s Life as Prisoner of War. Whitcoulls, 1975.
Lidbetter, H. Martin. Friends Ambulance Unit, 1939-1943: Experiences in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Egypt, Greece and Germany. 1st ed., Hyperion Books, 1993.
Rofe, Cyril. Against the Wind. 1st ed., Hodder & Stoughton, 1956.
Venetsanakos, Georgia (2015, July 15). Battle of Kalamata 1941. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/battleofkalamata/posts/seventy-years-ago-the-surviving-pows-are-making-their-way-through-transit-camps-/1600718310191993/
Note: In this post, I discuss my own attempt to obtain compensation and damages from the French government on behalf of my family for works of art seized by the Nazis in December 1940 from my father’s first cousin, Fedor Löwenstein, a noted painter. I also touch on the multiple occasions France has wronged my family during WWII, following WWII, and continuing to the present.
This story begins in 2014. This is the year my wife and I took a 13-week trip to Europe traveling from northeastern Poland to southeastern Spain following the path of my Jewish family’s diaspora. It included a stop at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, on the outskirts of Berlin, where the personal papers of two of my accomplished and unmarried great-aunts, Franziska Bruck (Figure 1) and Elsbeth Bruck (Figure 2), are archived. The family items at the Statdtmuseum include academic papers, diaries, numerous professional and personal letters, family photographs, awards, and miscellaneous belongings. (Figures 3a-b) During my visit, I photographed all the articles and artifacts for later study.
The letters and photographs turned out to be most informative. The letters were written in four forms, Old German Script (known as die Kurrentschrift or Kurrent for short in German); an updated version of Kurrent called Sütterlin developed in the early 20th Century; normal German script (deutsche Normalschrift); and typed normal German. Suffice it to say, that the three forms of German script are completely indecipherable to me, so I depended on German-speaking friends and relatives to translate these letters. However, in the case of letters typed in German, using a good on-line translator, called DeepL, I was able to make sense of the content of some of these missives.
One letter I translated provides the basis of much of this Blog post. (Figures 4a-c) It contains astonishing information that led to the seven-year odyssey I embarked upon to obtain redress from the French government for an injustice perpetrated upon my father’s first cousin, Fedor Löwenstein, by the Nazis. The letter was written by Fedor’s younger sister, Jeanne “Hansi” Goff née Löwenstein, to her aunt, my great-aunt, Elsbeth Bruck. It is dated the 30th of October 1946, and was sent from Nice, France to Berlin, Germany. What makes the letter so astounding is not that it mentions both my paternal grandmother ELSE Bruck and my father OTTO Bruck, since both had connections to Nice and France in 1946, but rather to Hansi’s declaration that one of her brother Fedya’s (named Fedor but also called “Fidel”) paintings had sold posthumously in 1946 for 90,000 French Francs. Using a Historic Currency Converter, I determined this would be worth more than $16,000 as of 2015, obviously even more today. Given the enormous amount that one of Fedor Lowenstein’s paintings had fetched in 1946 convinced me that he was no run-of-the-mill painter and that I needed to learn more about him.
One place my wife and I visited in 2014 attempting to obtain copies of original death certificates for ancestors who had died in Nice was la Mairie de Nice, City Hall. There, I was able to obtain death certificates not only for Fedor Lowenstein (Figure 5) and his mother, Hedwig Löwenstein née Bruck (Figure 6), but also for his sister, Jeanne Goff née Löwenstein. (Figure 7) I was fortunate to even find Fedor Lowenstein’s name in the death register. In German, his surname was spelled “Löwenstein,” with the “ö,” that’s to say with an umlaugh over the “o,” transcribed in English as “oe”; in the French death register, Fedor’s surname was spelled simply as “Lowenstein” (Figure 8), so I nearly missed finding his name among the 1946 deaths. I would later discover that Fedor’s surname was variously spelled “Lowenstein,” “Löwenstein,” and even “Loevenstein.”
Having obtained the death certificates, I was dispatched to a different administrative office in Nice, le Service Administration Funéraire, the Funeral Administration Office, to locate their tombs. While Fedor’s sister I learned had been cremated, the Funeral Administration Office directed me to the Cimetière Caucade, the Caucade Communal Cemetery (Figure 9), on the outskirts of Nice to find Fedor and Hedwig’s tombstones. (Figures 10-11) It was providential that I was assisted at the Funeral Administration Office by a Mme. Jöelle Saramito (Figure 12), who would later render me a great service.
Jeanne Goff née Löwenstein’s translated 1946 letter convinced me her brother was no ordinary painter. Knowing this, I became curious whether I could obtain an obituary from a contemporary newspaper that might lead me to living descendants. Hoping Mme. Saramito might be able to track it down for me, or at least point me in the right direction, I contacted her. What she provided surpassed my expectations.
In what can only be characterized as a fortunate occurrence of serendipity, Mme. Saramito sent me links to several articles about an exposition featuring three of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings seized by the Nazis that had been displayed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux. Unbeknownst to my wife and me, this exhibit had taken place there between the 16th of May and the 24th of August 2014, overlapping our extended stay in Europe that year; needless to say, had we known about this exposition, we would have detoured there.
Among the links Mme. Saramito sent me was an article naming the art curator for the exhibition held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, a lady named Florence Saragoza; the article also mentioned the French government was looking for legitimate family members to whom Fedor Loewenstein’s artworks could be returned.
While I had several photographs of Fedor Löwenstein with his family in Nice (Figurse 13-14) found at the Stadtmuseum in Spandau, and a copy of his acte de décès, death certificate, obtained from la Mairie de Nice, there was much I did not know about my father’s first cousin. Hoping to learn more, I tried to contact Mme. Saragoza, and quickly discovered she was affiliated with the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication as a conservatrice du patrimoine, curator of heritage. My initial email to her at the Ministère de la Culture “bounced.” I eventually learned that she was also the then-Director of the Musée Crozatier in le Puy-en-Velay, France (Figure 15), where my subsequent email reached her. I will always remember her response dated the 16th of September 2014, “What a surprise to read your e-mail! (To be honest I cried) . . .I’m so glad to read about someone from Lowenstein’s family!” Logically, Mme. Saragoza had assumed that Fedor’s family had been murdered in the Holocaust, emigrated, or would be unlikely to learn about the exhibition in Bordeaux and the resurfaced paintings. More on this later.
Almost immediately after connecting with Mme. Saragoza, she sent me the Journal d’exposition, the exhibition catalog, for the Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) trois œuvres martyres exposition. (Figure 16) Most of Fedor Löwenstein’s biography and the history behind the works of art confiscated by the Nazis is drawn from this reference.
Wilhelm Fédor Löwenstein was born in Munich, Germany on the 13th of April 1901, and is often characterized as a Czech painter because this was his family’s country of origin. He first studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1923, Fédor Löwenstein settled in Paris (Figures 17a-b), attracted by the artistic influence of the capital. An artistic movement dominated there, designated in 1925 as the École de Paris, the School of Paris; in reality, this name does not refer to any school that really existed, but rather to the École de Paris, which brought together artists who contributed to making Paris the focus of artistic creation between the two world wars. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew.
In Paris he mixed with and became a student of the painter André Lhote from Bordeaux and joined the “Groupe des Surindépendants” in 1936. Löwenstein’s early works were marked by the influence of cubism, whose main representatives worked in Paris, although his subsequent productions evolved towards abstraction, probably under the influence of André Lhote. In 1938, he painted “La Chute” (The Fall), inspired by the signing of the Munich Agreement that dismantled the Czechoslovakia that had been created in 1918. As is noted in the 2014 Bordeaux retrospective exhibition catalog, “The composition and iconographic vocabulary of the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica, exhibited a year earlier in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair.” The comparison to Picasso’s famed work speaks volumes about Löwenstein’s remarkable talent.
When France entered the war in September 1939, Löwenstein, like many artists, had to leave the capital. As a foreigner, he had to hide to escape France’s exclusion laws. He went to Mirmande (Drôme) on the advice of Marcelle Rivier, a friend and another of André Lhote’s students. The two artists probably met in Paris shortly before France entered the war. At that time, Mirmande, a village in ruins, welcomed a few painters who lived there. But most of them came there to work alongside André Lhote during his summer academy. The village became a place of refuge for many Parisian artists of foreign origin, all of whom led a relatively peaceful life, free from military operations and repression, contending mostly with the difficulty of obtaining art supplies.
This ended abruptly when the Germans occupied the whole of Metropolitan France in November 1942. Until then, the French Demarcation line marked the boundary between the occupied part of France administered by the German Army in the northern and western part of France and the Zone libre in the south. The suppression of the Demarcation line marked by the invasion of the southern zone by the Germans put an end to the peaceful life the artists in Miramande had enjoyed. This caused the group gathered there to break up.
From then on, it was the French Resistance network that worked to protect the refugees of Mirmande, thus allowing many Jewish painters to flee. Marcelle Rivier, Fedor Löwenstein’s friend who had enticed him to move there, somewhat amusingly described her involvement in his evacuation in 1943 from Miramande: “That night I put on Lowenstein one of these vast peasant skirts that we wore then and by a night of full moon in this month of February 1943, we left for Cliousclat. . .With his skirt, Lowenstein had the air of a horse disguised and the ground left no other means than to take the traced road. There I entrusted him to Ména Loopuyt, a Dutch painter living in Cliousclat. Charles Caillet had gone by bicycle to the abbey of Aiguebelle to get along with the abbot and gave us an appointment at his house. The next day at midnight, Doctor Debanne disguised the Jews as wounded, and they were taken to Aiguebelle.”
As the exposition catalog goes on to describe, “They [the Jews] were in possession of false identity cards made by Maurice Caillet, the curator of the Valence Museum. In agreement with the bishopric and the superior of the community, the monks of the abbey of Aiguebelle in the Drôme welcomed refugees at the end of 1942 and sheltered Jews whom they employed in the various works of the abbey. Löwenstein decorated tiles without enthusiasm.”
In the fall of 1943, ill, Fedor went to Paris, under the pseudonym of Lauriston, to consult at the Curie Institute and at the Broussais Hospital in the south of Paris, where Dr. Paul Chevallier, a French pioneer in hematology, was practicing. However, his disease was not diagnosed, and he continued to deteriorate. Löwenstein would eventually return to his family in Nice, where he was hospitalized and would die on the 4th of August 1946. It was determined he died of Hodgkins Lymphoma.
Fedor’s association with the “Groupe des Surindépendants” from 1936 onward resulted in him exhibiting regularly with them until the outbreak of WWII. The group even organized a personal exhibition for him in 1939. At some point in 1940 during his stay in Miramande, Fedor returned to Paris where he selected small format works as well as six watercolors that he brought to be shipped to New York City. There is little information about the circumstances surrounding this project, but the paintings were sent to a harbor warehouse in Bordeaux for shipment to an American gallery. Unfortunately, the crates never left Bordeaux but were instead “requisitioned” by German military authorities on the 5th of December 1940, the date of a major seizure operation.
A special commando unit affiliated with the “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)” (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) raided the warehouse where Fedor’s crates were stored, seized them, and had them shipped to Paris where they were stored at the “Jeu de Paume.” The ERR was a Nazi Party organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during WWII and was led by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg, ergo its name. The Jeu de Paume was the seat of ERR’s processing of looted art objects confiscated from Jewish-owned collections.
Owing to the abstract cubist nature of Löwenstein’s works, the ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume deemed them as “degenerate” and consigned them to the store room for condemned art, the “Salles des Martyrs,” Martyrs’ Hall. They were marked for destruction, in German “vernichet.” In total, 25 paintings by Fedor were seized and brought to the Jeu de Paume to be disposed of for ideological reasons.
Almost seventy years after the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 three of the purportedly destroyed Löwenstein paintings resurfaced in French museum collections. French Ministry of Culture officials were able to match the resurrected paintings with information contained in the ERR database for three works labeled by the Germans as Löwenstein 4 (“Paysage” or Landscape), Löwenstein 15 (“Peupliers” or Poplars), and Löwenstein 19 (“Les Arbes” or The Trees). In the official catalogue of unclaimed works and objects of art known as “Musée Nationaux Récupération (MNR),” the works are assigned MNR numbers R26, R27, and R28. These three paintings correspond to Löwenstein’s works of art that were displayed at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux in 2014 for which I would later file a claim for restitution. As an aside, all three paintings were signed “Fedor Loevenstein.” I would later learn from a French reader of my Blog, who purchased several of his works at auction, that Löwenstein also signed some with his initials in reverse, “LF.”
In connection with researching and writing the catalog for the 2014 exhibit of Fedor Löwenstein’s three resurrected paintings, Florence Saragoza and her colleagues uncovered the notes of the curator at the Jeu de Paume, Rose Valland. Her notes from July 20, 1943, confirm the fate of artworks destined for destruction: “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 Dalí’s. The paintings in the Loewenstein, Esmont (sic), M[ichel]-G[eorges] Michel collections are almost all shredded. . .” On July 23rd, 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. . . . The paintings that remained in the Louvre were classified by category. . .”. It appears that Löwenstein’s three works that escaped destruction had been classified by the Louvre as “paintings of lesser importance,” while the remaining works were likely stabbed, shredded and/or incinerated.
As a side note, since virtually all the images of Fedor Löwenstein’s paintings as well as the historic images of the Martyrs’ Hall at the Jeu de Paume are copyrighted, I refer readers to the hyperlinks to view photos.
As a mildly interesting aside, Florence Saragoza and her colleagues, using the notes left behind by Rose Valland, then curatorial attaché at the Jeu de Paume, were able to attribute most of the paintings exhibited there. They did this using a detailed digitization of the negatives, work by work, accompanied by anamorphosis. This was a new term to me and is defined as: “. . .a distorted projection requiring the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point, use special devices, or both to view a recognizable image. It is used in painting, photography, sculpture and installation, toys, and film special effects. The word is derived from the Greek prefix ana-, meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’, and the word morphe, meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form.’ Extreme anamorphosis has been used by artists to disguise caricatures, erotic and scatological scenes, and other furtive images from a casual spectator, while revealing an undistorted image to the knowledgeable viewer.” In the case of the historic photos on display in the Martyrs’ Hall, I take this to mean that since the paintings in the photos look somewhat distorted, some digital manipulation was required to identify and attribute the works of art.
As previously mentioned, Fedor Löwenstein’s 25 paintings were seized from État-major administratif du port, hangar H, Bordeaux, the “Port Administration Headquarters, Hanger H, Bordeaux.” They were seized at the same time as a set of Dali’s works were taken from another collector, which were described under the acronym “unbekannt,” “unknown.” This was intended to indicate that the history of the works had been lost during the various transfers from their seizure in Bordeaux to their shipment to Paris, the inventories being drawn up only belatedly by the historians of the ERR. Again quoting from the exhibition catalog, “But the fact that these collections were made anonymous was also part of the ideological policy of the Third Reich, which aimed at cultural appropriation, an affirmation of superiority inscribed in a historical connection and a rewriting of art history.” As in the case of Dali’s works, the provenance of the three orphan paintings by Löwenstein was lost and they were described as having been donated anonymously in 1973. Only in 2011 were they were reclassified as stolen works. This brings me to where things stood when I learned all the above.
Soon after connecting with Florence Saragoza, she asked me whether I wanted to file a claim with the Commission pour l’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations (CIVS) for the return of Fedor Löwenstein’s three orphan paintings, as well as payment of damages. CIVS is the commission established in 1999 under the French Prime Minister to implement the policy of the State regarding the reparation of the damages suffered by the Jews of France whose property was looted during the Occupation, because of the anti-Semitic measures taken by the German occupier or by the Vichy regime. This seemed like a logical next step. Given my intimate familiarity with my father and his first cousins’ family tree, I immediately realized that I am Fedor’s closest living relative. (Figure 18) That’s to say, because neither Fedor nor either of his two siblings had any children or surviving spouses, as a first cousin once removed, I am their closest surviving blood relative.
With Mme. Saragoza’s gracious assistance, I filed a claim with CIVS in October 2014. CIVS acknowledged receipt of my claim in November 2014, assigning it a case number, “Requête 24005 BROOK,” noting that considering the numerous claims pending before their office and the multiple archives and offices that would need to be consulted, it could take some time to render a decision. In fact, it took more than 6 ½ years.
In June 2015, my wife and I met with the staff at the CIVS in Paris (Figure 19) to discuss my claim, whereupon I provided them with a written account of the chronology detailed above and my ancestral connection to Fedor Löwenstein. In February 2017, I was eventually contacted by a genealogist contracted by CIVS to investigate my claim. I shared an updated written account of what I had sent to CIVS in 2015, and included an extensive array of historic documents, photos, and exhibits, along with a detailed family tree. In essence, I did the genealogist’s work for him.
Between February 2017 and June 2021, when CIVS rendered their written decision, I was never contacted by the Premier Ministre’s office. The decision letter from the Premier Ministre along with the attached report by Le Rapporteur Generale arrived on the 17th of June 2021. It included much of the same information discussed above. The final decision is that my claim was rejected.
Beyond the disappointment and anger I feel about this determination, I was curious about the merits and legal basis of this ruling. Inasmuch as I can ascertain, it appears that because France is governed by principles of civil law rather than common law, my rights have been supplanted. Civil law has its features compiled and codified into a collection for ready reference. It is inspired by the Roman law. Common law, on the other hand, has its rules and regulations administered by judges and vary on a case-to-case basis. Civil law was framed in France. Common law was started in England. Common law varies from case to case depending upon the customs of the society whereas civil law has a predefined written set of statutes and codes for reference. Judgment in common law varies whereas in civil law, the judges must strictly follow the codification written in the book.
In the case of my claim for restitution, CIVS concluded there are what are called “universal legatees,” an element of civil law, whose claim to Löwenstein’s property and damages supersede my own. France considers property left in a will a “universal legacy,” so the person who inherits the rights, obligations, possession, and debts of an ancestor’s title in property through a testamentary disposition is called a “universal legatee.”
These universal legatees in the case of Fedor Löwenstein’s estate are descendants of individuals, merely friends, who inherited from his brother and sister. They and their descendants were not and are not related by blood to Fedor Löwenstein, as I am. Were it not for my efforts to uncover information about Fedor’s orphaned works and file a claim for repatriation and damages, these individuals would have no knowledge of their existence. Furthermore, had it not been for my own extensive genealogical research into Fedor Löwenstein’s spoliated works and ancestry, the CIVS genealogist contracted to undertake the forensic investigation into my claim likely would not have uncovered all the information I provided in 2017. Notwithstanding the stated wishes of CIVS and the Musée National d’Art Moderne housed in the Centre Pompidou in Paris to restore Fedor Löwenstein’s to his family, this is emphatically not happening.
In retrospect, I would say I should not be surprised by this outcome. France has a long-standing tradition of having wronged my family going back to when the French were complicit in helping the Germans deport my aunt Susanne Müller née Bruck in August 1942, from Fayence, France to Auschwitz, where she was ultimately murdered. Then, following the war, in 1948, they arrested my father, Dr. Otto Bruck (Figure 20), in Nice, France for allegedly practicing dentistry illegally, simply for managing the practice of a dentist who had no interest in her business. My father was arrested only because he was “apatride,” stateless. Rather than offer French citizenry to a man who spoke fluent French and who offered a service much-in-need following WWII, they detained and intended to prosecute him had he not decamped for America. And this although my father served France nobly and honorably for five years during the war as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. Arguably, France may have met its legal obligation with its decision regarding my claim, but they most assuredly have not fulfilled their moral obligation by handing over my ancestor’s paintings and awarding damages to so-called “universal legatees.” Family of Fedor Löwenstein they are decidedly NOT!!
REFERENCE
Fédor Löwenstein (1901-1946) trois œuvres martyres. 16 May-24 Aug. 2014. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux.
VITAL STATISTICS OF WILHELM FÉDOR LÖWENSTEIN & HIS IMMEDIATE FAMILY
