The second World War was so prodigal in human lives, so destructive to whole nations, political systems and societies, that to many people the wholesale looting and destruction of European art seemed a minor consideration in 1945. With entire populations uprooted, cities (particularly German and east European ones) bombed into ruins and millions of people starving and homeless, art was not high on many statesmen's priorities. Many of Europe's great galleries had been systematically picked over by the Nazis and their greatest treasures shipped to Germany - either to be absorbed into Hitler's grandiose scheme for a gallery and museum at Linz in Austria, or to be taken into the personal collections of Goering and other Nazi leaders.
The leading private collectors and dealers often fared even worse, since many of them were Jewish, particularly in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France. Some were interned and/or murdered and their artworks were officially impounded. Others fled abroad to Britain or the US leaving their homes and possessions behind to be looted, and a certain number managed to buy their liberty at the expense of their collections and personal wealth.
Hitler's massive operation, code-named Sonderauftrag Linz, had been carefully planned before the war began. A team of advisers compiled dossiers of art collections, both public and private, in the countries likely to be invaded or conquered, with special stress on Italian and Dutch Old Masters. Hitler hated Modern Art - though some people in his entourage, notably Goebbels, admired German Expressionism - and campaigned for its virtual eradication in Germany. Goebbels swallowed his private tastes and organised a systematic suppression of Modernism which forced German artists into exile (Klee fled back to his native Switzerland, Lyonel Feininger to the US ) or suicide (such as Ernst Kirchner) or simply into semi-underground lives without the right to sell or exhibit their work, or even to create it. The infamous exhibition of Entartete Kunst(Degenerate Art) at Munich in 1938 was followed by massive sales of impounded Modernist and Post-Impressionist works abroad. A notable one took place at the Grand Hotel in Lucerne, Switzerland, in June 1939, conducted by a leading Swiss art dealer, Theodor Fischer, who had close links with the Nazis. It included paintings by Gauguin, Picasso, Franz Marc, Van Gogh, Kokoschka, Beckmann, Nolde and virtually all the leading German Expressionists, many of whom were still alive. Much of these had been seized from public galleries in Munich, Essen, and other German cities. The prices paid, however, were not as high as had been hoped. What the Nazis could not sell off for foreign currency, they usually destroyed.
Arguably, modern art in Germany never recovered from this organised suppression. It was, however, only a single aspect of a huge and well-orchestrated operation which involved Hitler's intimates such as the sinister Martin Bormann, high officials and many petty ones, dubious or corrupt dealers, opportunists and crooks of all kinds. Modernism mattered far less to them than Old Masters, since these could be used as a kind of wartime currency reserve. There has been a good deal written about this long nightmare in recent years, as more and more records and files come to light, and as survivors break silence.
The latest survey is presented in a new book, The Lost Masters: the Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses, written jointly by writer/historian, Peter Harclerode, and investigative journalist, Brendan Pittaway.
One case they quote, typical of many, is that of an Austrian aristocrat, Count Czernin. One of his family heirlooms was a painting by Vermeer, Portrait of the Artist in his Studio, which he had reputedly refused to sell even when the American collector Andrew Mellon offered him $6 million for it. Hitler tried every trick to extract this picture from the Czernin family, but they were blameless citizens and there was no legal way in which he could claim it. But the Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, applied heavy pressure and with an increasing number of their friends vanishing into the hands of the Gestapo, the family finally yielded. In 1941 Czernin was forced to sell it for a fraction of its value, and the picture was packed off to Munich.
This was mild compared with the fate of conquered countries such as Czechoslovakia. Being Slavs, the Czechs ranked no higher than Jews in the Nazi racial hierarchy and paid a similar price. "The University of Prague lost its entire library; the Czech National Museum was stripped, as was the palace of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Lobkowitz collection of paintings was removed, along with unique collections of armour and coins, to a repository in Munich to await their ultimate transfer to Linz."
Again, this was restrained compared with the treatment of Poland, Hitler's next victim, which was systematically stripped. In Warsaw alone, 13,512 paintings and 1,379 sculptures were confiscated; churches and monasteries throughout the country were denuded, and apart from systematic plundering there was wholesale, mindless destruction by German soldiers of valuable artefacts. And after the success of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviet Union suffered in terms not only of artworks and manuscripts and relics of the Russian past, but of historic buildings and monuments.
Russia eventually paid Germany back in the same coin. To this day, masses of this looted treasure lie in Russian museums, cellars and archives, including the gold jewellery horde which Heinrich Schliemann had excavated at Troy and which had belonged to a public gallery in Berlin. France was a special case, since there were many collaborators there under the Vichy regime, and some of them were influential museum curators who used the Occupation years to enhance their own collections. In general, however, France lost many of its art treasures, even if the Louvre collections were moved around the country to keep the core of them intact. Again, Hitler's personal vulture-officials took what they could, while Goering stole, bartered or bargained for treasures to deck out his own residences, usually through agents or corrupt dealers. Leading dealers and collectors, such as Paul Rosenberg (a Jew), either fled leaving their collections to be plundered, or like the Bernheim-Jeune family (Jewish too) vanished with the Holocaust.