Nazi Art Looting During World War Ii Primary Sources
New Research Tracks Aboriginal Artifacts Looted past the Nazis
Scholars are increasingly focusing attention on the seizure and digging of antiquities from Hellenic republic and other countries by German forces during Globe War 2.
When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941, Julius Ringel, a major full general in the High german army, took an agile role in initiating illegal excavations on the island of Crete, where Minoan culture had flourished more than than 3,000 years before.
The state was rich with artifacts from the island's cultural heritage and Ringel, often aided by his troops, carted off all sorts of ceramics, vases, parts of statuary, some for his ain gain and some to be sent back to German museums every bit the spoils of state of war.
Ringel, commander of the Fifth Mountain Division, also looted ancient treasures that had already been discovered. He confiscated antiquities from the Villa Ariadne, the quondam domicile of the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, which he converted into the division's headquarters. He stole others from a locked room at the aboriginal palace of Knossos, a five-acre archaeological site that was the middle of Minoan culture, co-ordinate to experts.
"Army officers such as Ringel were not only excavating and looting antiquities for personal wealth simply they were also responsible for the devastation of antiquities, in Crete, Macedonia, Tiryns, Assini and Samos," said Vassilios Petrakos, a scholar who is curator of antiquities and general secretary of the Archaeological Lodge of Athens.
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Though the cinematic exploits of Indiana Jones in the 1980s provided a popular, fictional view of a Nazi animalism for antiquities, the fine art world has, understandably, focused considerably more attention on the seizure of art from Jews.
Merely the topic of the Nazi function in antiquities looting is increasingly drawing attention, in part through the work of scholars who are peeling back the mysteries of what happened to the objects that were excavated or seized eight decades ago.
Last fall, for example, "The Past in Shackles," a five-volume study on the looting of antiquities in Hellenic republic during World War II, written by Petrakos, was published.
"Inquiry has intensified greatly in many countries, including the United states, Germany, Italian republic, French republic, Poland and Greece," said Irene Bald Romano, a professor of anthropology at the Academy of Arizona and curator of Mediterranean Archeology of the Arizona Land Museum.
Symposia and lectures on antiquities looting past the Nazis have been held in several cities in the past few years, including one by the Higher Fine art Association, which presented a console on the topic at its annual conference last February.
"The studies that have been fabricated up to now actually sort of scratch the surface of the topic," Romano said in a telephone interview.
Romano is co-editor of the forthcoming "The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era," a special online consequence of RIHA, the journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, which will exist produced in clan with the Getty Research Establish and the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. The consequence is scheduled to be published later this year.
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"Antiquities have not received the kind of in-depth research they deserve on the fate of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Etruscan, Well-nigh Eastern and Egyptian antiquities stolen by the Nazis," said Claire Lyons, curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum. "We need to exist focusing more effort on World War II."
The passage of time has made it hard for scholars today to quantify the scope of the looting of antiquities that occurred during World War Two, whether information technology exist from Greece, Italy or the Eye East, primarily Arab republic of egypt.
"A complete business relationship of what was stolen does non exist and is no longer possible," said Petrakos, referring to the situation in Hellenic republic. "The annexation was carried out by the Germans and Italian armed forces men who robbed museums and findings from the excavations. Nosotros exercise non even know the quantity of items that were plant in those excavations."
Tracking items is complicated by the fact that the annexation took identify during a time when the antiquities market was flourishing, especially in Germany, Switzerland and France, particularly occupied Paris.
These days, experts say, Germany has been quite responsive to claims for repatriation of looted antiquities, although it is not articulate whether some may notwithstanding reside in its museums because determining the full history of aboriginal artifacts can be so difficult.
"The Germans accept been very open virtually their collections, created databases to make their collections' information and athenaeum accessible, conducted provenance enquiry in public museums, and restituted many works of art," Romano said. "The state of affairs is not perfect, simply Germany has a high standard for museums with respect to provenance issues, especially during the Nazi period."
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While minor excavations took place under German supervision across Greece, in that location were major digs in the Thessaly region of northern Greece, Petrakos said. The Thessaly excavations, he said, were organized by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi theorist, who headed the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, which plundered art, archives and libraries throughout Europe.
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo and the SS, likewise started excavations in Hellenic republic nether the auspices of his Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) arrangement, with a purpose of proving that Germans were part of an Aryan race and the heirs of ancient Greek culture.
In Italy, some antiquities were exported to Deutschland nether the directly authority of Mussolini. In Greece, in apprehension of the Nazi invasion in Apr 1941, museums began hiding objects vi months before. Some works were placed in caves, crypts or cached in gardens so as to protect them from bombings as well as annexation. Some statues were placed horizontally in trenches, which were filled with sand and sealed with cement. Gold pieces and museum catalogs, which were viewed as valuable inventories of what the institutions had held, were sent to the vaults of the Bank of Greece.
"The hiding of antiquities was successful only for the big museums, those in Athens, Olympia, Delphi, Thessaloniki and Chalkis," Petrakos said. "The smaller museums, except that of Nafplion, were not protected properly and many antiquities were robbed."
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Eleni Pipelia, an archaeologist in the Greek Ministry of Culture, said one sculptor she knew told her that during the war she had created fake antiquities and sold them to the occupying Germans, in an effort to sate their need to bring home antiquities and to heighten money for the resistance.
Some other hero of Greek antiquities preservation was Nikolaos Platon, the manager of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete, who, at some personal run a risk, was known to bicker with the Germans to foreclose their plundering.
Platon, who died in 1992, kept an inventory of the items Ringel had taken from the Heraklion Museum. Iv years ago, based in role on Platon's inquiry and reporting, the University of Graz in Austria returned 26 antiquities to the museum that had been taken past Ringel, according to Georgia Flouda, the museum's curator of Prehistoric and Minoan Antiquities.
One institution, the Pfahlbau Museum in Unteruhldingen has returned more than than xiii,000 artifacts that were taken from Thessaly — pottery fragments, pocket-sized clay figures, stone tools, fauna bones, earthworks documents and photos, that are at present in the shop rooms of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, according to Kostas Nikolentzos, head of the museum's department of Prehistoric Egyptian, Cypriot and Near Eastern Antiquities.
"The restitution began in 1951 and was completed in 2014," he said. The items have not been publicly exhibited, he said, in part considering and so many were in poor condition at the fourth dimension of their excavation.
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Dr. Maria Lagogianni-Georgakarakos, managing director emerita of the museum, said the length of the repatriation process had been influenced by the splitting of Deutschland at the end of the state of war. "Documents and antiquities were divided at diverse locations in East and West Germany," she said. "The director of the Pfahlbau Museum explained that information technology took two decades for enquiry into the origins of the antiquities to be completed."
The focus on Nazi antiquity annexation comes as museums beyond the world confront increased force per unit area to review items originally acquired by colonizers and occupying forces in eras that long predate World War Ii.
"Greece has been robbed since the Persian Wars," Petrakos said.
Elizabeth Marlowe, an acquaintance professor of aboriginal and medieval fine art at Colgate University and an practiced on antiquities looting and repatriation, said: "The British Museum, too as many national European museums, are total of objects that were seized under a variety of circumstances from colonial territories and other European spheres of influence effectually the globe."
Equally antiquities looted by the Nazis have been repatriated or returned to their original owners, many have been sold or donated to major museums around the earth.
The Getty has two antiquities — a bronze statuette of a woman and a carnelian gem, that were restituted after they had been sold to a dealer who acquired works for Hitler, according to Lyons, the museum's curator of antiquities. The works are now on exhibit at the Getty Villa.
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Victoria Reed, the curator for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, said that she had found that the museum has iii classical sculptures that were returned to a collector after having been confiscated by the Nazis then restituted — a portrait bust of a statesman or philosopher and a immature satyr, both at present in storage, and a relief sculpture, which is on exhibit.
"Unlike one-time master paintings, many antiquities are extremely difficult to research," she said. "They are not attributable to a particular artist and criteria, including a descriptive title, dimensions and weather tin can alter dramatically over a short period, with losses or additions."
Only Reed said the research is condign easier. "Many books and catalogs are increasingly accessible through online digitizing services. The University of Heidelberg, the Getty Inquiry Institute and the Berlin State Museums have collaborated to make available the contents of thousands of auction catalogs from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Photograph archives and digitized records of Nazi and Allied organizations are available online."
Flouda, the curator of the Heraklion Museum who researched German excavations on Crete, said she is concerned that those tracking what happened to looted antiquities nonetheless do not take full access to research undertaken by some High german and Austrian scholars.
"We don't have all the evidence and nosotros are not ever in a position to know what documents are subconscious in Germany and Republic of austria," she said. "Merely quite often new documents come to the fore and we cannot exclude the possibility that there were more excavations that we are not aware of."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/arts/design/nazis-antiquities-looted.html
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