On Returning Stolen Art Looted from Ukraine - Dürers

[Stefan Lemieszewski]

http://www.iisg.nl/archives_in_russia/grimstedfinal-final.doc

Spoils of War Returned
U.S. Restitution of Nazi-Looted Cultural
Treasures to the USSR, 1945–1959
By Patricia Kennedy Grimsted

[11,578 words, 7,133 w/out notes; 52 pages]

[ . . . ]
The second American transfer to the USSR, totaling
approximately twenty-five freight-train wagons of archives
and other cultural treasures plundered from Ukraine and
Latvia, took place on October 25, 1945, west of Pilsen, in
the part of Czechoslovakia liberated by the U.S. Third Army.
Those treasures had been found in early May 1945 by the
Americans in the Bohemian castle of Trpísty, northwest
of Pilsen, and the nearby monastery of Kladruby to the
southwest. That transfer consisted of extensive early
archival records from the former Kyiv (Kiev) Archive of
Early Records, rare early printed books and manuscripts
from the Library of the Academy of Sciences (TsNB) in
Kyiv, and even more extensive early archives and museum
exhibits looted by the Nazis from Riga. The inventory of the
Kyiv archival materials had been prepared and signed by
the volksdeutsch Slavic scholar Nikolai Geppener, whom
the Nazis had taken with the shipment. He turned down an
American offer of asylum and insisted on accompanying
those treasures back to Kyiv; after his return, however, he
was persecuted as a Nazi collaborator.15

[ . . . ]
Among the highlights in the Soviet Munich shipments were
icons from many different churches in Novgorod and Pskov,
twelfth-century mosaics from the Cathedral of St. Michael of
the Golden Domes in Kyiv, collections of insects and herbaria
from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and thousands of
prehistoric archaeological finds from the Crimea. There were
ethnographic exhibits from Kharkiv, Poltava, and Minsk; and
treasures of the decorative arts from many museums in
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus that had been found in Bavarian
castles and monasteries.
[ . . . ]
And, unfortunately, nobody at OAD knew Slavic languages
well, nor did they understand the complexities of Soviet library
reorganization and the migration of Russian, Belarusian,
Ukrainian, and Polish collections (including many Jewish ones)
in connection with post-revolutionary Soviet nationalization and
wartime international border changes. Hence, it is not surprising
that we find many Ukrainian library stamps listed under
“Russia—‘Russland’” and others in the “Poland” section in
the OAD albums. Such discrepancies explain why many books
plundered from Ukraine by the Nazis and restituted to the USSR
by the United States were never returned to Ukraine. Recent
tributes to OAD operations usually do not mention these
identification and distribution problems, which still need more
thorough analysis.

While over 275,000 volumes were returned to the USSR from
OAD, many more books were returned from other collecting
points as well. As late as 1962, the West German government
transferred nine crates of books found in the library of the
University of Heidelberg to the USSR, comprising scientific
and technical books from Kyiv, Voronezh, and some from
unidentified libraries. It is not known if those had come through
OAD, although book stamps from Voronezh appear in the
OAD albums.26

[ . . . ]
April 1957, Ardelia Hall, who headed the American restitution
program in the Department of State, personally transmitted
thirty-one icons to the embassy of the USSR in Washington.
The icons (presumably from a village in Ukraine) had first been
looted by a Nazi SS officer and then looted from the basement
of a hospital in Halle, Germany, by an American army captain.
When he tried to send his booty to the United States in two
separate shipments, they were seized by U.S. Customs in
Texas. Restitution of the icons to Soviet authorities was
delayed because of a significant protest (with a petition from
parishioners) from a local priest of the Russian Orthodox
Church in America:

[ . . . ]
Two years later, a collection of thirty-one prehistoric bone
artifacts was identified in the American Museum of Natural
History in New York as having markings from an archaeological
collection in Kyiv. The artifacts had first been removed to
Cracow and thence taken to the Castle of Höchstädt in
Bavaria.

[ . . . ]
Another highly disputed U.S. postwar cultural transfer was
the collection of Dürer drawings from the former Lubomirski
Museum in Lviv, nationalized following the Soviet annexation
of western Ukraine in 1939–1940; they were seized by a
personal emissary of Hitler in 1941. 41 Following long-secret
negotiations after the war, American restitution authorities in
the State Department transferred the collection to Prince
Georg Lubomirski, who claimed the drawings with supporting
documentation that the terms of his family’s donation had been
abrogated when Soviet authorities abolished the Lubomirski
Museum and nationalized the Polish collections in 1939–1940.
During negotiations with U.S. authorities, Lubomirski promised
the drawings to the National Gallery of Art, but he later quite
legally sold the Dürer drawings at auction, resulting in their
dispersal to various museums in Great Britain and the United
States. At the time of the Washington Conference on
Holocaust-Era Assets (December 1998), a formal claim was
filed by the Stefanyk Library of the Academy of Sciences of
Ukraine in Lviv for Dürer’s “Male Nude” now in the National
Gallery. Several recent journalistic accounts have tapped
many sources and raised conflicting issues. Recently, the
National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa was considering (on
moral grounds) turning their Dürer drawing over to Poland,
but the U.S. Department of State presented a convincing
opinion that the postwar “restitution” of the collection to Prince
Lubomirski was justified, that the museums now holding the
drawings acquired them in good faith, and that restitution to
Ukraine or Poland should not be required.42

[ . . . ]
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