26 April 2007
German authors have published the first handbook to help Jewish families recover art works looted by the Nazis The 528-page tome ‘Nazi Looted Art – Art Restitution Worldwide’ is sold as a manual for heirs of Holocaust victims hoping to confront museums and collectors in different corners of the world in a bid to recover lost canvasses. Co-author Gunnar Schnabel makes an educated guess that "there are still thousands of masterpieces and tens of thousands of lesser paintings that should be returned to the rightful heirs”.
"For example, some 30,000 art works were taken out of France, but 16,000 never resurfaced. It is the museums' policy to keep all of this top secret. There are works in basements and vaults," Schnabel, a lawyer who handles restitution claims, said. Even before it hit the shelves last month, the book he wrote together with historian Monika Tatzkow was adding to pressure on the German government to return a Spitzweg painting featured on the book’s cover. The painting was part of the German government's art collection for decades after World War II, but originally belonged to Jewish trader Leo Bendel, who died in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1940. In February, as articles about the book appeared in newspapers, the German Finance Ministry announced it would return the painting to the Bendel heirs. Schnabel and Tatzkow have expressed the hope that the book will force museums to investigate the provenance of their works and come clean on art they obtained thanks to the Nazis' systematic seizure of Jewish collections that peaked in the early 1940s.
