Egypt’s bid to recover Nefertiti bust from Nazis blocked by US
Egypt’s attempts to retrieve the bust of Queen Nefertiti from the Nazis after the Second World War were thwarted by the US, recently uncovered documents show.
The US dismissed the request amid fears it would set a precedent that would lead to other ancient artefacts being returned. It even said it would be following “Nazi principles”, letters shared with The National by Egyptologist Monica Hanna reveal.
Dr Hanna is the first researcher to unearth the documents, which have remained in the US National Archive since the end of the war, which she has used to shed new light on how Queen Nefertiti’s bust was smuggled out of Egypt to Germany and how it remained there, despite the Egyptians’ requests to the victorious Allies.
She unearthed correspondence by the US Army unit that dealt with the restitution of looted Nazi art, which revealed how they blocked the request to return the bust.
Dr Hanna, an associate professor and acting dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Egypt, told The National that “as soon as I saw the letters, I was truly amazed”.
“It also showed the inherent solid cultural imperialism in the West and how they truly saw the heritage of our country,” she said.
The artwork had been smuggled out of Egypt in 1912 by a
German archaeologist and put on display in Berlin in 1923.
The Egyptians have been calling for the bust to be returned from the day when it first appeared in public.
An agreement with the regional government of Prussia to return the 3,300-year-old artwork was vetoed by Adolf Hitler, who was said to be “in love with Nefertiti”.
At the end of the war, the bust of Queen Nefertiti was rediscovered along with looted Nazi art in a salt mine in Wiesbaden, Germany, as touched on in the Hollywood film The Monuments Men starring George Clooney and Matt Damon.
The letters were written in 1946 and came after Egypt’s prime minister at the time, Mahmoud Fahmy El Nokrashy Pasha, wrote to the US State Department
stating that “this masterpiece of ancient Egyptian art must return to Egypt, which it should never have left”.
The US initially appeared positive and suggested the Egyptians make the request to the three other victorious allied powers, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, Dr Hanna’s new research paper Contesting the Lonely Queen reveals.
While the Soviet Union appeared sympathetic, the Allied military administration told them it did not have the power to return the bust as it came to Germany before the war.
The real-life monuments men also moved to block restitution and Lt Lamont Moore, an officer in the monuments, fine arts and archives section unit, wrote in a letter to Huntington Cairns, the executive officer of the National Gallery of Art: “To return this item to Egypt now would be to follow the Nazi principle of confiscating works of art by pretence or force to enlarge their own collections.”
Dr Hanna said the letters revealed Egyptian prime minister’s “naivety” in believing the “US was a true Egyptian friend, how confident they were in their strong US ties”.
She said Cairo was sure the US would support their request as “their political culture was everything that was against Nazism, colonialism and imperialism”.
The 47cm tall bust of Queen Nefertiti, the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, was taken from Egypt by Ludwig Borchardt, the German archaeologist who unearthed it in 1912.