The struggle to recover Nazi plunder
Researcher who tracked stolen works quit when no one returned them
BERLIN— For three years, Sibylle Ehringhaus, a veteran provenance researcher, worked with the Georg Schäfer Museum in northern Bavaria to examine the ownership history of its 1,000 oil paintings and several thousand drawings, prints and watercolours.
Georg Schäfer, the industrialist whose collection is displayed there, had bought much of the art in the 1950s in Munich, then a hub for dealers who had had relationships with the Nazis. Among those from whom he purchased works was Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer.
Ehringhaus’ job was, in part, to determine just how much of the collection had a tainted provenance. But last year, she said, she began to ask herself why the City of Schweinfurt, which manages the museum, had bothered to hire her.
After she had identified several plundered works, she said, no one seemed to have any plans to return them to the heirs of the original Jewish owners.
Increasingly, she said, she began to feel her work was unwelcome. She was denied access to historical documents vital for her research, she said, and forbidden to contact colleagues at another museum with a research inquiry. So in December, she rejected an offer to extend her contract for another year.
“I got the impression they didn’t want me there — they really made things difficult for me,” Ehringhaus, 60, said at a meeting in a Berlin café. “They needed me for appearances. I felt as though I was being used as a fig leaf.” The owners of the museum collection, a private foundation run by the Schäfer family, said they are aware of restitution claims for some of the works, but believe that it is the German government, not collectors, who are responsible for addressing it. The museum itself has denied trying to hinder Ehringhaus’ work.
Germany has made progress of late in addressing critics who say it has not done enough to accelerate the return of art looted by the Third Reich. Earlier this year, for example, the Culture Ministry set up an office staffed by an art historian to help heirs seeking Nazi-looted art to navigate the German bureaucracy.
But this case is a bit different. Although the museum occupies a building owned by the state of Bavaria and is run by the city, the art itself is on loan from the private foundation set up by Schäfer, who made his fortune in roller bearings and died in 1975.
The Georg Schäfer Foundation says the art was bought legally and in good faith and that compensating victims of the Nazis is a state function, to be undertaken by the German government.
The private foundation is not bound by the internationally endorsed 1998 Washington Principles on restitution of art looted by the Nazis because the guidelines only apply to public collections. Returning art would violate laws that ban foundations from divesting assets, it says.
In a statement, the foundation said, “the German federal government, as the legal successor of the Third Reich, is responsible for compensating for the crimes of the Third Reich.” The statement called for a German restitution law that would include government compensation for private entities that return Nazi-looted art.
The heirs of Jewish collectors have laid claim to about 20 works in the museum. Ehringhaus said she found many of them to be justified, but said that under the terms of her contract, she could not address specific cases.
One request is for the return of a portrait of Martha Liebermann, painted by her husband, Max Liebermann. The painter, a Jewish Berliner, was chased out of his position as honorary chairman of the Academy of Arts in Berlin after the Nazis seized power in 1933. He created it before his death in 1935.
Liebermann’s daughter Käthe
Riezler escaped to the United States with her husband and daughter, but Martha Liebermann never managed to follow. The portrait hung in her Berlin apartment where, after a visit by the police, she took her own life by taking poison at the age of 85 to avoid being deported to a Nazi death camp.
“The family couldn’t get her out of Germany and my mother carried this with her for her whole life,” said Katharine Wild, Max and Martha Liebermann’s great-granddaughter. “This kind of family tragedy gets passed along to the children and I am no exception.”
The portrait of Martha Liebermann is on a Gestapo list of objects seized from her apartment after her death, according to Jutta von Falkenhausen, a lawyer who represents the Liebermann heirs. Schäfer purchased it in1955 from a Munich dealer. The Liebermann family first tried to recover it more than 10 years ago.
“I am trying to carry on what my mother and sister were doing and continue that work,” Wild says. “What I would like the people in Schweinfurt to know is: we have an opportunity. We could settle this matter.”
Like the federal government, the state of Bavaria said it could not simply direct that works be returned. The Bavarian culture minister, Bernd Sibler, said in an email while the goal of the provenance research is “to give back artworks lost due to persecution or to find fair solutions for compensation,” the state “has no legal means to exert influence over the Georg Schäfer Foundation in terms of implementing the Washington Principles.”
Similarly, the City of Schweinfurt “is only the manager of the museum,” the mayor, Sebastian Remelé, said. “We are aware that this is a politically sensitive matter, but we have no power to act.” The issue of restitution “is not what should be occupying” Ehringhaus, Remelé said. “Political moralizing is not her job. Her job was to research the history of the artworks.”
Ehringhaus, who has done research for the British Museum and the German Historical Museum, among others, said she wishes the foundation, city and state of Bavaria had agreed on a restitution process before she was hired. “There’s no point in having a provenance researcher if this is not resolved,” she said.
“No one wanted any hassle,” she said. “Everyone had an interest in keeping the status quo. No one showed any empathy for the human stories behind these artworks. I kept wondering — ‘do you really want to keep hold of these works belonging to people who were persecuted so horribly and suffered so much?’”