Wartime Looting

Private restitution of Nazi looted art was until recently an
underestimated issue on the agenda of nations and art institutions. The historical and legal context shows clearly that WWII brought the protection of cultural property on the foreground. Private parties were left out of the scope of all international agreements that provided for the restitution of
Nazi looted art. A private party in order to establish its claim for restitution has to deal with the legal complexities that arise. This essay attempts to present and compare the relevant case law and to portray the new tendencies. Emphasis is given to alternative dispute resolution particularly in connection to the special advisory commissions/panels, which followed the Washington Principles 1998. Moreover, this essay tries to inform about
the private cultural property of the Greek Jews of Thessaloniki, presenting the results of a compressed yet fruitful research in published sources and the archives of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.

International conventions that criminalize wartime abuse of cultural property and bilateral treaties that target trafficking in antiquities reflect evolving consideration for looted art in foreign policy. Since the poignant plunder of Jewish collections by Nazi authorities, restitution of artworks has garnered political clout, and looting of developing nations during the Cold War era compounded the significance of cultural property in international affairs. In parallel, the increasing financial volume of the art market over the past half-century has attracted the attention of transnational organized crime and has implications for funding of terrorist groups. This paper examines how security-intelligence services of World War II and the Cold War controlled the looting and recovery of cultural property. Related activities in the post-Cold War period suggest that applications for foreign intelligence on looted art have expanded from diplomacy to security policy.

What happens to art in time of war?  Who should own art, and what is its appropriate context? Should the victorious ever allow the defeated to keep their art?  These questions were posed by Cicero in speeches he gave in 70 BCE, when he prosecuted the Roman governor of Greek Sicily, Gaius Verres, for extortion during his time in office. Cicero’s  published speeches had a very long afterlife, affecting debates about collecting art in the 18th century, and reactions to the looting of art by Napoleon. The focus of this book is on those speeches by Cicero, and what they reveal about the context of Verres’ trial, Roman attitudes toward Greek art, and how the text illuminates the history of Greek Sicily. The subsequent impact of Cicero’s arguments on legal thinking about cultural property is also discussed, concluding with the decisions made by the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo in Paris in autumn, 1815.

This paper focuses on the impact of the war and subsequent occupation (2003–2011) on Iraq’s heritage, documenting the most significant and devastating instances of heritage damage and destruction that occurred. Moving forward, this chapter continues with a discussion of the grave challenges facing Iraqi heritage beyond the withdrawal of US military forces in the form of various groups - from jihadist networks such as the 'Islamic State' through to various sectarian actors. It also discusses the threat to heritage sites from development, neglect, and inexpert and haphazard excavation, preservation, protection, and restoration. Despite this troubling scenario, this chapter also examines the extent to which the Iraq conflict was a turning point for major Western military operations and the development of CPP programs which aim to better prepare military personnel for protecting cultural property in future conflicts.

By examining the historically progressive role of cultural property in terrorism and political violence, this paper reveals the evolving significance of art to international security. Over the past two centuries, abuse of antiquities and fine art has evolved from the spoils-of-war into a medium for conducting terrorism which strives to erase the cultural heritage of ‘the other’. In contrast to wartime destruction and plunder which date back millennia, the growth of the art market over the past fifty years has created opportunities for novel abuses of cultural property. Since World War II, maturing international awareness has recognized the threat which armed conflict and looting pose to cultural property, but in parallel, art trafficking and the politics of cultural property have become tools for transnational organized crime and terrorist groups. The resulting unique intersection of issues in art, politics and counterterrorism forms the basis for a new field—cultural security. After an assessment of topical security threats which suggest the need for such a field, the paper concludes by speculating on international-security risks precipitating from antiquities trafficking and collecting.

International conventions that protect cultural property during armed conflict, along with bilateral treaties that target antiquities trafficking, indicate a need for intelligence on foreign cultural patrimony.  The 'acquisition' of Jewish collections by Nazi authorities in World War II precipitated cases for restitution of the illicitly acquired artworks, and the international nature of the cases has developed the political clout of cultural property. Similarly, trafficking in antiquities from developing nations during the Cold War era has led to repatriation claims, which increase the significance of cultural property as currency in foreign relations. A simultaneous increase in the financial volume of the art and antiquities market has attracted the attention of transnational organized crime and creates funding opportunities for terrorist groups. This paper examines how security-intelligence services of World War II and the Cold War controlled both the looting and recovery of fine art and antiquities.  The examination reveals the value of intelligence on foreign cultural property in diplomacy and countering threats to national security.

Reflection on wartime treatment of artworks, historic buildings, and religious monuments since World War I reveals the compounding value of cultural property in foreign affairs. The poignant plunder of artworks during World War II has led to a history of restitution that suggests a model for the resolution of wartime art crime. The exploitation of cultural artifacts in developing nations during the Cold War era tests the model for repatriation of antiquities, and the destruction of historic and religious monuments in the post-Cold War period offers an opportunity to apply the model in predictive analysis for strategies in foreign policy. Specific examples illustrate the maturing market value of Nazi plunder. Successful restitution cases and an expanding art market inspire repatriation of looted antiquities. The financial and political significance of artworks decades after the wartime art crime indicate that the clout of displaced cultural property in foreign affairs increases with time.

This essay analyzes the long-term effects of looted books through one case: the creation of the Uppsala University library in seventeenth-century Sweden. Without denying
the religious controversies of that time, the essay challenges the idea of Catholic books being useless in a Lutheran library. By mainly analyzing library catalogues, the essay demonstrates how Jesuit epistemology affected the organization of the Uppsala library, and that confessional books urged librarians to think about temporality in terms of old and new knowledge.

Materialising the Swedish National Archives: A biography of spoils from Mitau in 1621. The article deals with the meanings and effects of a collection of documents that was taken as spoils of war by the Swedish army in the Livonian town Mitau in 1621. An object biography of the documents from Mitau makes it possible to follow the collection through the entire 17th century in order to analyse how the meanings and effects of the documents changed when introduced into new contexts. But such a biography also reveals how the war booty object itself was transformed over time. The Mitau object, which came into being when the collection was gathered and taken by the Swedish army, quickly changed in the context of the Swedish national archives, located in the royal castle Tre Kronor in Stockholm during the 17th century. Several inventories and lists of the national archives make it possible to follow the Mitau documents being separated through different arrangements made by the archivists. Some of the papers were incorporated with other documents associated with Swedish kings, other Mitau documents were put in barrels, chests and boxes and were moved to other rooms in the royal castle due to lack of space in the rooms of the national archives. Over time, documents of very different provenance were added to the Mitau object, changing its composition once more.
The Mitau documents became a meaningful historical and political resource for the Swedish government. But the documents also affected the national archives. They were a material quantity that demanded space, a disorder that needed to be ordered and of several provenances that needed to be classified by the archivists – sometimes conflicting with the chronological and dynastic order that dominated the national archives at the time. The Swedish national archives were not only materialised by documents that had been produced by the Swedish government and Sweden’s kings and queens, but also with spoils collected during war, making the national archives partly an effect of war looting practice.

Satellite technologies are increasingly used to track looting in remote and inaccessible archaeological sites and assess damage to heritage. Evidence gathered in our study proves a growing user uptake of these technologies, beyond the specialist remote sensing community, but also that a more synergistic use of optical and radar data is required. The advantages of such an approach to satellite monitoring are demonstrated on Apamea, Syria. Current limitations and future perspectives are outlined, as an entry point to a comprehensive review published by the authors in the referenced journal article, that the readers are encouraged to refer to for a more in-depth and specialist discussion.

In this book chapter I examine case studies of works of art that were offered to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) during and immediately after World War II. Many of the MFA’s postwar acquisitions had been plundered and needed to be returned, or otherwise have their ownership legally resolved. To understand how these looted works of art made their way to the MFA I consider, first, the general knowledge of art looting within the museum community during and after the war. I examine the role of the US government in preventing the circulation of looted art. Finally, I look at the actions of individual MFA staff members in exercising due diligence when making acquisitions. Though there are obvious differences between the looting of Europe during World War II and the plundering of archaeological sites today, it is hoped that the lessons afforded by previous wartime experiences can be applied to the present, as museums strive to build their collections diligently during periods of unrest.

The bi-millenary history of the Hebrew Community in Rome is reflected in one of the most ancient libraries in the world. In the 1930s, Isaiah Sonne confirms that the library (over 7000 volumes) was a real treasure. In 2007, Dario Tedeschi. representative of UCEI, reports that it included " very rare pieces, sometimes unique, made of manuscripts, incunabula, Soncino's prints and other 16 th century pieces, the so called cinquecentine printed by Bomberg (among these, a first edition of the Talmud in eight volumes), Bragadin and Giustiniani. There were also texts printed in 16 th century Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Kraków, Lublin as well as 17 th century and 18 th century works coming from Venice and Livorno ". In addition to the religious texts there were also treaties in philosophy, astronomy, medicine, moral, ritual and legal consults. On October 1943 all of these volumes were loaded on a wagon and sent to Germany, disappearing into oblivion. In 2002, the Italian government forms a " Commission for the recovery of the librarian heritage looted from the Jewish Community of Rome in 1943 ". In 2007, after an intense historic and archival research activity made by scholars and experts from around the world, as well as an incessant diplomatic effort, the Commission concludes that it is necessary to develop an additional research project. Several are the purposes of this paper. 1) Analysing the socio-anthropologic network of the Einsatztab Reichleiter Resembler (ERR) and confronting it with the human resources of the Offenbach Collecting Point (OCP) can help understand which mechanisms, back then, allowed for the restitution of a part of the raided goods and which ones, to this day, prevent the completion of the work carried out by the OCP. Still to be defined is the role and profile of the Lilliputian network of postwar times bureaucrats, specialists, and academics that formed the ideological and organizational structure of the ERR. 2) Reconsidering the deduced variables in the documentation acquired by the Commission, in relation to the hypotheses it formulated at the end of the investigation. Further surveys suggested by the Commission could be implemented today by activating new research strategies. 3) To examine the matter of the orphaned property in light of the political consequences and juridical contradictions. In spite of the coral condemnation of the Nazi raids, they have produced paradoxes that continue to act within an incoherent legal system. Furthermore, sophisticated and complex measures of personal data protection, classified documents, as well as political dissimilarities in nations potentially involved, are just some of the elements that contribute to leaving a part of history in the shadows, favouring the concealment of the plundered goods. 4) Problematizing the trading rules operating among market, scientific institutions, private citizens, and governments in relation with plundered goods. 5) Suggesting a new path of research that includes global knowledge networks, especially in relation to the extraction, re-elaboration and interpretation of data sets. 6) Re-evaluating and delineating a geo-historic map of the hypothetical allocations of the library after its theft. 7) Reflecting on the political effects that the loss of such heritage produces within mankind's immaterial knowledge. Beyond the ethic, historic, scientific, religious and economic consequences, the finding of the library would be an important step towards the regeneration of human relations that, for a long time to come, the history shall undertake to cultivate in order to alleviate the pain of shoah.
http://www.rosevallandinstitut.org/lecture.html

The failure to establish a functioning government and put an end to the violence in Somalia over the past 18 years suggests the warring parties do not want to change the status quo and that the international community does not fully understand some of the underlying causes of the hostilities. If the problem has not been clearly defined, any strategies to solve it will most likely not succeed, which the multiple-failed governments and international peace conferences bear out.

Political conflicts, regime change, revolutions and wars make not only people but also their property vulnerable. Plunder and con- fiscation were common ways of dealing with the enemy – either internal or external – in many conflicts, conquests and occupations during the Old Regime, and resurfaced as crucial political weapons in both the First and the Second World Wars, with disruptive effects. In the two World Wars and the interwar period, sequestration and confiscation grew in scale and scope, reaching an unprecedented magnitude as a result of three driving forces that were frequently intertwined: nationalism, socialism and antisemitism. Confiscation was a political weapon that furthered different aims. It helped to make the expulsion of enemy subjects irreversible. It was an instru- ment to exclude from the civic body those who did not belong – the ‘internal enemies’ – and to prevent undesirable people from acquiring citizenship. This special issue collects eight essays on proper...

I enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 series ‘The Invention of Germany’, but it got off to a poor start with a seriously misleading portrayal of the 1631 siege of Magdeburg, which formed the main focal point of the first episode (17th October 2011).

This programme is still available to listen to on the BBC website.

A few months ago a former British soldier made headlines for trying to sell part of the backside of the Saddam Hussein statue that was famously toppled in 2003. Though Saddam was long gone, the Iraqi government, happy to be rid of him, requested the return of the "artifact." Their interest in repatriating a symbol of their "dictator in hindsight" illustrates the unforeseeable significance of cultural property in foreign relations.

The essay deals with the history of a bundle of letters looted from the Kamenez-Podol'skij region after the German army had started its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. An official of the German postal administration in the occupied territory transferred the “collection” of letters to the Postal Museum in Vienna. He thought that it could convey an impression of “the mood among the Russian people before the war began".

The essay discusses one characteristic of colonial archives – how the ruling state plunders/loots the colonized’ archives and treasures and controls them in its colonial archives - erasing them from the public sphere by repressive means, censors and restricts their exposure and use, alters their original identity, regulates their contents and subjugates them to colonizer’s laws, rules and terminology. It focuses on two archives plundered by Israel in Beirut in 1980s: the Palestine Research Center and archive of Palestinian films. The essay continues my earlier research on Palestinian visual (and other) archives taken as booty or looted by pre-state Jewish military organizations and soldiers or civilians in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe, 1948), and later by Israel’s military bodies. It analyzes the plunder itself while focusing on the power relations reflected toward the hybrid gazes of the colonizer and the colonized and discusses colonial features of military archives holding and controlling seized materials. While colonial museums have been largely discussed, and also archives holding colonial history, this is one of the first essays to discuss features of colonial archives holding plundered archives/material.

In this review of Adam Raz's Looting of Arab Property during the War of Independence (2020, in Hebrew) Rona Sela critiques the book as dealing with the subject from a Zionist perspective and accepting Ben-Gurion's attitude of reducing official/ state responsibility for the massive theft against Palestine and Palestinians, and being unconcerned that looting/seizures violated international law. Sela points out that Raz shows that the government made manipulative political use of the "looting" in its drive to ethnically cleanse what would become the State of Israel while arguing, at the same time, that the responsibility lies with the individual (Jewish) citizens of that state, who became "passive accomplices" of its policies. According to Sela, by Raz not distinguishing between individual looting and organized official seizure, he is led to minimize the direct responsibility of the sovereign and adopt biased conclusions that contradict, conceal, reframe, and whitewash the testimonies and cases described in his own book. While the pillaging and seizure of Jewish private property during the Holocaust is always on the Israeli public agenda, the looting and pillaging of Palestinian property and culture has been largely silenced. Just as Israel demands and receives compensation for Jewish stolen property and for crimes committed against them, Sela argues that compensation for the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians must be on the agenda-morally, legally, and practically-and that Israel must reveal the Palestinian textual and cultural treasures held and hidden in Israeli archives and return them to their rightful owners.

Political conflicts, regime change, revolutions and wars make not only people but also their property vulnerable. Plunder and confiscation were common ways of dealing with the enemy – either internal or external – in many conflicts, conquests and occupations during the Old Regime, and resurfaced as crucial political weapons in both the First and the Second World Wars, with disruptive effects. In the two World Wars and the interwar period, sequestration and confiscation grew in scale and scope, reaching an unprecedented magnitude as a result of three driving forces that were frequently intertwined: nationalism, socialism and antisemitism. Confiscation was a political weapon that furthered different aims. It helped to make the expulsion of enemy subjects irreversible. It was an instrument to exclude from the civic body those who did not belong – the ‘internal enemies’ – and to prevent undesirable people from acquiring citizenship. This special issue collects eight essays on property r...

Political conflicts, regime change, revolutions and wars make not only people but also their property vulnerable. Plunder and confiscation were common ways of dealing with the enemy – either internal or external – in many conflicts, conquests and occupations during the Old Regime, and resurfaced as crucial political weapons in both the First and the Second World Wars, with disruptive effects. In the two World Wars and the interwar period, sequestration and confiscation grew in scale and scope, reaching an unprecedented magnitude as a result of three driving forces that were frequently intertwined: nationalism, socialism and antisemitism. Confiscation was a political weapon that furthered different aims. It helped to make the expulsion of enemy subjects irreversible. It was an instrument to exclude from the civic body those who did not belong – the ‘internal enemies’ – and to prevent undesirable people from acquiring citizenship. This special issue collects eight essays on property r...