Testimonies to the biggest theft in history

The documents of the ‘Monuments Men’ (and women) deployed by the Allies at the Central Collecting Points

2. May 2025

Anne Uhrlandt

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German Lost Art Foundation

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German Lost Art Foundation Berlin Branch Office

Seydelstr. 18
10117 Berlin
Germany
Phone: +49 (0) 391 727 763 0
E-mail: kontakt@kulturgutverluste.de

The Help Desk offers advice and assistance to victims of the Nazi regime and their descendants on questions relating to Nazi theft of cultural property. Serving as a central and initial low-threshold point of contact in Germany, it is aimed in particular at people whose place of residence is outside Germany and who are unfamiliar with German procedures, especially in connection with cultural federalism. The Help Desk seeks to provide support in taking initial steps as well as providing further contacts and information. We will also be happy to help initiate discussions with museums and other institutions.

German Lost Art Foundation, Branch Office
Dr. Susanne Meyer-Abich
Head of Help Desk

Seydelstr. 18
10117 Berlin
Germany
Phone: +49 (0) 30 2338493 85
E-mail: helpdesk@kulturgutverluste.de

With the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Allies were confronted with the spoils of the biggest theft in history. Across Germany and in the formerly occupied territories were depots filled with objects that had been systematically looted by the National Socialists throughout Europe. The genocide of the Jewish population was preceded by expropriation on a massive scale. Everything deemed to be “of value” was taken – entire household furnishings including crockery and textiles, gold and silver objects, books, works of art.

The Central Collecting Points

The Allied forces were aware of the immense scale of this art theft and sent in specialists. Art historians and museum curators first sought out the depots in which the Nazis had stored the looted assets – in mine tunnels, churches, monasteries, palaces and salt mines they discovered untold quantities of stolen objects, including gold and masterpieces of European painting. The American experts, the so-called ‘Monuments Men’ (and women), attempted to secure the objects they found.

The massive destruction wrought by war meant that intact buildings were scarce, let alone functioning infrastructure. Nonetheless, Central Collecting Points were established throughout Germany to which all the items discovered in the depots were brought. The Collecting Points served both to secure the objects against further theft and enable their provenance to be investigated with a view to restitution.

The American occupation zone in southern Germany was confronted with the largest finds of Nazi-looted assets. For this reason, the biggest Collecting Point was set up in Munich, directly in the former party headquarters of the NSDAP, while another Collecting Point was located in Wiesbaden, in the state museum there which had survived the war relatively intact. In Marburg the state archive was used, while in Offenbach a Collecting Point was established that specialised in looted archives. (Fig. 1)

The property cards

Each object was recorded on index cards, known as “property cards”, and was also photographed, measured and checked for damage. These property cards document not only the object itself but also provide information on where and when it was found and to whom it was subsequently delivered. Eighty years after the end of the war, the cards bear witness not only to the theft but also to the victims and perpetrators.

For the purpose of scholarship, and particularly provenance research, the documents from the Collecting Points are an invaluable source. A database for the Munich Collecting Point was established in 2009, enabling research not only by object but also by person. But what of the cards from Wiesbaden and Marburg? The Federal Archive in Koblenz has digitised these cards in high quality, and they are available on application – but they are not searchable.

The JDCRP digital platform

The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) has set itself the task of making the Allied documentation of Nazi looting accessible on a digital platform. The aim is to provide easy, universal access to the subject and enable searches for people, objects, places and more. The property cards from the Wiesbaden and Marburg Collecting Points are the first documents to have been integrated. These can then be supplemented with information directly linked to the work of the Collecting Points, such as transportation lists and documents relating to restitutions. The platform is scheduled to go online at the end of 2025.

The property cards will be transcribed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and artificial intelligence, and the resulting data linked within the platform. This will make it possible to trace objects through time and space, extending back to the documentation of the theft and forward to the records of the post-war years.

Since the Collecting Point records were created by Allied occupation forces, only some of these documents are still located in Germany today. Others are scattered around the world: important material is held in the archives of the Allied powers – the USA, Britain and France – as well as in countless local archives in Germany. The JDCRP team is searching worldwide for relevant holdings that can be usefully combined. For example, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds records from the Wiesbaden Collecting Point, such as Leica film rolls of negatives showing the objects stored there. Before the objects could be restituted or handed over to states to hold in trust on behalf of possible rightful owners, they were photographed again.

These photographs are now being scanned by the JDCRP to supplement the property cards on the platform, thereby adding further visual material relevant to the looted objects. Photographs often enable unequivocal identification, particularly when objects were mass-produced or suffered damage. One example is a wooden standing Madonna from the Wiesbaden Collecting Point (Fig. 2). The Madonna can be seen in the photograph, and the card notes that her right arm and a finger were missing. A negative image from NARA also showed that the Madonna no longer had her child: not only are the missing arm, finger and fingertip to be seen, but also a crown and the Christ Child, whose tiny arm with the orb was broken off – the Allies had carefully laid out all the broken-off pieces on a table and made a photographic record of them.

In the coming years the JDCRP will continue to expand the platform and gradually add archival material documenting the looting carried out by the Nazis, so in future it will be possible to access information more quickly and without having to undertake costly journeys to distant archives.

This will not only benefit provenance research on individual objects with a view to restitution. To this day there are still no precise figures for what was the biggest theft in history – only conjectures and estimates. By bringing the documents together, it may be possible to establish such details more reliably in future. We should continue to approach this task with the seriousness and accuracy once shown by the Allies: after all, every object is linked to a person who may have been a victim of Nazi persecution or a perpetrator, and whose story the documents can help us uncover.

Anne Uhrlandt is Research and Documentation Officer with the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project, Berlin

Literature:

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted: ERR Archival Guide. Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot, 2015–2022, online at https://www.errproject.org/guide.php (15 April 2024)
Iris Lauterbach: Der Central Collecting Point in München. Kulturschutz, Restitution und Neubeginn. Berlin / Munich 2015

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