Some four million euros provided for research into Nazi-looted property

Over the course of two rounds of proposal submissions, the German Lost Art Foundation approved a total of around four million euros in funding for provenance research in the area of “cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution” in 2024, supporting a total of 34 research projects. The provenance researchers involved in the funded projects check for Nazi-looted property in collections held at public museums and libraries as well as at private institutions. They also reconstruct the biographies of Jewish collectors, as well as looking into the role of those actors in the Nazi state who profited from the expropriation and disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens – in some cases far beyond the end of the war.

For example, the town of Bad Oeynhausen is looking into the history of its German Fairy Tale and Weser Legend Museum and the museum’s founder Karl Paetow (1903-1992), who ran the institution up until 1981. It has only recently become public that Paetow had ties with National Socialism and worked for the taskforce known as “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg” (ERR). As an art historian, he was actively involved with this Nazi organisation dedicated to plundering art in occupied areas during the Second World War, serving in the special ethnology section known as “Sonderstab Volkskunde”. The aim is now to take a closer look at Paetow’s own collection, which forms part of the museum’s holdings today. The basis for this is Karl Paetow’s extensive estate, which provides information about his activities for the ERR, his acquisitions during the war, and the networks he maintained. The ultimate goal will be to help identify and restitute looted objects.

Museum Ulm likewise has extensive source material to work on – namely the museum’s correspondence from the years 1933 to 1945, which has been preserved in its entirety. In the 32,000 or so pages of letters, the Ulm museum directors discuss the terms and conditions for purchasing works of art with collectors and art dealers such as Adolf Weinmüller, Julius Böhler and Siegfried Lämmle, as well as with other museums and with Nazi institutions. The letters provide a clear picture of how the museum directors were able to push down the prices offered by Jewish traders: “I think even the price of 1200 reichsmarks is still quite high; ... And I believe I could wait until it is offered to us at a price of around 500 reichsmarks,” wrote museum director Adolf Häberle to Hugo Helbing in 1935. Although only a few works were ultimately purchased by the Ulm museum, many ended up in other public collections, so the information to be found here will be vital to research being done in other museums, too. The material is to be digitised and made accessible for research via a database.

The victims of the Nazi regime are the focus of a project being carried out at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (MdbK). The aim here is to examine the art collections which belonged citizens of the city who were persecuted as Jews under National Socialism. Research focuses on their biographies and also what became of their collections, many of which were broken up and scattered far and wide as a result of persecution. The goal is ultimately to restore the memory of Leipzig’s largely forgotten art collectors: the results of the project are to be presented at a major special exhibition in 2026.

Meanwhile the Leipzig municipal library is investigating its holdings since they contain a number of suspected Nazi-looted items. Attention here is focused on the addition of 40,000 volumes between 1944 and 1951 when books were acquired for post-war reconstruction – some of them through antiquarian channels – or found their way into the library through donations, via the “Reichstauschstelle” (Reich Exchange Agency), and potentially from the holdings of the SS. Some were returned in later years, so the aim now is to find out where books that may have been looted ended up, also in co-operation with other institutions.

Since 2008, the Federal Government and the German federal states have funded provenance research on the subject of Nazi-looted cultural property with a total of approximately 55.16 million euros, enabling 468 projects to be realised to date. The German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg, founded on 1 January 2015 by the Federal Government, the German federal states and the leading municipal associations, is the central point of contact in Germany for questions concerning unlawfully seized cultural property. The Foundation receives institutional funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media; this is also the source of funding for its projects.

The German Lost Art Foundation not only supports research projects dedicated to arriving at just and fair solutions, it also documents cultural property losses in its publicly accessible database Lost Art in the form of search requests and found-object reports. The results of the Foundation’s funded research projects are presented in its research database Proveana at www.proveana.de.

For further information on funding opportunities, see: kulturgutverluste.de