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NAZIS

Zurich uni returns artworks stolen by Nazis

Two paintings owned by the University of Zurich have been returned to the heirs of a Berlin publisher after they were found to have been looted by the Nazis in 1933.

Published: 27 April 2016 08:35 CEST
Zurich uni returns artworks stolen by Nazis
The paintings were bought by the university in 1979. Photo: Frank Tomio/University of Zurich
The university’s Institute of Archaeology bought the two ancient portraits of Egyptian mummies in 1979 along with seven other paintings for the total sum of 220,000 francs, it said in a statement. 
 
In 2015 the university’s own investigations revealed that the paintings once belonged to successful Berlin publisher Rudolf Mosse and were unlawfully seized by the Nazis from Mosse’s daughter and son-in-law in 1933. 
 
The university then contacted the heirs of the Mosse family itself. 
 
“With a view to finding a solution that accounts for the particular circumstances the heirs agreed to make a financial contribution to the teaching and research work of the University of Zurich in exchange for the two objects,” the university said. 
 
Prior to last year, the provenance of the paintings was unknown, it added.
 
The university had bought them from the widow of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, author of famous First World War novel All Quiet on the Western Front, who was himself persecuted by the Nazis and left Germany to live in Switzerland.
 
“Despite intensive research on the provenance it has neither been possible to establish when and where Erich Maria Remarque had purchased these two objects nor to identify possible prior owners,” said the university. 
 
“What is certain, however, is that the objects formerly belonged to the collection of Rudolf Mosse and were part of the assets the couple Felicia and Hans Lachmann-Mosse had forcibly been deprived of by the National Socialists on racial grounds.”
 
According to the Mosse Art Restitution Project, which is seeking to recover pieces of art confiscated by the Nazis, the Lachmann-Mosse family were outspoken critics of Hitler and became a symbol of the so-called 'Jewish press' hated by the Nazis. 
 
Following Hitler's ascent to power in 1933 the couple were forced to leave Germany and the Nazis took control of family property including their art collection. 
 
“The Mosse Art Restitution Project would like to thank the Institute of Archaeology and the University of Zurich for reaching out to the Mosse heirs and restituting the two pieces,” it said. 

 
The case is one of many examples of Nazi-looted art in Switzerland. 
 
Earlier this month a Modigliani painting allegedly looted by the Nazis was sequestered in Geneva after the Panama Papers leak revealed the identity of its owner. 
 
And in October a painting which its Jewish owner was forced to sell by the Nazis in 1938 turned up in the art collection of a prominent Swiss politician.
 
 
The museum has said it will go ahead with a planned exhibition of other works from the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt – a powerful art dealer during the Third Reich – later this year. 
 
It would present the collection “within a historically and scientifically contextualized framework”, including details on efforts to determine the origin of some of the pieces, it said in a statement earlier this month.
 
A 1998 agreement signed by 44 countries including Switzerland sets out how to deal with Nazi-confiscated art.
 
In the case of artworks not yet returned to their pre-war owners or heirs, “steps should be taken expeditiously to achieve a just and fair solution,” it says.
 
 

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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