Let’s go back in time... in the last days of World War II, Berlin was the site of terrible hand-to-hand, street-by-street fighting. From the east came the Russians, eager to devastate Berlin and the Nazis as retribution for the millions of Reds killed at Hitler’s hand. From the south and west came the Allied Forces, eager to bring the war to a close and, not least, avenge the bombing of Britain and the atrocities of the newly liberated death camps. The Berliners knew what was coming and, in hindsight, some are amazed any survived such avenging forces.
The cost of the war was terrible. Once the victory was assured, plans were put into effect to repair the damage to governmental coffers by "reparations" (a legal form of looting). The fact that the Allies and the Russians did so with authority and systematically did not lessen the effects of the disappearance of most of the remaining wealth of Germany.
Now, it has to be explained that a great deal of that remaining wealth was not really legal, nor Germany’s. Much of the gold (you have read here before that much of the Nazi gold the U.S. Treasury holds in Manhattan has been assayed as refined tooth gold from concentration camp victims) and perhaps as many as a million works of art were "liberated" Reich treasure. Jews, Belgian and French museums and collectors have been trying to find Nazi looted paintings, art treasures and sculptures for decades.
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The United States not being such a culturally aware society went for the gold. The Brits confiscated very few art treasures and most of those were handed back some years later. The Belgians and French were pretty much prevented from getting anything. (They often complained at the time of having to "stand in line behind the Yanks." The Yanks, meanwhile, were busy reminding the French they should be grateful that we "saved" them, again.) The Russians, however, knew real loot when they saw it and liberated about 1.5 million pieces of the finest art of Europe.
Before I get to today’s update, there is one more little twist to this story. The Allies (including the Russians, remember) sat down in conquered Berlin and discussed Germany and the need to decentralize power to prevent World War III. They decided to decentralize government (making the powerful regional state governments, undoing Hitler’s centralizing) and — here is the interesting part — breaking up the cultural power of Berlin in the process.
The Americans at the time could not see the point in such expense. The French sided with the Russians, and the Brits went along with the idea as well. Break up a nation’s culture and you prevent a unity of taste, influence and voice. Later television was to unify the voice of Germany, but in 1945 and 1946, radio, papers and, most importantly, all the museums’ collections were sent to nine regional centers, leaving Berlin as the 10th equal cultural center.
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How do you split up collections? About 10 years ago, I was in the Berlin Volkerkunde Museum (the Museum of Mankind) when the re-centralization of culture was taking place as Berlin became, once again, the capital of Germany. Crates that had been packed by the Allies were arriving by truck from Leipzig, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and other cities. The Berlin museum staff stared in amazement to see that the crates had never been opened. As the Frankfurt representative explained, "We had no budget to examine and catalogue the effects, so why not just leave them safely packed?"
Day after day, the staff unpacked cases to rediscover some of the greatest works of art ever created. Bronze figures from Benin, Ndorobo headdresses, Three Rivers masks, New Guinea totems, Eskimo walrus carvings, Siberian scrimshaw, Mayan gold death masks, Chinese jade amulets, Ming horses, Aztec crowns… each regional shipment was a cross-section of the once great Berlin collection… items thought lost, never documented properly by the Allies when crated, never opened by the regional impoverished museums.
Again, at last, in Berlin is a unified collection of perhaps the largest and greatest art collection of the hand of man from pre-history to the beginning of modern man. If you added all the U.S. collections together, it would not equal 25 percent of the Volkerkunde.
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Now, today’s news… when it came to paintings and what one normally refers to as art, there was surprisingly nothing to "regionalize" in 1946. The Russians, having set up the shell game of de-centralization of art, had already shipped all they wanted to Moscow. They used that looted wealth to get loans and, basically, to hoard it all away from Germany. But, unlike prehistoric and primitive art, much of what they "looted" was already Nazi loot.
For decades, families and museums alike have been asking for their artwork back, claiming title as well as equal suffering under the Nazis. Several world courts agreed. The problem is, the Russians never said what they took, refused to let anyone have a look and, of course, kept it all secreted away.
As the Soviet Union began to crumble, dissident Russians began to tell all. And so the stage is set for developments playing themselves out in public, finally. Whose paintings, sculptures and antiquities are they, and why shouldn’t Russia be able to sell them (many have already been sold, quietly, through dealers in New York and London)? And if they are not Russia’s, whose are they and who is going to offset Russia’s World War II loss? After all, the United States has all that victims’ tooth gold...
It’s a tricky mess, made more difficult because the public could not care less. But let’s put this in context: The current guestimate of the value of the Russian hoard is a bit past $1 trillion. Now, that’s enough to make any politician sit up and pay attention — whether he or she be in Berlin, Washington or Moscow.
Peter Riva resides in New York and New Mexico.
