Hell Hath No Fury like a Woman Who Seeks Justice

Cover Image: Two of the Monuments Women, Rose Valland (left) and Edith Standen (center), at the recovery center in Wiesbaden. (Image Courtesy of Artonauti: Le figurine dell’Arte)

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Over the span of eight years, Adolf Hitler’s brutal Nazi regime viciously stripped the 11 million victims of the Holocaust of their humanity, identity, and culture. Soon after their assumption of power, the Nazis began to introduce legislation to deny Jewish people of their rights, initiated pogroms to incite violence against Jewish neighborhoods, businesses, and synagogues, and even organized a systematic campaign to plunder or destroy art and cultural treasures from Jewish families. 

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The most active member in the latter category—the systematic looting of Jewish families’ art and cultural treasures—was the Third Reich’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), which “documented each of more than 20,000 art objects” stolen from Jewish families and others “on index cards or inventory lists.” Just in France alone, the 1944 German ERR documents indicate that about 22,000 objects from 203 collections were stolen, including, but not limited to, about 5,000 items from the Rothschild collections, approximately 2,700 items from the David-Weill collections, and a little over 1,000 items from the Kann collection. French officials estimated that about 33 percent of all private French art had been confiscated by the Third Reich during WWII. By the end of the war, the United States Army identified and restituted over 700,000 pieces of art and the Allies documented looted art in over 1,000 repositories in Germany and Austria. Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist at the National Archives, estimates that more than 20% of Europe’s art was looted between 1933 to 1945. While the majority of the stolen art was stored at Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, other collections were found in Austrian and German salt mines.

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Fig 1. | Looted art in Merkers Mine, Germany. (Image Courtesy of the National Archives)

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As a part of the Safehaven Program “to identify, recover, and restitute Nazi looted assets,” the United States Government expended manpower and resources toward pillaged art. In June 1943, President Roosevelt approved the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas and established the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) section, which was made up of almost 350 men and women whose occupations ranged from art history scholars and archaeologists, to architects and archivists. This group of people, otherwise known as the “Monuments Men,” were successful in tracking down and locating over five million works and returned these objects to the countries from which they had been looted.  

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Nevertheless, among the ranks of these so-called “Monuments Men,” there were 27 women members who lent prowess and dedication to the restitution effort. In her article, Monuments Women and Men: Rethinking popular narratives via British Major Anne Olivier Popham, Elizabeth Campbell writes that the “very terminology” describing the MFAA task force “elides the role of women in key leadership positions.” For example, Captain Edith Standen, a “foremost authority” on European tapestries according to the Monuments Men and Women Fund, “oversaw the sorting, cataloguing, and eventual restitution of thousands of works of art and other cultural objects found within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forces, Austria (USFA).” French Captain Rose Valland, who risked her life to spy on the Nazis, kept meticulous records that guided the MFAA to a stockpile of over 20,000 works of looted art in the Bavarian Alps. Major Anne Olivier Popham, who studied art history at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, was in charge of coordinating the Monuments Men in the field and, most notably, leading the restitution effort of twelve bronze church bells, which the Nazis had seized with the intention of creating cannons and ammunition.

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Fig. 2 | Two Monuments Women, from left to right, Rose Valland and Anne Olivier Bell. (Image Courtesy of Christie’s)

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Fig. 3 | Capt. Edith Standen and Capt. Rose Valland conversing with a soldier (upper left). (Image Courtesy of Christie’s)

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Clearly, the Monuments Women’s successes were part of a larger international effort that sought to return confiscated art to its country of origin. But what happens when those efforts turn personal? In modern times, we recognize these efforts as ones by heirs of paintings who fight in arduous legal battles with museums and countries alike to reclaim the works that have remarkable places in their families’ histories. During and after WWII, however, these efforts were undertaken by the individuals themselves whose art was stolen and who advocated for the restitution of their family heirlooms and art “confiscated or sold under extreme duress during the war.” 

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Henriette Hirschland, the wife of Kurt Hirschland, a German banker and art collector, was forced to flee Amsterdam in 1939. Before she left the Netherlands for the United States, she entrusted three of her most treasured artworks, which included Van Gogh’s La Mousmé, to a family friend. While the details of what happened to these artworks are unclear, it appears that by 1943, the Van Gogh had appeared in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. After she returned to the Netherlands after the war, Mrs Hirschland led and organized the restitution efforts for her beloved painting, which ended up being restituted to her in 1956. According to Christie’s, her grandson described her efforts with the Latin phrase “Dux femina facti,” or “A woman was the leader of the deed.”

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Fig. 4 | Desiree Goudstikker, ca. 1946. (Image Courtesy of Christie’s)

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Another marvelous case of individual restitution lies in the story of Desiree Goudstikker, a Viennese opera singer. She was the wife of Jacques Goudstikker, a well-known Jewish-Dutch art dealer, who was forced to sell over 1,200 paintings to Hermann Göring, one of the Nazi Party’s most powerful figures, as the family fled persecution in 1940. After the war, while 300 works of art were restituted to the Dutch Government, 267 were sold and included in the Dutch National Collection. Goudstikker and her descendants engaged in one of the biggest legal battles in the history of Nazi-looted restitutions so that her family’s paintings could be rightfully returned. In 2006, ten years after Goudstikker passed, her descendants were able to recover 202 Old Master paintings, including Jan Steen’s “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia” and a river landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael.

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Fig 5. | Steen’s “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia,” currently in the collection of Goudstikker’s descendants. (Image Courtesy of The Leiden Collection)

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The most well-known of these restitutions cases spearheaded by women was Maria Altmann’s case against the Austrian government (Republic of Austria v Altmann) for the return of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. In this instance, Altmann proceeded against Austria for the restitution of five paintings, including Klimt’s work, from an Austrian government museum. In 2001, when she was 82 years old and exhausted from the Austrian Government’s efforts to try and silence her, she is reported having said “They delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die.” After eight years of legal battles and a year of arduous arbitration, the courts ruled in Altmann’s favor in 2006, marking a major triumph for the restitutions field.

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Now, as the window of opportunity is getting smaller, since verbal testimony is lost and the claimants and heirs themselves are passing away, every restitution case becomes more pressing to resolve as the years and decades pass. As such, modern women in the restitution effort have picked up where others left off. 

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Nancy Yeide, the head of the Department of Curatorial Records at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, created and published the first complete catalog of Hermann Göring’s collection and was the co-author of The AAM Guide to Provenance Research, a thorough resource and introduction to Holocaust-Era Provenance Research which focuses on cultural property looted by the Nazi’s during WWII.

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In 1990, Anne Webber founded the Commission for Looted Art in Europe which, according to its website, “researches, identifies and recovers looted property” and “negotiates policies and procedures…and promotes the identification of looted cultural property and the tracing of its rightful owners.” Since its establishment, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe has restituted over 3,500 Nazi-looted objects to their rightful owners, negotiated new policies with European governments and institutions—including Resolution 1205 of the Council of Europe of November 1999 and the Final Declaration of the 2000 Vilnius Forum—and established national claims processes with various European countries such as Austria, the UK, and Italy, among others.

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Finally, Mimi Fischer, a Restitutions Specialist at Sotheby’s, engages with this legacy of Nazi-looted art and is tasked with the tedious yet rewarding effort of research into the provenance of works and objects from 1933-45. She, and the Restitutions Team at Sotheby’s comb through the many thousands of lots—about 10,000 to 12,000 works of art a year—to ensure that they are not selling any items that were looted by the Nazis, whether from Jewish families, museums, or other private individuals. Since much of the records left by the ERR were extremely basic, sometimes only consisting of the work’s title and artist with no image, Fischer’s work is usually comprised of looking at the paintings’ ownership records and the reverses, or undersides, of the paintings to see what stams, label marks, and inscriptions were left behind. 

In March 1997, Bradsher wrote that “Philip Saunders, editor of Trace, the stolen art register, stated that “there are at least 100,000 works of art still missing from the Nazi occupation.” While many of these paintings are likely still hanging on the walls of internationally renowned museums or in the private collections of unaware buyers, one thing is for certain: the efforts of these incredible women from WWII to modern times proves that the fight for restitution is far from over. Current efforts undertaken by art houses, museums, and countries alike ensure that the researchers of the 21st century are able to further the work started by the Monuments Women and the earliest claimants, whose endeavors inspire and guide the work of restitutions specialists today. It seems that Christie’s has put it best: “the determination and grit of the women at the forefront of the restitution cause, from the Second World War to the present and into the future, are a testament to the moral conviction that underpins their work: to achieve justice for the rightful owners of these prized works of art.”