Introduction

Antiquities in the Nazi Era: Contexts and Broader View

Irene Bald Romano

Abstract
This introduction presents an overview of the research questions and the challenges involved in studying the fate of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities during the Nazi era. Since the antiquities markets and the methods of trade, disappearance, and confiscation of ancient archaeological objects varied a great deal across Europe and the Middle East during the Nazi period, this article examines the evidence in individual countries, both in source countries where the archaeological objects originated and in market countries where antiquities were collected, traded, or confiscated—including the United States. Finally, some conclusions gleaned from this broader study are presented, including from the articles in this special issue.

Research questions and challenges of examining the provenance of antiquities

[1] Despite the important role that antiquity—especially classical antiquity—and archaeology played in the ideology of the “Third Reich”¹, the fate of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities during the Nazi era is only now being presented here using a holistic approach². Previous research on this subject has been directed mostly at specific categories of objects, such as coins³; evidence of losses from individual countries, mainly in immediate post-World War II reports (e.g., in Italy and Greece); or specific cases of individual museum objects or collections about which ethical or legal ownership questions have been raised. Questions of national antiquities laws in source countries were largely ignored by Western museums until the spirit of the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property of 1970 became widely implemented and accepted by museums and professional organizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s⁴. Until well after the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art had been signed by 44 countries⁵, provenance questions regarding antiquities had mostly been rather single-mindedly focused on whether the ethical principles of the 1970 UNESCO Convention had been met⁶, often neglecting other histories of these objects, including their possible Nazi past.

[2] The topic of antiquities in the Nazi era is an expansive one, and the papers in this collaborative international publication still represent only part of the picture. In approaching this research, some of the major questions we have explored are as follows:

• To what extent were Mediterranean and Middle Eastern moveable antiquities or archaeological objects subjected to confiscation, forced sale, theft, looting, loss, illegal sale and exportation, and trade in general in various countries in Europe and the Middle East from 1933 to 1945?
• Who were the major state actors or private collectors and dealers of antiquities in the prewar period and earlier, as well as during the Nazi era?
• What were the market mechanisms for antiquities during the Nazi era and the World War II period in Europe, the Middle East, and the US? What happened to them at the conclusion of World War II?
• Can we trace any of these objects to their ancient contexts?
• Can we fill the gaps in provenance to the present day?

[3] The answers to these questions are challenging. Among the many difficulties we face are the linking of these antiquities to their specific ancient contexts in the Mediterranean and Middle East and understanding how and when these objects were removed from their place of manufacture and/or archaeological deposition. In this regard, archaeologists generally use the term provenience to denote the archaeological find spot, while provenance refers to the history of that object, its transfers, locations, and owners from the time of its unearthing to the present day⁷. Only in rare cases have moveable antiquities never been buried and passed down through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and succeeding centuries in religious, royal, private, or, eventually, public museum collections. Identifying the provenience of antiquities once they have been removed from their ancient context is complicated. Although we might be able to pinpoint the general place of manufacture by style or technique, the archaeological deposition context is more problematic—especially for Greek and Roman objects, both small and large, which were widely transferred around the ancient Mediterranean. For example, a Greek vase might have been created in Athens but deposited in an Etruscan tomb in central Italy; a marble sculpture may have been made in a workshop in Rome for a temple in Roman Spain; Roman coins and categories of ceramics traveled widely. Thus, without excavation records and unless an ancient object is unique with its deposition restricted to one locale (e.g., very distinctive inscribed Palmyrene funerary reliefs), it is often not possible to identify even the site from which an ancient object originated once that critical archaeological information becomes separated from the object. In rare cases, dealers have recorded information about an object’s find spot, but often this information is questionable, dangerously and misleadingly labeled “said to be from” in museum records, or only revealed many years later⁸.

[4] Antiquities have generally been ignored in provenance studies relating to the Nazi era, dismissed as “multiples”, or categorized with decorative arts, mostly with no associated artists’ names, and thus regarded as not worth pursuing. In addition, antiquities are inconsistently or inadequately described in databases, with few or conflicting cultural affiliations or dates, sometimes with misidentifications, and few photographs⁹. It seems even the Allies’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) prioritized the identification of European paintings, sculpture, and treasure arts found in various Nazi repositories, giving antiquities rather cursory attention.

[5] It is, moreover, impossible to separate the antiquities trade from the rest of the art trade during the Nazi period. Dealers, for the most part, did not exclusively sell antiquities¹⁰, and most individuals and families with the financial means collected various categories of works of art. It is problematic, therefore, for scholars to isolate the ancient objects and neglect other categories of cultural objects or art when research questions call for a more inclusive approach¹¹. Finally, antiquities were (and still are) often sold not through auctions or dealers but through an illegal or black/gray market in source countries, making tracing their provenience and provenance very difficult.

[6] Despite all the challenges, it is a good time to undertake such a study with many museums proactively conducting provenance research, making their collections’ databases available online, and producing exhibition catalogs with full provenance information. Research institutions, like the Getty Research Institute (GRI) and Heidelberg University Library¹² or the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI)¹³, as well as museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met)¹⁴, have digitized dealer records and auction catalogs. Also, more and more relevant finding aids for archival documents (and the documents themselves) from Nazi and Allied agencies and other institutions are being made available online¹⁵. Moreover, what makes the study of the provenance of archaeological objects in general so interesting, and perhaps more difficult than other categories of art and cultural objects, is that many of these objects have led very complicated lives over many centuries, sometimes with a colonial-era past (e.g., in the Ottoman Empire for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities)¹⁶—a topic that has moved to the forefront of provenance research in recent years—and a Nazi-era or more recent history. Some of these complicated histories are unraveled in this special issue.

The fate of antiquities in individual countries

[7] Since the antiquities markets and the methods of trade, disappearance, and confiscation of ancient archaeological objects varied a great deal across Europe and the Middle East during the Nazi period, with the United States serving as one market, it is necessary to examine the situation in individual countries or regions to grasp the fuller picture. In Greece, for example, there were no official confiscations from museums, though many cases of theft or illegal excavations have been well-documented¹⁷. The possessions of Jews in northern Greek communities were inventoried and confiscated, but they seem to have included few, if any, antiquities. This is in contrast to the conditions in France and elsewhere in Europe where the collections of wealthy Jews targeted for confiscation comprised at least some antiquities. In the following sections, I summarize some of the information regarding the antiquities markets, dealers, collectors, wartime losses, and Nazi confiscations in specific countries, beginning with Greece and Italy, main source countries for classical antiquities. Details about the antiquities dealers in other source countries or regions, including Egypt and the Middle East, are included in the discussion of the US market.

Greece

[8] In Greece, the occupying forces made no official confiscations of the important antiquities collections such as those in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens or the Acropolis Museum. The majority of the collections in the major museums had been well hidden and protected; for example, when German troops arrived in Athens on 27 April 1941, they found the galleries of the National Archaeological Museum more or less empty (Fig. 1)¹⁸.

Fig. 1. Sculpture collections of the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, under preparation for safekeeping beneath the floors of the museum, 1940–1941 (photograph courtesy of National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Photographic Archive, reprod. by author from text panel in National Archaeological Museum, Athens, February 2019)

The Nazi occupation of Greece (28 October 1940 to December 1944) was framed by the Nazis as “a fourth wave of Nordic migration to defend and rejuvenate Greek soil after a long period of racial decay”¹⁹. Because the Nazis regarded themselves as the legitimate guardians of an ancient Greek culture that was part of their own legacy, they were not inclined to officially plunder or damage antiquities²⁰. However, there were still losses, especially from smaller museums and archaeological sites all over Greece, from the many cases of random plunder during the triple occupation by German, Italian, and Bulgarian officers and enlisted men²¹. These losses (and some returns) of antiquities were documented in 1946 in Greek and British reports²², but it is clear from subsequent reports that the information was only preliminary since the surveys of losses were continuing as the reports were going to press²³. For example, accounts of the losses at ancient Corinth differ in the Greek and British reports and in the report of the director of the excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens²⁴. German archaeologist Roland Hampe reviewed these reports and provided some rebuttals and corrections to them, calling for objectivity and verifiable information; he was especially concerned with the characterization of the situation with the material from the German Archaeological Institute’s excavations at the Heraion on Samos²⁵.

[9] Recent repatriations illustrate the diverse nature of the thefts in Greece during this period. For example, Hermann Göring participated in 1934 in the smuggling of a collection of antiquities that Werner Peek, a Nazi sympathizer and later a famous Greek epigraphy specialist, purchased in Greece in 1933. One of these objects was a black-figure skyphos with a scene of long-distance runners; it had been awarded to Spyridon (also: Spyros) Louis, the winner of the first Olympic marathon in 1896. The cup was rediscovered in the collections of the University of Münster and repatriated to Greece in November 2019, where it is today exhibited in the Museum of the Olympic Games in Olympia²⁶.

[10] In May 2022 a Mycenaean (12th-century BC) gold signet ring with a representation of two confronting sphinxes was returned to Greece from the Nobel Foundation in Sweden. The ring had been excavated in 1927 from a Mycenaean chamber tomb in Ialysos, Rhodes, by the Italian Archaeological School at Athens and published a few years later by the excavator, Giulio Jacopi, with a photograph and drawing²⁷. It had been stolen from the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes while the city was under Italian occupation during World War II. In 1975 Carl-Gustaf Styrenius, former director of the Swedish Institute at Athens (1963–1970) and then director of the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet) in Stockholm (1971–1989), wrote to Christos Doumas, then curator of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Dodecanese, to inform him that the ring in his Stockholm museum was likely from Rhodes. The ring had entered the museum in 1974 from the Nobel Foundation, to which it had been bequeathed by the late Nobel laureate Georg von Békésy, who had bought it in the United States in the 1950s or 1960s. It wasn’t until recently that this correspondence was rediscovered by the Directorate of Documentation and Protection of Cultural Goods of the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the ring was returned to Greece by the Nobel Foundation. Hundreds of other finds were stolen during World War II from the Rhodes museum (coins, gold and silver jewelry, and other small items), which are still missing²⁸.

[11] Thefts in 1941 by Austrian general Julius Ringel at the Villa Ariadne and the Stratigraphic Museum at Knossos on Crete have also been well-documented, with a 2017 repatriation of some of these objects from the University of Graz²⁹. There were also losses from illicit exports from German or Austrian excavations that were not sanctioned by the Greek Archaeological Service, especially on Crete³⁰ and in the central Greek region of Thessaly³¹. Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth, head of the Reichsbund für Deutsche Vorgeschichte (Reichsbund for German Prehistory) and of the Sonderkommando Griechenland (Special Task Force Greece) of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), conducted large-scale excavations at the Neolithic (5000–8000 years BP) site of Visviki-Magula in Thessaly, undertaken in an effort to find proof of the presence of Nordic people who might have migrated to Greece in prehistoric times³². Large numbers of archaeological objects were removed to Germany and housed in the Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen on Lake Constance. Around 10,000 pottery sherds and other artifacts from both excavations and surveys in Thessaly were returned to Greece in 2014 from this museum³³. In addition, some repatriations were successful immediately after World War II as a result of the work of Spyridon Marinatos, who was deputized by the Greek government to be its emissary in the recovery of material taken from Greece to Germany, Austria, or Italy, though he was never admitted to Germany³⁴. More information about Greek antiquities gleaned from dealer records of sales, especially to American buyers, in this period is discussed below.

Italy

[12] One of the most difficult issues to summarize regarding the Fascist period in Italy relates to Jewish art and antiquities dealers, Jewish collectors, and the fate of their ancient collections. Italy and Italian museums have been criticized until recently for having done little to advance provenance research on Jewish collections that changed hands during the period, especially from 1938 to 1944³⁵: In the immediate postwar period, when Rodolfo Siviero, the charismatic, self-promoting, and dogged ministro plenipotenziario, was assigned the diplomatic mission to bring back to Italy art treasures that had been taken by the Nazis, little attention was paid to stolen Jewish collections, except for the libraries of the Jewish communities in Rome and Florence, which were found and restituted³⁶. Following the 1998 Washington Conference and its resulting Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, to which Italy was signatory, Italy established a governmental advisory commission (named after the chairwoman: Anselmi Commission) to move forward the return of cultural objects seized during the Nazi era to the rightful owners or legitimate heirs of mainly Jewish owners. The commission produced a 2001 final report that included a brief section entitled “Looting of Artistic, Cultural and Religious Assets”, but little has been done in its wake³⁷.

[13] In the Fascist period (1922–1943) and during the German occupation of the former ally between September 1943 and April 1945, thousands of Jews were compelled to flee Italy, especially after the implementation of the racial laws in 1938. Moreover, Italy—in particular Trieste—played a major role as a port of transit in the process of emigration. As a matter of fact, more than 8,200 Jews in Italy were murdered in the death camps, but we have no clear accounting of most of these individuals’ assets, the confiscations, or the duress sales, in which Jews were forced to sell their property at diminished value. Scholars have recently explored questions surrounding the fate of cultural objects that belonged to Jewish individuals and institutions in Italy—a topic that was largely ignored, indeed brushed under the table, by Italian museums and governmental bodies, minimizing the role the Fascist government of Mussolini played in the persecution of Jews and allowing the mistaken presumption to exist that Italy was a victim of the Nazis and that the only persecution and theft of cultural property from Jews in Italy took place under coercion of the Nazis or by the Nazis themselves³⁸.

[14] The dispersal of one Jewish-owned antiquities collection in Italy, that of Ludwig Pollak (1868–1943), the Prague-born Jewish art dealer, archaeologist, connoisseur, and director of the Museo Barracco di Scultura Antica in Rome, is an important case study in this regard. Pollak was highly respected and well-connected in the art world in Rome as well as internationally. He was famous for having identified the right arm of the Laocoön, found not far from the site of the statue’s 1506 discovery in Rome³⁹. His Tagebücher, with the last entries written just a month before his death, demonstrate the extent to which he intimately understood the Roman art trade, including fakes on the market, the major dealers of antiquities and their networks, and the important institutions; these diaries are also a gold mine of information on the cultural life of Rome from the end of the 19th century to 1943⁴⁰.

[15] Persecution of Jews in Italy officially began in the winter of 1938–1939 with prohibitions on Jewish-owned businesses and employment and confiscation of Jewish property, with increasing levels of persecution until 1943–1944, when all Jewish businesses were shut down⁴¹. As a Jew in Rome feeling the increasing pressure of the Fascist and Nazi anti-Semitic policies, in 1940 Pollak began to disperse some of his personal collection by depositing for safekeeping eleven ancient sculptures in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva⁴². He consigned the remainder of his collection of paintings, as well as ancient gems, jewelry, bronzes, vases, and small marble sculptures, for sale in three auctions in Rome in 1942 and 1943, the first comprising 118 objects at the Casa di vendite Palazzo Simonetti in May 1942. Only 23 of Pollak’s objects sold⁴³. The objects that did not sell at the first auction were put up for sale again at the Galleria d’Arte L’Antonina in March and April 1943, but only 30 items sold⁴⁴. In the marginalia of the sales catalog, Pollak noted that those that did not sell were put in a deposit “bei Romiti”; it is not clear who (painter Gino Romiti 1881–1967?), what, or where Romiti is⁴⁵. Despite overtures to assist his escape, Pollak remained in his beloved Rome; he, his wife, and two children were rounded up with other Roman Jews on 16 October 1943 and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau shortly thereafter⁴⁶. In addition to the sculptures in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire—three purchased from Pollak’s heirs in 1949 and 1951 and eight donated by Pollak’s sister-in-law, Margaret Süssmann-Nicod, in 1957⁴⁷—parts of Pollak’s personal collection are located today in the Musei Capitolini, the Museo Barracco, and the Museo di Roma⁴⁸. Those auctioned off in 1942 and 1943 are scattered to various locations unknown to me.

[16] Many of the antiquities plundered by the Nazis from public institutions and non-Jewish private collections in Italy have been located and restituted. The list of known items lost or still to be recovered includes archaeological material from the Finaly Collection in a villa in Florence (six antiquities) and from the Museo della Torre di Pandolfo Capodiferro, near the ancient site of Minturnae in Campania (23 ancient items)⁴⁹. Twelve other antiquities are listed in Morozzi and Paris’s 1995 catalog of missing works of art from Italy, but several of these have since been repatriated⁵⁰.

[17] A second-century AD marble statuette of Artemis/Diana of the Versailles-Leptis Magna type with a dog beside the goddess, excavated at Minturnae in the 1931–1933 University of Pennsylvania/Soprintendenza in Naples campaign, was acquired by the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Trier in 1963 from a private collection in Trier; it had almost certainly gone missing during World War II⁵¹. It was repatriated to Italy in January 2003⁵² and is on display in the Antiquarium at Minturno today (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Marble statuette of Artemis/Diana with a hunting dog, second century AD. Antiquarium of Minturnae, Minturno, Italy (photograph by Carole Raddato, 1 July 2014, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Another sculpture from these same excavations, a marble portrait head of the late third to early fourth century AD, possibly of the emperor Maximianus Herculeus, was purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA Boston), in 1961 from Münzen und Medaillen AG in Basel, deaccessioned by the museum on 8 October 2020, and transferred to Italy in April 2022⁵³. Rodolfo Siviero provided some details of the movement of the Minturnae collections, including that in a five-month period in 1944, when the Kunstschutz was moving collections from regional museums and deposits to Rome, selected artifacts were removed, with some sent to Germany⁵⁴. Another orchestrated plunder of antiquities in Italy during the Nazi period is illustrated by the October 1943 theft by the 1st Paratroop Panzer Division “Hermann Göring” of collections from Naples museums, which were recovered in Altaussee and repatriated to Italy⁵⁵.

[18] Cases of random plunder in Italy during the war have been highlighted by a recent research project and restitution. The project is being jointly conducted by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli and St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, on the archaeological collection of indigenous, Greek, and Etruscan objects found on the estate of Baron Marcello Spinelli at ancient Suessula in the Piana Campana (inland Campania, northeast of Naples). During World War II, first German and then American troops occupied the Baron’s estate with Spinelli’s private museum, the Casina Spinelli, used from October 1943 as an Allied cinema and barracks. During this period, the museum was looted, with objects dispersed⁵⁶.

[19] Another case of random plunder is illustrated by a Roman marble portrait of Drusus Minor that was deaccessioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2016 and repatriated to Italy in 2017 after it was proven to have been excavated at the Campanian site of Sessa Aurunca in 1925 or 1926 and published in the report of the excavations. It went missing in 1944 from the archeological museum in Sessa Aurunca in Caserta province (Fig. 3)⁵⁷. It was likely looted under cover of war, and its removal from Italy without a permit would have been prohibited under Italian laws 364/1909 and 108/1939, although we know these laws were sometimes bypassed with permits approved by Fascist officials, including Mussolini himself in high-profile cases⁵⁸.

Fig. 3. Marble portrait of Drusus Minor, excavated in Sessa Aurunca, Campania, repatriated from the Cleveland Museum of Art to Italy in 2017 (photograph by David Brichford, Cleveland Museum of Art, Gallery 103, 14 August 2012, with permission of Cleveland Museum of Art)

[20] The antiquities trade in Italy and the taste for Italian antiquities showed few signs of diminishment during the Fascist and Nazi periods in Italy. The looting of ancient sites there continued, and antiquities were plundered under cover of war in both random and systematic ways. Italian antiquities dealers⁵⁹, art advisers, and agents were enriched by sales to the Nazis and to foreign dealers, museums, and collectors, despite attempts by the Italian state to regulate the exportation of culturally significant works of art⁶⁰.

France

[21] To gain a sense of the relative interest in antiquities among Jewish collectors in France in the pre-Nazi period and, therefore, the availability of various categories of ancient art for Nazi looting, we can examine the database of art objects confiscated from late 1940 through August 1944 by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in France and Belgium, the vast majority of which were stored in the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris⁶¹. In his report in July 1944, Robert Scholz, head of the Sonderstab Bildende Kunst, enumerated 21,903 works of art confiscated by the ERR from about 250 private collections and institutions. Only 239 of these works of art are antiquities⁶². We now understand that this was not a comprehensive statistic since a search through just two of these collections produces over 300 antiquities. For example, Alphonse Kann’s collection of 1,614 works of art, confiscated in October 1940 from his mansion in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (assigned “Ka” inventory numbers by the ERR), comprised at least 150 ancient objects, including Egyptian (Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, and Coptic periods; ca. 65), Middle Eastern (ca. 10), Greek (ca. 51), Etruscan (some red-figure vases or sherds labeled Etruscan, but are possibly South Italian; ca. 7), Roman (ca. 13), and Byzantine (ca. 6) objects for around 9 percent of Kann’s eclectic collection (Fig. 4)⁶³. The incomplete descriptions of some of the objects and the lack of photographs make further identifications of ancient objects in this collection impossible, especially works in glass and ceramic, which are categorized as decorative arts with no further descriptions in the ERR database.

Fig. 4. Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg(ERR) catalog card (Ka 517) for an Egyptian bronze bowl on a tripod with two upright handles, decorated with three bird heads, from the collection of Alphonse Kann, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France (photograph from “Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume”, https://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/card_view.php?CardId=1085 [accessed 5 February 2020])

[22] In addition, more than 5,000 works of art were confiscated from the collections of the French Rothschilds in Paris (all of the collections of the various Rothschild family members were labeled “R” in the ERR catalog system). Of the 1,288 objects cataloged from Maurice de Rothschild’s confiscated Paris estate, there are at least 154 ancient objects (almost 12 percent of the collection), with the largest category being Greek and Roman jewelry (135 entries), including some labeled with a Southern Russian provenience, possibly from tombs on the Crimean peninsula (Fig. 5)⁶⁴. At least six Greek vases from Rothschild’s collection are documented in Hermann Göring’s Carinhall, as Laura Puritani outlines in her paper in this publication and in her major publication of the Carinhall antiquities⁶⁵.

Fig. 5. Ancient gold ring with a Greek inscription from the collection of Maurice de Rothschild, Paris, and ERR catalog card (R 2208) (photographs from “Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume”, https://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/card_view.php?CardId=14132 [accessed 11 April 2021])

[23] Moïse Lévy de Benzion (1873–1943), a Sephardic Jewish department store owner in Cairo with property in and around Paris, amassed a large collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine (Coptic) antiquities, some of which he acquired in his native Egypt and some in Europe. In 1940–1941, the ERR confiscated over 1,000 works of art and objects from Lévy de Benzion (designated “LB” in the ERR’s inventories) in his Chateau de la Folie in Draveil, outside Paris; more than 275 of these were antiquities⁶⁶. Part of this collection was restituted to Lévy de Benzion’s widow in 1946–1948, and a portion was sold at an auction in Cairo in 1947⁶⁷. Some of his collection have entered various American and European collections—for example, the Antonine bust of a woman now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that was purchased at the 1947 sale of Lévy de Benzion’s collection (Fig. 6)⁶⁸.

Fig. 6. Marble bust of a female, Antonine period, ca. AD 150. Former collection of Moïse Lévy de Benzion, now in Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2017.4 (photograph by Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

[24] In addition, the Möbel-Aktion (“Furniture Operation”), an arm of the ERR, plundered 69,619 homes in France, some 38,000 in Paris alone. The confiscated household goods comprised much more than furniture, however, and included some ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern objects. The ERR database lists lots (sometimes with groups of objects listed under one entry) of 4 Egyptian antiquities (ERR inv. nos. MA-AEGY); 152 Asian antiquities (i.e., Middle Eastern [pre-Islamic and Islamic] and Indian), 59 of which are pre-Islamic (listed variously as Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, and Luristan⁶⁹, with East Asian objects listed separately); 102 “Antik(e)”, in general (inv. nos. MA-AN), which include an array of objects of various periods and types, only some of which are ancient (pointing to the problems interpreting the German use of the adjective antik or the noun Antike); and 63 coins (inv. nos. MA-MÜ), only seven of which are ancient⁷⁰. Such a limited number of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities in comparison to the very large total of confiscated objects speaks perhaps to a minor interest in ancient artifacts among average Jewish families in France, as opposed to wealthy collectors.

Germany

Notable German collectors of antiquities in the later 19th century and the first half of the 20th century

[25] There were several notable German collectors of the later 19th century and the early 20th century whose interests were focused primarily on antiquities; all of them were Jewish. Friedrich Ludwig von Gans (1833–1920), a Frankfurt am Main industrialist, was one of these. We know a great deal about his collecting preferences from publications of the part of his collection that he donated to the Berlin Königliche Kunstsammlungen (Antikensammlung today) in 1912⁷¹ and from a catalog of the Bachstitz Gallery in The Hague, which had acquired von Gans’s collection en bloc after his death⁷². His Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Late Roman/Byzantine jewelry, gems, and glass collections are especially notable. His name is mentioned repeatedly throughout this special issue⁷³.

[26] Beginning in 1902 with purchases, especially of Greek vases from the English collection of William Henry Forman, the German-American James Loeb (1867–1933) formed a collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities that was bequeathed just at the beginning of the Nazi era to the Museum Antiker Kleinkunst (Staatliche Antikensammlungen today) in Munich. It comprises some 800 objects—primarily small items such as jewelry, gems, glass, and other luxury objects, bronze statuettes and terracotta figurines, Roman ceramics—as well as around 180 Greek vases and fragments and three large Etruscan bronze cauldrons on stands, the latter excavated from the Tomba di Fonte Ranocchia near Perugia in 1904 and bought in Rome in 1905 (Fig. 7)⁷⁴.

Fig. 7. Etruscan bronze tripod (tripod A), ca. 540–530 BC, found in the Tomba di Fonte Ranocchia in San Valentino di Marsciano, near Perugia. Acquired by James Loeb in 1905, now in Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (photograph: from Wikimedia Commons, 22 October 2016 [accessed 11 April 2021])

[27] Archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1938), from a distinguished Berlin family of antiquarians and patrons of Egyptology and founder of the German Archaeological Institute’s Cairo department in 1907⁷⁵, acted as an agent or middleman in Egypt for the acquisition of antiquities for German museums.⁷⁶ Borchardt is most famous for his excavations at Tell el-Amarna (ancient Akhetaten), where from 1907 to 1914 he directed archaeological research for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft and in 1912 discovered the bust of Nefertiti in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose⁷⁷. Controversy over the presence of the bust in Berlin (now in the Neues Museum) has continued on and off from soon after its discovery⁷⁸. A patron for those excavations was James Simon (1851–1932), son of a prominent textile manufacturer. Simon, a major donor to Berlin museums, donated the bust of Nefertiti to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin along with other important ancient Egyptian objects in 1920⁷⁹, while parts of his collection, including the ancient jewelry, were sold at Lepke auction house in 1932, just on the cusp of the Nazi era (Figs. 8a-b)⁸⁰.

Figs. 8a-b. Facing title pages for auction catalog for sale of James Simon’s collection, Nachlass Dr. James Simon, Berlin. Miniaturen, Gemälde, Plastik, Kunstgewerbe und Textilien, antiker Goldschmuck, Möbel, Bücher, Rudolph Lepke’s Kunst-Auctions-Haus, Berlin, 29 November 1932 (photographs: from Internet Archive, 12 December 2016, [accessed 11 April 2021])

[28] Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920), a Berlin publisher, arts patron, philanthropist, and sponsor of archaeological excavations in Egypt, donated a large Egyptian collection (ca. 700 objects) to the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin between 1892 and 1894. In 1933 his daughter and heir, Felicia Lachmann-Mosse, and her husband, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, the publisher of the Berliner Tageblatt, fled Germany because of Jewish persecution. Remaining parts of the Mosse collection were confiscated and auctioned in 1934 by the Berlin auction house Lepke. That auction comprised 63 ancient works of art, including Egyptian stone sculptures, bronze statuettes and vessels, wooden objects, faience amulets, terracottas, as well as several Greek and Roman objects⁸¹. The formation, provenance, and dispersal of Mosse’s private Egyptian collection and his donations to the Egyptian museum in the context of Jewish patronage of excavations and museums are discussed in this special issue by Thomas L. Gertzen and Jana Helmbold-Doyé⁸².

The Linz museum and antiquities

[29] The database of works of art that were bought or confiscated for the planned Gemäldegalerie (“Führermuseum”) in Linz includes very few antiquities—around 30 known, in addition to coins, from a total of some 6,755 works of art. Surviving Linz photo albums, in which the art works procured for Hitler were documented, show only seven antiquities⁸³. Some of these are from the former collection of the prominent Frankfurt industrialist and art collector Friedrich Ludwig von Gans (1833–1920) (Fig. 9). In her article in this special issue, Claire L. Lyons traces the history of two of these antiquities in the J. Paul Getty Museum today: a Roman bronze statuette of the moon goddess Luna and a cornelian intaglio gem with a depiction of Venus and Anchises⁸⁴. The latter has a long and well-documented history since the 18th century, once part of the famous Marlborough collection. Both were bought from a sale of von Gans’s collection by Kurt Walter Bachstitz (1882–1949), a prominent German-Austrian art dealer in The Hague, following von Gans’s death. In 1941 Bachstitz sold a number of works of art at below-market prices to Hans Posse for the “Führermuseum”, including important antiquities such as the Luna statuette and the gem⁸⁵.

Fig. 9. Portrait photograph of Friedrich Ludwig von Gans, unknown date, shown with three antiquities: a Greek vase behind his head, a Roman sculpted head at the left edge of the photo, and an Egyptian dark stone head on the mantle (photograph “Friedrich von Gans” provided by Angela von Gans, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, 24 January 2009 [accessed 11 April 2021])

CCP Munich records

[30] From the online database of the restitution cards of the Munich Central Collecting Point we get a general picture of the antiquities recovered by Allied forces. Approximately 170,000catalog cards (including duplicates) show that around 2,000 ancient objects were recovered, with the largest category being coins (“Coins” and “Greek”: 5 entries for a total of 1,213 objects; “Coins” and “Roman”: 42 entries)⁸⁶. Roman (535 objects, including gold jewelry and sculpture from the Rothschild collection), Greek (411 objects), and Egyptian (162) antiquities, in that order, comprise the majority of them, with Etruscan (18) and Middle Eastern (2) artifacts among the fewest. In fact, the topic of Middle Eastern antiquities during the Nazi period in general has not been well studied until very recently⁸⁷.

Major dealers of antiquities in Germany

[31] Berlin and Munich were the most important loci for the art trade in Germany at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, including during the Nazi period. In the catalogs for the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen” (Great German Art Exhibitions) from 1938 to 1944 (but not in the 1937 catalog), there are advertisements for various art-related and other businesses (such as travel and spas), including ads in the 1942, 1943, and 1944 catalogs for the Berlin auction house Hans W. Lange at Bellevuestraße 7. Lange advertised his expertise in paintings, antiques/antiquities, and carpets, coinciding with the height of his prominence as an important dealer for sales to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Albert Speer⁸⁸. His use of the word Antiquitäten on his business card and in his advertisements may be misleading, however, as it could refer to antiques that might include decorative arts and furniture from the 19th century or earlier, as well as objects from the ancient world. The vagueness of the term antique in various languages is a general problem in provenance studies of this period, especially in searching databases. Moreover, the descriptions in inventories or in auction catalogs are often not sufficient to identify the objects and distinguish the meaning of the term.

[32] The large archive of about 7,800 photographs and associated object cards documenting works of art bought and sold from 1903 to 1994 in some 61,500 transactions by Julius Böhler, the leading Munich art dealership (with joint businesses in Lucerne (Böhler and Steinmeyer, 1919–1976), Berlin, and New York(Böhler and Steinmeyer, Inc.), was acquired in 2015 by the ZI in Munich⁸⁹. This remarkable resource, combined with the company’s stock ledgers in the Bayerisches Wirtschaftsarchiv (Archive of the Bavarian Chambers of Industry and Commerce), provides evidence for the activities of one of the major players in the German art market, including to a limited extent in the antiquities trade, before and during the Nazi period. Irrespective of the preliminary state of research, it is already known that Böhler’s activities were complicated, with collaboration (half ownership) with the Nazi auction house owner and dealer Adolf Weinmüller (1886–1958) in Munich and Vienna⁹⁰ to sell collections belonging to Jews who were forced to liquidate their property in order to raise cash for their “flight tax” to flee Nazi-occupied lands. Böhler profited greatly during the Nazi era. The portion of Böhler’s business devoted to antiquities, however, has not been systematically studied; nevertheless, it appears to be minor compared to other categories of art. Although the majority of the 26 antiquities thus far identified in the archival photographs and stock cards were purchased by Böhler in the 1910s and 1920s, some must have been sold by him over the next decades⁹¹. In her paper in this publication and in her major publication on the antiquities at Carinhall, Laura Puritani mentions the 1941 sale by Böhler to Göring of a Roman imperial marble portrait of a woman, probably Vibia Matidia, that was formerly in the collection of Hugo Liebermann-Rosswiese in Vienna and acquired by Böhler in 1939⁹².

Switzerland

[33] The art trade during the Nazi era was enhanced and complicated by activities in Switzerland, which took advantage of its neutrality and protective banking and business laws to serve as a major hub for art salesand transfers of stolen art and a haven for hidden assets⁹³. As Emanuele Sbardella discusses in his paper, the Jewish coin dealers and the ancient coin trade moved from Germany to Switzerland during this time⁹⁴. Julius Böhler effectively used his branch business in Lucerne (1919–1976) and his Swiss relationships during the Nazi period. Hans Wendland (1880–1972), a Nazi dealer who moved easily between Germany, Switzerland, and France, was a key mastermind of the Swiss art networks, in general acting as an intermediary between Walter Andreas Hofer, Göring’s chief purchasing agent, and Theodor Fischer, whose Lucerne gallery conducted the infamous 1939 auction of “degenerate art”⁹⁵. British art historian, art critic, collector, and MFAA officer Douglas Cooper, along with MFAA officers James Plaut and Theodore Rousseau Jr., produced reports on the Swiss market for the Allies in 1945 and concluded that at least 16 Swiss dealers were involved in trafficking in stolen art during this period⁹⁶. The largest buyer was Emil Georg Bührle (1890–1956), for many years managing director and majority shareholder of machine tool factory Oerlikon, and as such an arms manufacturer and supplier to the Wehrmacht, though it seems there were no antiquities in his collection⁹⁷.

[34] A well-known name in the postwar Swiss (Geneva) as well as Paris antiquities trade, Nicolas Koutoulakis (1910–1996), began his career in the late 1930s with his uncle Manolis Segredakis (1891–1948) in the Paris antiques shop that Koutoulakis inherited on his uncle’s death. Segredakis, in collaboration with another Parisian dealer with Greek ties, Jean Mikas, and Ernest Brummer sold Joseph Brummer a lot of 20 Greek vases on 24 September 1935, which Joseph then sold to William Randolph Hearst in April 1936 (Fig. 10)⁹⁸.

Fig. 10. Stock card from Brummer Gallery Records for a fourth-century BC Greek hydria, one in a lot of 20 vases sold by Manolis Segredakis with Jean Mikas and Ernest Brummer to Joseph Brummer on 24 September 1935, then sold to William Randolph Hearst in April 1936. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Thomas J. Watson Library Digital Collections, Cloisters Archives Collections, Brummer Gallery Records, P12057_recto (photograph from Brummer Gallery Records, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16028coll9/id/39796/rec/1 [accessed 11 April 2021])

Koutoulakis kept the Paris establishment but moved to Geneva, where he ran his antiquities business from his home. The majority of Koutoulakis’s documented antiquities dealings began in the 1950s and continued through the early 1980s, during which he developed close relationships with a number of collectors of antiquities, such as J. Paul Getty and George Ortiz, as well as with US museums, including The Met and the J. Paul Getty Museum⁹⁹. Koutoulakis is known as the dealer through whom the illicitly excavated Keros Hoard of Cycladic figurines became dispersed throughout American and European collections¹⁰⁰, and he is among the infamous dealers and collectors in the chain of looting outlined in the organigram recovered in a raid on the premises of Danilo Ziccho in Italy in September 1995 by the Carabinieri; there is a direct line from dealer Robert Hecht’s name to Koutoulakis and collector George Ortiz¹⁰¹.

[35] Several wealthy Swiss collectors may have augmented their antiquities collections during the Nazi era, though the full picture of their purchases is not clear. The Antikenmuseum Basel, opened in 1966, has one of the largest public collections of antiquities in Switzerland, and one of the two major sources of its collection is Robert Käppeli (1900–2000), a pharmaceutical executive from Lucerne. Part of Käppeli’s collection was exhibited in Lucerne in 1963, and many objects were already included in Karl Schefold’s catalog for a special exhibition of Greek masterpieces held in Basel in 1960¹⁰². The provenance for some of these objects indicates purchases at various auctions, mostly in Switzerland, from 1951 into the early 1960s. However, one Geometric bronze horse in Käppeli’s collection was formerly in the private collection of Swiss classical archaeologist Ernst Pfuhl (1876–1940), whose collection was sold in 1941 at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne¹⁰³. Pfuhl’s father-in-law was the Greek antiquities dealer Athanasios Rhousopoulos (1823–1898), from whom he may have acquired ancient objects¹⁰⁴. One transfer of the complicated provenance of the bronze statuette of Luna in the Getty Villa can be traced to Käppeli¹⁰⁵. In addition, a Hellenistic marble torso of Aphrodite in the Cleveland Museum of Art, acquired in 1988 and said to have been found in Southern Italy (Tarentum) early in the 20th century¹⁰⁶, was also in Käppeli’s collection and, like the bronze statuette of Luna, was part of the von Gans collection that was bought by the Bachstitz Gallery in 1921 (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Marble torso of Aphrodite, said to be from Tarentum, Hellenistic period. Formerly in the collections of Jacob Hirsch, Ludwig von Gans, Bachstitz Gallery, Max Emden, and Robert Käppeli, who sold it to The Cleveland Museum of Art in 1988 (acc. 1988.9) (photograph, “Aphrodite Torso”, courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1988.9 [accessed 6 April 2022])

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s online information, before 1935 the marble Aphrodite torso was in the collection of Max Emden (1874–1940), a Jewish-German chemist, entrepreneur and owner of a department store group. The Emden family was persecuted during the Nazi era, with their German businesses, properties, and financial assets seized in 1934 and 1935. In 1937 Emden was forced to sell his art collection¹⁰⁷. In addition, the family’s works of art at their villa on the Brissago Islands in the Swiss part of Lake Maggiore were stolen during World War II¹⁰⁸. The last name listed for the provenance of the Cleveland Aphrodite is Dr. Robert Käppeli, in whose hands the torso was by 1935, though it is not stated how he acquired it. He sold the torso to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

[36] Another collector in the Swiss art market was Josef Müller (changed to Mueller) (1887–1977) from Solothurn, a collector of primarily Modern art and African ethnographic objects but also antiquities. Some of these are displayed today, along with the collection of his son-in-law, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, in the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva¹⁰⁹. The antiquities include Neolithic, Cycladic, Egyptian, EuropeanBronze Age, Italic, Etruscan, and Middle Eastern objects. The provenance of many of them is not specified in the museum’s online catalog, but some are identified as having been acquired by Mueller “before 1939”¹¹⁰, while the provenance for others is listed as “before 1942”¹¹¹. Presumably, 1939 and 1942 are dates when inventories were taken of Mueller’s collection; thus we might infer that the “before 1942” objects were not in Mueller’s collection by the 1939 inventory but were acquired between 1939 and 1942. His son-in-law records that after Josef moved back to Switzerland in 1942, he made frequent trips to Paris in the 1942–1947 time period, where he bought ancient ceramics and marble and bronze sculpture from Koutoulakis, whose (mostly later) suspicious antiquities dealings are discussed above¹¹². After Josef’s death, part of his collection was sold at Christie’s London in 1978, and three of his antiquities were acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum: a Roman marble head of a philosopher¹¹³; a Roman marble head of Apollo¹¹⁴; and a fragment of an Archaic period horse head, probably from an Attic context, given the reference to Hymettian marble, which was donated to the museum in 1980¹¹⁵.

The Netherlands

[37] The various archival holdings that reveal the history of systematic looting of Jewish property, art sales, and transfers in the Netherlands during the Nazi period have yet to be examined with a specific focus onantiquities¹¹⁶. The primary Nazi looting agencies in the Netherlands were the Dienststelle Mühlmann, under the direction of the Austrian Kajetan Mühlmann (1898–1958) (also active in the plunder of art from Poland and Austria), and the Möbel-Aktion, though after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the spring of 1940 there was a flood of art dealers, museum directors, and private collectors ready to pounce on Dutch art at low prices¹¹⁷. Walter Andreas Hofer (1893–1971), Göring’s art adviser and buyer, was one of these. He was, however, already well acquainted with the art scene in the Netherlands because he was the brother-in-law and former employee (1922–1928) of the Jewish art dealer Kurt Walter Bachstitz (1882–1949), who founded a thriving internationally known art dealership in The Hague (Kunsthandel K.W. Bachstitz) in 1920¹¹⁸. Bachstitz ran the gallery with his Protestant wife, Lili Hofer, after the Nazi occupation in order to avoid the Nazi restrictions on non-Aryan businesses; he was imprisoned nevertheless and was forced to divorce his wife (1943) and flee to Switzerland (1944). Bachstitz’s name appears in various places in this special issue. In 1921 he purchased one of the great pre-Nazi private collections of antiquities in Germany, that of Friedrich Ludwig von Gans, and in 1941 he sold several ancient objects from this collection to Hans Posse for the “Führermuseum” (Figs. 12a, 12b)¹¹⁹.

Fig. 12a. Tanagra terracotta figurine of a female with a fan, Hellenistic period. Formerly in the collection of Ludwig von Gans; bought by Kunsthandel K.W. Bachstitz, The Hague, 1921; sold to Hans Posse for the “Sonderauftrag Linz“, 1940; transferred to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden in 1953 (acc. 1953/3.1) (photograph “Tanagra-figurine met meloenkapsel, himation en spiegel”, courtesy of Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, https://www.rmo.nl/en/collection/search-collection/collection-piece/?object=59953 [accessed 6 April 2022])

Fig. 12b. Tanagra figurine in Linz album XX, reprod. from: Birgit Schwarz, Hitlers Museum: Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz: Dokumente zum "Führermuseum", Vienna 2004, 327, XX/4 (photograph © Birgit Schwarz, Vienna; photograph by Angelika Weidling, Berlin, with permission of Birgit Schwarz)

Austria

[38] Massive confiscations of property belonging to Viennese Jews occurred in Austria; however, there were very few ancient works of art in the larger collections, including in the Rothschild’s. We might surmise that antiquities were not particularly in vogue in these collecting circles. The Lanckoroński collection and that of the publisher Paul Zsolnay, inherited by him from his father, the collector Adolf (Wix) von Zsolnay (1866–1932), are notable exceptions. The Zsolnay collection included a Thasian votive relief (sixth century BC); a Thasian grave relief (third centuryBC) (purchased from the heirs by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2014) (Fig. 13)¹²⁰; two terracotta sima architectural fragments; a collection of 65 items of Greek and Roman gold jewelry and gems; and ancient coins.

Fig. 13. Marble grave relief, Thasos, third century BC. Ex. collection of Paul and Andy Zsolnay, now in Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Antikensammlung I 1553 (photograph: courtesy of KHM-Museumsverband)

Bernhard Witke, the Gestapo treasurer of the Austrian agency for the disposal of the property of Jewish emigrants, was named trustee of the collection in 1938 after the Zsolnays fled to London; he gave Hans Posse 14 pieces of jewelry and/or coins for the Linz museum; ten of these were given to Hitler as a birthday gift in 1944¹²¹. Paul Zsolnay must have managed to export some other antiquities from his collection before or when he fled to London, for some sculptures were sold at a Sotheby’s London sale of 13 June 1944; two of these, both from Thasos, are now in the J. Paul Getty Museum¹²².

[39] Although Count Karol Lanckoroński (1848–1933) was an aristocrat of Polish descent and not Jewish, his collection was confiscated in 1939 from his Vienna palace, then owned by his son Antoni¹²³. This collection comprised more than 350 antiquities, including Greek and Roman marble sculpture, Greek vases, bronzes, terracotta figurines, glass, mosaic and fresco fragments, some Etruscan objects, and a few Egyptian antiquities. In this publication, Victoria S. Reed examines several of the Lanckoroński antiquities now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston¹²⁴.

Poland

[40] In Poland there was a great deal of looting of art collections, especially in the first weeks of the German occupation in September 1939, with Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland, protecting collections for his own control¹²⁵. Polish collections in Warsaw and Krakow were especially vulnerable. Among the works of art lost in Poland during this period and still not accounted for, according to the database of the Polish government, are 345 ancient objects: Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Byzantine, and Egyptian ceramic vases, sculpture, jewelry, bronzes, and bone/ivory items¹²⁶. The majority of these are identified as having been in the National Museum in Warsaw, in the university collection in Warsaw, and in the Czartoryski collections in Gołuchów Castle near Poznań or in Krakow. The major private art collector in Poland was the Czartoryski family, whose collection was confiscated by the Nazis in 1940, with 85 important works of art selected for the Linz museum. The antiquities were mostly assembled by Princess Izabela Działyńska (neé Czartoryska) (1833–1899), owner of the Gołuchów Castle. Some of these, especially the Greek vases, were transferred to her as a debt payment from her husband, Count Jan Działyński, who had formed a collection while in Italy in 1865–1867 (including from excavations in Capua), and others were from the collection that she began in 1852¹²⁷. In the 1880s, Izabela began collecting Egyptian and Cypriot antiquities, and some artifacts from the excavations of Alfred Louis Delattre at Carthage were acquired by 1895¹²⁸. In this publication, Inga Głuszek and Michał Krueger reconstruct the complicated fate of this collection during World War II, with multiple bad actors removing parts of the collection. In 1945 part of the collection, including some objects already robbed by the Nazis, were plundered again—by the Soviet Trophy Brigades—from German repositories and shipped to the Soviet Union. They were mostly returned to Poland in 1956. However, the collections were not returned to their former owners or their heirs. The castle in Gołuchów, its surviving furnishings, and the artifacts were taken over by the Polish state, and Gołuchów castle eventually became a branch of the National Museum in Poznań. Now the objects from the important collection of Jan Działyński and Izabela Czartoryska are found in several museums in Poland. Other ancient artifacts from the collection are lost, possibly destroyed¹²⁹.

Hungary

[41] In Hungary antiquities were seized from at least four major collections in Budapest, lost first to Nazi robbing, then some to the Soviet Trophy Brigades and some to state museums in Hungary that kept the collections after the war. Baron Ferenc Hatvany’s collection comprised a range of antiquities—including an Egyptian Saite-period bronze statuette, a mummy case, Greek Tanagra figurines, a fourth-century BC bull’s head rhyton, Roman bronze statuettes of Venus and Eros, and a marble portrait of Alexander Severus¹³⁰. Baron Adolf Kohner’s collection focused on carved gems (Roman cameos and intaglios) and jewelry¹³¹. Zoltan Mariassy’s missing collection included a probable Greek fourth-century BC male torso¹³².

[42] One of the largest private art collections (ca. 2,500 works) in Hungary, however, was owned by Baron Mór Lipót Herzog (1869–1934) and inherited by his wife (d. 1940) and then by their two sons and daughter. It comprised paintings by El Greco, Corot, Velázquez, Courbet, and Cranach the Elder, as well as some 330 ancient objects¹³³. At least some of the antiquities, including five relief sculptures, may have been collected in Greece by Baron Herzog’s father, Peter Herzog (1838–1914), owner of a major tobacco company in Kavala in northern Greece¹³⁴. The family’s villa and collection in Budapest were confiscated by the Nazis in 1944. Some items were handed over by the Nazis (or later returned by the Allies to Hungary) to the Hungarian National Gallery and Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; the Museum of Applied Arts; and the Budapest Technological University, which have held on to some of these artworks to this day; much of the collection is still missing¹³⁵, a fate not dissimilar to that of the Działyński-Czartoryska collection in Poland. Among the artworks sought by the Herzog family in legal actions against the Republic of Hungary are several antiquities, including an Attic marble relief, a so-called Totenmahl or funerary banquet relief, of the second half of the fourth century BC. Framed by pilasters and a roof with antefixes, it depicts a reclining, partly draped hero with a polos on his head, holding a rhyton aloft, with a female seated on the end of the couch (kline), a banquet table and amphora in front, four assembled family members, and a horse head as a heroic attribute in the upper left. It is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (Fig. 14a)¹³⁶. The family also seeks 177 items of gold jewelry, coins, and other objects of daily life; four Egyptian items, statues, stelai, and a first-century AD female mummy mask (Fig. 14b)¹³⁷; four silver coins; and 78 ancient cameos, intaglios, other carved stones¹³⁸.

Fig. 14a. Marble relief with a Heroic Banquet Scene, Greek, second half of fourth century BC. Collection of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, now held in Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (no. 50.960) (photograph from website Hungary on Trial, see “Art Gallery”, no. 4, http://hungarylootedart.com/?page_id=34, with permission of Agnes Peresztegi)

Fig. 14b. Egyptian mummy mask, first century AD. Collection of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, now held in Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (no. 9818) (photograph from website Hungary on Trial, “Art Gallery”, no. 6, http://hungarylootedart.com/?page_id=34, with permission of Agnes Peresztegi)

[43] These cases represent just a fraction of the losses of ancient art in Hungary: those from well-documented collections. The inventories of the confiscated property of other Jewish families of Budapest also included antiquities, but these have not been comprehensively examined for this purpose¹³⁹.

The Soviet Union: Losses and transfers from Germany

[44] The Soviet Union’s losses during World War II were immense and devastating. More than 427 museums were plundered by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and other groups in the USSR, including 173 in Russia, in addition to the palaces of Leningrad and its suburbs¹⁴⁰. It is difficult, however, to be very precise in assessing the Soviet losses of works of art at the hands of the Nazis, including the number and nature of the antiquities that might have been destroyed or stolen, because the prewar inventories of Russian museums were incomplete, removed by the ERR, or destroyed—and information about these losses was regarded as classified by the Soviets, only recently having been made more transparent¹⁴¹. Yet, a searchable online summary catalog of the lost valuables of the Russian Federation includes some antiquities¹⁴².

[45] As is well-known, German public museums also suffered major losses, including of antiquities, from bombing, fire, theft, and looting. Despite the return of more than 1.5 million items from the Soviet Union to East Germany (German Democratic Republic) between 1955 and 1958, including the Pergamon Altar, there are more than 2,000 ancient objects still in Russia. Most of these were formerly in the Berlin Antikensammlung and were taken by the Soviet Trophy Brigades in 1945–1946 from bunkers and other storage areas¹⁴³. These include Priam’s Treasure, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Troy in 1873¹⁴⁴. The majority of these ancient collections remaining in Russia are now curated in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Historical Museum in Moscow, though a few antiquities have found their way to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. In the 2005 exhibition Archaeology of War: The Return from Oblivion, the Pushkin Museum displayed 552 ancient works of art, many shown for the first time since their disappearance from Berlin in 1945–1946¹⁴⁵. One more recent rediscovery is the gilded bronze statue of “Victoria of Calvatone” that turned up in 2015 in the Hermitage, having been mistakenly cataloged and housed with the French decorative arts collections and not recognized as the second-century AD statue that disappeared from the collections of the Altes Museum in Berlin in 1946¹⁴⁶. A gilded plaster cast of the statue is on display today in the Altes Museum, while the original remains in the Hermitage, exhibited for the first time there in December 2019 (Fig. 15). Analysis and conservation of the statue in the Hermitage have revealed that the wings were fashioned in 1844 after the statue had been purchased by the Prussian Royal Museum. That information, coupled with the bearskin worn by the female figure, suggests that the statue is not a Victoria but more likely a Diana.

Fig. 15. “Victoria of Calvatone”, second century AD. Ex. collection of Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, now in The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (inv. no. ЗСсэ-574) (photograph—as well as preview image for this essay—from website of State Hermitage Museum, “The Calvatone Victory: The Fate of a Masterpiece” [accessed 13 April 2021])

[46] The current Russian position on the matter of restitution of any works of art and other cultural objects that were taken from Germany to the Soviet Union and are in Russia today is uncompromising: “Everything that the Soviet Union took as compensation, which includes Schliemann’s gold as well, is not subject to return”¹⁴⁷. The Russian position is backed by a law passed in the State Duma in 1996 and reaffirmed in 1998 that does not allow for the repatriation of any collections taken from Germany¹⁴⁸. Yet, there has been a collegial spirit among the curators in Berlin and in Russia, sharing information and collaborating on joint projects to conserve, publish, and exhibit collections that were once in Germany¹⁴⁹.

Antiquities entering American collections: Mining the Brummer archives

[47] An important avenue to explore concerning the fate of antiquities is the American market for them from the end of World War I to the end of World War II. There were cases of random plunder by American troops during World War II, including (probably) a Roman portrait head found in 2018 in a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, that was looted from the Pompejanum, King Ludwig I’s (1786–1868) recreated Romanvilla in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria¹⁵⁰. Many sales of antiquities during this period were on the American market or to American collectors. We gain a view into the development of American antiquities collections, the dynamic European and American trade in this period, including in the immediate post-World War II period, and the major players in the source countries of the Mediterranean and Middle East in the period from 1933 to 1945 by examining the digitized archives in the Cloisters Library and Archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) of the records of the galleries in Paris and New York of the Hungarian-born Brummer brothers (Joseph [1883–1947], Ernest [1891–1964], and Imre [1895–1928]) (Fig. 16)¹⁵¹. Though the Brummers were not the only antiquities dealers supplying the American market during this broad period¹⁵², they were the most important source, especially Joseph. Around 1909 he began his antiquities business with the founding of a gallery in Paris, in which all three brothers became involved. In 1914 the main business shifted to New York; Ernest remained in Paris until just before the Nazi occupation, when he joined his brother.

Fig. 16. Joseph Brummer Gallery, 43 E. 57th St., NY, ca. 1918 (photograph from Brummer Gallery Records, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16028coll9/id/65884/rec/3 [accessed 13 April 2021])

Their galleries had various names and addresses, but the Brummer Frères were well-known for the sale of various categories of fine art, including Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine antiquities, in the years from 1909 until 1947, when Joseph died. The Met augmented its Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine collections with the purchase of many objects from Joseph’s private collection in 1947; another sale of the Brummer estatewas held at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet in 1949¹⁵³. Joseph’s widow, Ella, sold medieval objects to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 1966¹⁵⁴, and the rest of the collection was sold in Zurich in 1979.

[48] Through the digitized archives in The Met we have an unusually complete picture of from whom the Brummers acquired antiquities, as well as to whom they were selling them. The Met used the Brummers as intermediaries in purchases, including Joseph in their attempt to purchase the Lancellotti Discobolus¹⁵⁵. The names of their clients included some of the wealthiest American collectors. William Randolph Hearst (1860–1951)—son of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842–1919), prodigious collector of antiquities and anthropological objects, patron of archaeological expeditions, and philanthropist¹⁵⁶—was practically born a collector, especially of antiquities. Although he was already an established collector from 1899 to 1901, Hearst purchased around 540 works of art from the Brummers in the 1920s and 1930s and made a few purchases in the early to mid-1940s, of which over 100 are antiquities, including 43 Greek and Roman marble/stone objects, 13 Greek and Roman bronzes, and 9 Egyptian objects¹⁵⁷. Hearst purchased antiquities and other collections through many dealers, however, and most significantly acquired many important classical antiquities from old British collections, such as those of the Duke of Buckingham, Sir William Hamilton, Thomas Hope, and the noble Lansdowne family (from a sale in 1930)¹⁵⁸. With his financial situation deteriorating, Hearst began liquidating his collections in 1937. He donated large portions to the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art (that would become the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA]) from 1946 until his death in 1951, including at least 92 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan objects, 78 Egyptian objects, and 16 ancient Middle Eastern objects¹⁵⁹. In this way, the so-called Hope Hygieia and Hope Athena, two exceptional Roman sculptures, became part of LACMA’s collection¹⁶⁰. After Hearst’s death, his collections were further dispersed through sales by the Hearst Corporation, with The Met purchasing 65 Greek and South Italian vases in 1956, some of which had been bought by Hearst from the Brummer Gallery¹⁶¹.

[49] From the 1920s¹⁶² until his death, Henry Walters (1848–1931) purchased many antiquities from the Brummers, especially Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine objects; his widow, Sarah, continued this practice into the 1940s, and the institution that resulted from the bequest of his home and collection, the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, also continued to purchase antiquities from the Brummers, including from a 1941 sale and the 1949 estate sale¹⁶³.

[50] Robert and Mildred Bliss, with whom the Brummers became acquainted in Paris when Robert served as the US ambassador to France from 1912 to 1919, purchased their first Byzantine objects from the Brummers’ Paris location. Altogether they acquired about 90 objects from the Brummers both in Paris and in New York, which are today in Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC¹⁶⁴. In addition to The Met (42 objects from the ancient Middle East, 45 from Egypt, 109 Greek and Roman)¹⁶⁵, other major museums, especially the Brooklyn Museum of Art (especially Egyptian objects)¹⁶⁶ and the University of Pennsylvania Museum (12 objects)¹⁶⁷, sought ancient collections from the Brummers.

[51] The Brummers’ sources for these antiquities were varied and included opportunistic sales such as the 1921 London sale of Egyptian and Oriental antiquities from Lord Amherst’s (1835–1909) collection, where Ernest purchased six Egyptian and Assyrian pieces¹⁶⁸, and the 1927 sale of the French collector Alphonse Kann’s collection at the American Art Association, New York, where the Brummers purchased 31 antiquities¹⁶⁹. They did not, however, make any purchases at the Lepke auctions of James Simon’s (1932) or Rudolf Mosse’s (1934) antiquities collections¹⁷⁰. In addition, the Brummers seem to have done no business with the prominent Berlin dealer and auctioneer Hans W. Lange, and they purchased only a handful of objects from the Munich dealer Julius Böhler: a marble Aphrodite figure from a fountain (N3526), bought in 1922¹⁷¹, and a wooden South German Gothic stall (N6012) purchased in 1931¹⁷². The Brummer Gallery had some dealings with Kurt Walter Bachstitz in The Hague; they bought or took on consignment from Bachstitz 12 works of art, including some Greek, Roman, and Byzantine antiquities (some from von Gans’s collection), and they also sold 11 items to Bachstitz between 1919 and 1937¹⁷³. The names of dealers, collectors, and other contacts in Berlin or Munich are notably few in Joseph Brummer’s card files; this certainly must reflect the geopolitical and practical realities of a dealer based in France and the US during or just after World War I, during the Nazi advances and occupation in Europe, and during World War II. The Brummers may also have made a conscious decision not to engage with the German dealers¹⁷⁴.

Egyptian antiquities

[52] The Brummers’ main source for Egyptian antiquities (including those of the Byzantine/Coptic period) was the well-connected and highly respected Cairo dealer Maurice Nahman (1868–1948)¹⁷⁵. Nahman was born in Cairo and hailed from a family of Greek Jews from northern Greece who emigrated to Cairo in the mid-19th century¹⁷⁶. The heyday of his activities as a dealer of many categories of art and antiquities was the 1920s and 1930s, but as early as 1909 he was involved in the sale of parts of the so-called Asyut Treasure of Byzantine jewelry¹⁷⁷. The famous faience figurine of a hippopotamus, which has become a mascot of The Met, was excavated in 1910 at Meir in Middle Egypt by Sayyid Pasha Khashaba, who acquired it as a division of the finds; then acquired and sold by Nahman in 1911 to Dikran Kelekian, it was finally purchased by The Met in 1917 (Fig. 17)¹⁷⁸.

Fig. 17. Faience hippopotamus (“William”), Middle Egypt,Meir, Tomb B3,ca. 1961–1878 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 17.9.1 (photograph: The Met, CC0 1.0 [accessed 21 April 2021])

The Brummers bought some 100 objects from Nahman between about 1921 and 1938. For example, the so-called Baker Dancer, a Hellenistic bronze statuette of a veiled and draped dancing woman, was acquired by Joseph Brummerfrom Nahman in 1926 and sold by Brummer in 1948 to Walter C. Baker¹⁷⁹. In addition to many individual transactions, Nahman sold his stock in various sales (in 1920 in Cairo; in 1937 in London; in 1947 in Cairo), and there were three posthumous sales of his collections: two in 1953 at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris and one in 2004 at Christie’s London by his daughter¹⁸⁰.

Middle Eastern antiquities

[53] For Middle Eastern antiquities the Brummers bought single items from many individuals, but two names stand out: Alexander D. Messayeh (with several New York addresses), from whom the Brummers purchased about 40 Babylonian, Sassanian, Egyptian, and a few Greek and Roman objects between 1918 and 1930¹⁸¹, and Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948), from whom the Brummers purchased 17 Babylonian and Sassanian objects in 1944¹⁸². Herzfeld was a German archaeologist who was forced out of his professorship in Berlin in 1935 because of his Jewish background. He was a monumental figure in the development of the field of Middle Eastern archaeology and excavated widely in Turkey, Syria, and Persia (Iran), yet his role as a dealer and purveyor of antiquities while a practicing archaeologist makes him a controversial individual, with the probability that the objects he owned and sold were illegallyexported from Iran and Mesopotamia¹⁸³. By 1944, when he sold these objects to the Brummers, he was in the US as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey¹⁸⁴.

Greek antiquities

[54] Among the various dealers from whom the Brummers purchased Greek antiquities, the name Theodoros Zoumboulakis (Zoumpoulakis; Zoumpoulakis in partnership with several other dealers/owners) (birth/death dates uncertain) stands out, with more than 550 purchases between 1924 and 1946, but with a gap during the period of the triple occupation of Greece and major political upheaval from 1940 to 1945¹⁸⁵. Zoumboulakis opened his antiquities shop on Edward Law Street in Athens in 1912, and he seems to have been active up until the 1960s (Fig. 18)¹⁸⁶. Another member of the family, Byron Th. Zoumboulakis, had a business in Geneva and was selling some of Theodoros’s inventory into the early 1960s¹⁸⁷. Peggy Zoumboulakis gifted many Greek vases and sherds to the Benaki Museum, Athens, in 1986 and 2005, that were acquired by her father-in-law, Theodoros, probably at the height of his business in the 1930s. Many of these are Attic, Boeotian, and Corinthian red-figure vases depicting nuptial scenes, suggesting they came from the graves of women, some likely from Boeotia¹⁸⁸. Theodoros’s shop in Athens was raided by Greek authorities in 1938, with the confiscation of objects, especially terracotta figurines and vases, that were taken to the National Archaeological Museum, Athens¹⁸⁹. The precise reason for this raid is not specified, but we can infer that the objects had been illegally obtained¹⁹⁰.

Fig. 18. Advertisement for Zoumboulakis & C., Maison d’Antiquités, Rue Eduard Low 13, Athens, unknown date after 1912 (photograph from website of Zoumboulakis Galleries, “Our History” [accessed 13 April 2021])

[55] That Zoumboulakis took advantage of all possibilities to acquire antiquities is also illustrated by the acquisition and sale of a seventh-century BC bronze griffin cauldron attachment that had been accidentally found in the Kladeos River near the gymnasium of ancient Olympia in December 1914 and deposited in storage in the Olympia Museum (Fig. 19a). How and when it left Olympia is not clear, but in the summer of 1936, the same year in which the object appeared in a prominent publication by Ernst Buschor¹⁹¹, Joseph Brummer purchased it from Coomber (Coomber and Dickin?) and Zoumboulakis for $25. It was reported missing from the Olympia Museum in a 1937–1938 publication, about which Brummer was aware since a transcription of the relevant page of the German publication was found among the Brummer Gallery’s papers (Figs. 19b-c)¹⁹². Brummer put the griffin attachment in storage in Manhattan in 1937 and held onto it for more than a decade, perhaps in order to avoid calling attention to its loss from Olympia and/or to allow this rare and important object to appreciate in value. He finally sold it on 15 January 1948 to Walter C. Baker for $27,000—an astounding profit. It was acquired in 1971 by The Met as a bequest from Baker’s estate¹⁹³.

Fig. 19a. Stock card from Brummer Gallery Records for a bronze griffin cauldron attachment, sixth century BC, from Olympia, Brummer no. P13197 (photograph from Brummer Gallery Records, “Head of a griffin in bronze. Open mouth. 6th C. B. C.” [accessed 12 April 2021])

Figs. 19b-c. Transcripts of Emil Kunze and HansSchleif, Bericht über die Ausgrabungen in Olympia, vol. 2, Berlin 1937–1938, 114, and Archaiologikon Deltion 1 (1915), 89, found in Brummer Gallery files (photographs from Brummer Gallery Records, “Head of a griffin in bronze. Open mouth. 6th C. B. C.” [accessed 12 April 2021])

[56] Museums were also buying directly from Theodoros Zoumboulakis, and the range of antiquities that can be connected to this dealer in the period of our study is broad. For example, the British Museum acquired from him in 1922 a Geometric-period bronze horse suckling a foal¹⁹⁴; Harold Woodbury Parsons purchased a marble Roman statue of Castor or Pollux for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, from Zoumboulakis in 1933¹⁹⁵; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA Boston), purchased a Cycladic marble figurine from him in 1935¹⁹⁶ as well as an Archaic marble torso of a kouros in 1939¹⁹⁷.

Antiquities from Italy

[57] For antiquities from Italy, the Brummers’ main sources were Ugo and Aldo Jandolo, who owned a gallery in Rome at 53 Via Margutta¹⁹⁸. Hailing from a family of antiquities dealers, their names figure prominently in the provenance of many ancient objects, especially Roman sculpture, in American museums acquired from the 1920s to the end of World War II. The Jandolos were the go-betweens in the sale of the famed Discobolus by the Lancellotti family, with Joseph Brummer acting as The Met’s agent (and working through the Jandolos) in trying to acquire the statue in the 1930s¹⁹⁹. Ugo’s name appears in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Art Looting Investigation Unit’s (ALIUD) “Red Flag List”, compiled in 1945–1946, as someone who sold sculpture to Walter Andreas Hofer for Hermann Göring’s collection, using as an intermediary the dealer Alessandro Morandotti (1909–1979), born from a Jewish-Viennese mother and an Italian father²⁰⁰. Among these objects are an Imperial Roman portrait of a woman and akneeling Venus statue, both sold to Hofer in 1943, as well as a sarcophagus with lion imagery, sold in 1942²⁰¹. The Brummers bought approximately 140 items from the Jandolos between 1925 and 1946, including a marble head of Menander from Aldo Jandolo in 1943, sold to Dumbarton Oaks in 1946 (Fig. 20)²⁰².

Fig. 20. Stock card from Brummer Gallery Records for a marble portrait of Menander, purchased from Aldo Jandolo in May 1943 for $5,000; sold by Brummer to Dumbarton Oaks in 1946 for $7,500; Brummer no. N5521 (photograph from Brummer Gallery Records, “Life-size head of Menander, in marble” [accessed 15 April 2021])

The relationship went both ways, and the Brummers sold around 29 objects to the Jandolos²⁰³. The Jandolos were able to acquire newly excavated antiquities in Italy, such as the Roman tomb relief of the Publius Gessius family, in which transaction both Aldo and another member of the Jandolo family, Mario, were involved, along with another Roman art dealer, Armando Pacifici; the Jandolos sold the relief to the Brummer Gallery in 1936, and they, in turn, sold it in 1937 to MFA Boston. The relief was said by Aldo to have been excavated in September 1936 on the Via Cassia near Viterbo, but at the time of its acquisition, the MFA Boston was told by Brummer that it was excavated in Rome and exported with a permit²⁰⁴.

Conclusions

[58] We can conclude from our studies that there were many transfers of antiquities during the Nazi period (1933 to 1945), some as a result of confiscations (e.g., ERR activities in France from 1940 to 1944; the Zsolnay collection in Vienna in 1938; the Mosse collection in Berlin in 1934; the Czartoryski collection inPoland in 1940; the Herzog collection in Hungary in 1944) or as a result of duress or forced sales of Jewish collectors (e.g., Max Emden in 1934 and 1935) or through direct sales from dealers. Antiquities collections amassed before 1933 were also being disposed of during this period, some at auctions and some in individual sales through dealers (e.g., Bachstitz in The Hague). Antiquities were also still directly available from source countries, including Persia (Iran) and Mesopotamia (Iraq)²⁰⁵; Egypt (e.g., through Maurice Nahman in Cairo)²⁰⁶; and Greece (various dealers, but especially Theodoros Zoumboulakis) and Italy (e.g., the active Jandolos). In some cases, local dealers or Nazi military or civilian leaders were able to take advantage of loose antiquities regulations or to ignore those regulations to acquire newly (illicitly) excavated objects to satisfy demand. For example, the German presence in Egypt from 1939 to 1942 made possible the theft and sale of archaeological objects²⁰⁷. And Mattes Lammert has shown that German museums took advantage of the availability of ancient Egyptian collections in the Paris art market to augment their collections²⁰⁸. There were many cases of petty and large-scale theft or attempted theft from vulnerable museums or archaeological sites in Greece, as shown by Alexandra Kankeleit in this special issue²⁰⁹, in Italy, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. There were diplomatic/propaganda transfers such as the gifts of ancient art from Italian Fascist party members to Hitler (e.g., the 1938 gift of an Apulian vase in Rome) or to Göring (e.g., the 1938 gift of the Venus from Leptis Magna, Libya) and the purchases from the Lancellotti family in Rome of the Discobolus statue in 1938, with an export permit allowed by Mussolini²¹⁰, and from the Barberini family of the Rape of Europa mosaic in 1941²¹¹.

[59] In general, the art market was booming during the Nazi period in parts of Europe, especially in Paris and Switzerland, with the availability of confiscated Jewish collections or duress sales, the purging of “degenerate” Modern art from German museums, and the resulting status that art collecting conveyed to Nazi elites. The inventory was full, but the prices were, in general, low²¹². In the period from around 1940 to 1945, at the height of the military conflict in Europe, the legitimate antiquities market seems to have diminished in most parts of Europe (and in the US), as compared to the previous decade, with the exception of the Paris and Swiss trade. Armenian antiquities dealers in Paris continued to supply the market²¹³, and Switzerland was still a haven for many transfers of art, including antiquities, in this period. Emanuele Sbardella shows, for example, how the coin market with largely Jewish-owned numismatics dealerships was transferred to Switzerland²¹⁴. German dealers with business sense opened or turned to established dealerships and partnerships in Switzerland (e.g., Julius Böhler and Nicolas Koutoulakis). Antiquities stock bought in previous decades was sold (e.g., Bachstitz’s 1941 sale of parts of Friedrich Ludwig von Gans’s collection to Hans Posse for the Linz museum; the 1941 Brummer New York sale; or Ernst Herzfeld’s 1944 sale to the Brummers after Herzfeld moved to the US). The upper echelons of the Nazi party, especially Hermann Göring, continued to enhance their collections of antiquities during this later period²¹⁵, and some dealers and art agents (e.g., Prince Philipp von Hessen) were able to negotiate and profit in the market because of their ties to Nazi authorities.

[60] Among collectors of the later 19th century and first third of the 20th century, there was a general preference for antiquities of Kunst- und Wunderkammer scale, such as jewelry, coins, bronze and terracotta statuettes, and smaller ceramics. Greek and Roman antiquities constitute the largest category, with Greek vases of special interest to many collectors, including Izabela Działyńska (née Czartoryska) in Poland and, to a lesser extent, Hermann Göring²¹⁶. During the Nazi period there were only a few collectors whose financial means, contacts, and interests allowed them to purchase impressive large-scale works of Greek and Roman art. Greek vases and marble sculpture were within the grasp of the wealthy American collector William Randolph Hearst in the first four decades of the 20th century. Göring, through his dealers, acquired large-scale statues, both original works of art and copies of famous works, as decoration for his hunting villa of Carinhall²¹⁷.

[61] Egyptian artifacts rank a close second to Greek and Roman antiquities in the collecting practices and transfers during the Nazi period. There is no doubt that there were illicit excavations conducted in Egypt during World War II, with collections eventually making their way to Europe and the US²¹⁸. Late Roman/Byzantine (Coptic period) antiquities, especially from Egypt and the Middle East and especially small items such as jewelry, appear often in the context of this special issue. It is difficult, however, to differentiate Roman from Late Roman/Byzantine antiquities in the imprecise language of many of the archival documents.

[62] Only a few Etruscan antiquities can be documented in the trade during the Nazi period, though this is difficult to accurately assess because of the confusion in the descriptions and identification of Etruscan objects²¹⁹. Two probable fourth-century BC Etruscan bronze situlae are shown on a shelf among an eclectic array of objects confiscated by the Allies and held in Neuschwanstein Castle; these were photographed by Thérèse Bonney in 1945 but have not yet been linked to a specific owner²²⁰. As I discuss in my article in this special issue, the Etruscans were not in favor among Nazi ideologues, and there is very little evidence that the Nazi elite were greatly interested in this category of antiquities²²¹. A composite (pastiche?) of a bronze vessel with an Etruscan warrior statuette atop the lid appearing in photos of Göring’s Carinhall²²² and an Etruscan bronze helmet in Heinrich Himmler’s collection, however, are exceptions²²³.

[63] As indicated at the outset, this study has scratched deeply into the surface of the topic of the fate of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern antiquities during the Nazi era, but it has become very clear as we have gathered these studies that there is still much more to be done: details to be uncovered and more data to be mined from the increasing numbers of digitized databases, auction catalogs, and dealer files. In addition, scholarly examination of archival documents in many repositories and provenance research in many museum collections remain to be conducted. These will certainly add to our picture of antiquities collecting and trade in the first half of the 20th century in Europe, the Middle East, and the US, as well as the methods and nature of antiquities transfers during the Nazi period.

Special Issue
Irene Bald Romano, ed., The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era, in: RIHA Journal 0282-0294 (15 September 2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2022.2.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all the authors of this special issue and those that have supported the publication, especially Gail Feigenbaum and Sandra van Ginhoven at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Christian Fuhrmeister of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, and Hermann Parzinger, president of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. I also owe my thanks to numerous colleagues who shared their expertise with me, who are named in the acknowledgments to my article in this special issue.

License
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