The following are excerpts from a Bloomberg article about a woman, Gisela Bermann-Fischer, whose family was looted by the Nazis in 1938. Her winning fight to reclaim a piece of stolen art took guts and determination.
Few heirs have the persistence to conduct the kind of campaign that Bermann-Fischer has led, said Gunnar Schnabel, a Berlin-based lawyer who specializes in art-restitution cases.
"How many people would sustain a battle lasting years against former Nazi art dealers, their secret trustees and dubious lawyers to get a picture back?" Schnabel asked. "Only a very few extraordinary, cosmopolitan people like Gisela Bermann-Fischer."
Most of us simply don't have the perseverance and wherewithal to undertake and win a battle with modern-day Nazis like Bermann-Fischer has. I am grateful to her for her efforts. Partly because it allows me the segue to address the [slightly taboo] topic a bit.
Here's a bit of her story.
Gisela Bermann-Fischer waited almost 70 years to get back a painting by Camille Pissarro stolen from her family’s home in Vienna by the Gestapo in 1938. ...
She recovered "Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps" after a quest that pitched her into a battle of lawyers’ letters with Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer appointed by Hermann Goering to loot treasures in occupied France, and finally led to a Zurich bank vault, where the picture was stashed in a safe. Prosecutors sealed the safe as part of a continuing three-nation probe into associates of Lohse suspected of extortion and money-laundering.
Although the art dealer and the bank that hid the picture are still under investigation, Bermann-Fischer's case is settled and the painting is finally heading to the auction block by her choice. It's estimated to fetch as much as 1.5 million pounds at auction.
Some people might ask "If she worked so hard to get the painting, why is she selling it?" Her answer is this:
I have invested such a tremendous amount over the past 13 years, so much energy and so much of my finances, that it would be frivolous to keep it."
So in Bermann-Fischer's case it seems that the battle was not only about getting the painting, but really about getting it away from the bad guys. In that vein, I want to echo what some people in situations similar to Bermann-Fischer's have said. And that is to ask: "If the settlements for WW2 are not honored, did we really win the war?'
The Nazis stole about 650,000 artworks altogether, the New York-based Jewish Claims Conference estimates. The Art Loss Register, a database of stolen art, lists 70,000 works lost in World War II that are still being sought by the owners.
Bermann-Fischer's case presents the opportunity for a teachable moment for those who can see the bigger picture. The lesson I want to convey is that the Nazis did not only take art and lock them in vaults - they also stole priceless antiquities that belong to the whole world, as well as actual bank accounts and stock piles of treasure that were being held as collateral before and up to the time of being looted by the Nazis.
There is one thing I want to make sure people understand about what I call I sometimes call 'ww2 settlements', of which this painting is a tiny fraction, in a representitive way. That is that the funds do not need to be 'raised' in order to be retributed. Just as the Pissarro painting did not need to be painted in order to be returned to Gisela Bermann-Fischer. It's already there, in many cases collateral accounts are confirmed and release has been court-ordered, but it always, always, always, has an error somewhere in the process that scoots it down a different path to never see the light of days because the claimants either run out of money, energy, courage, or heirs to continue the fight... sadly, making the assets the property of whomever has been blocking it - the banks (among others). In other words, the bad guys win.
The longer the wait for disbursal, the greater the likelihood that heirs with knowledge of the accounts or treasure will be dead. That's why they delay. It may not always be the exact same technique as the hoarding of stolen art - but the premise for hoarding stolen assets of any kind is the same: Wait out the rightful owners.
"I don’t think we’ll ever find out from where to where the painting was transported over the years," Bermann-Fischer said. "It truly was hidden. I think the exhibition at l’Hermitage Lausanne in 1984 was a test run, to see whether the original owners or any heirs were still on the lookout for the paintings and would make a claim."
The safe, in the Zuercher Kantonalbank on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse, was registered to a Liechtenstein trust called Schoenart Anstalt that Lohse controlled. The trust is still under investigation, Lutz said. A Liechtenstein court ordered the painting to be returned to Bermann-Fischer in 2007. She says the Pissarro may have been in the vault of the Zuercher Kantonalbank since the 1970s.
"There are probably thousands of paintings, still in safes, waiting for the passing away of the last possible claimants," Bermann-Fischer said.
It's my belief that in the last sentence you could replace the word "paintings" with the phrase "collateral treasure" and it would likely be just as accurate, and tell a much broader/more-inclusive/bigger-picture of the truth as well.
There is more I would like to chat about, but I believe this is the kind of subject that needs to be consumed in small doses. [Toe in water.] In future, I expect there will be more stories like Gisela Bermann-Fischer's - not exactly the same - but similar. Please let's not miss the bigger picture.
Hattip: Catherine Hickley of Bloomberg News
Full disclosure: I knew nothing of this case until I found the above referenced article.
Peace.
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*Definition of Godwin's Law.