This was once a center of the Nazi Party in
Munich. And here, where the Nazis planned the systematic seizure of
Jewish assets, today a belated restitution for those
crimes is being worked on. The batch of documents that arrived at the
Central Institute for Art History in Munich are a treasure trove for the art world.
Provenance researcher Meike Hopp has received the entire archive of the
Julius Böhler art dealership from the years 1933 to 1945 to work through. It
could be a huge opportunity to locate lost artworks from
Jewish collections. -This can be like looking for a needle in
a haystack. We have at least 8,500 photos like this to digitize. We have a total of
nearly 40,000 of Böhler's transactions that we’re working on and figuring out.
So we have a lot of work ahead of us. -Viktor Klemperer. Rudolf Mosse.
Siegfried Lämmle. Artur Rubinstein. James Bleichröder.
Fritz Gutmann. Agathe Saulmann. These are important names, but we
must always remember that they are simply representative of very,
very many fates in the Nazi era. Given the large number of objects we
provenance researchers work with, and the many names we encounter that we can’t even
properly identify, cases like these are very important as examples. They enable
us to demonstrate how the mechanism of expropriation and looting functioned and
how certain objects ended up in museums. And of course, each object
has a very moving story to tell of the fate
of its former owners. The town of Pfullingen is located in
southwestern Germany. This is where the Jewish couple Ernst and Agathe Saulmann,
who were avid art collectors, lived from the late 1920s until they were forced
to flee Nazi Germany in late 1935. Provenance researcher Iris Schmeisser was
examining the collection of the Liebieghaus Museum in Frankfurt. She was checking its
legality when she found that the museum had a Madonna figure that had
belonged to the Saulmanns. -I think we can imagine how the Saulmanns
lived in the late 1920s, what kind of a feeling it must have been to
live in a house full of art. I’m trying to imagine where
the Madonna might have stood. The alabaster ‘Madonna and Child' dating
from the 14th century was sold to the Liebieghaus in 1936 by the Munich art
dealer Julius Böhler on behalf of the Saulmanns. The owners were forced to put
it up for sale when they fled the country. -You can sense from this photo that the
house was empty when it was taken. And I recognize this knob on the stairwell.
Now we have the carpeting and the wallpaper. It’s hidden
under the current décor. -These are pictures that the Reutlingen
Tax Office took in the couple’s absence. It's very important to note
that it was in their absence. But they are nonetheless extremely valuable
sources because they provide a few puzzle pieces that allow us to
reconstruct how this space looked when Ernst and Agathe
Saulmann lived here. Ernst and Agathe Saulmann moved into the
house called Erlenhof in the summer of 1927. In the neighboring town of
Eningen, Ernst Saulmann had a highly successful cotton weaving mill. His
wife was the one who built up the art collection — and she had another,
rather extravagant, hobby. -Well, apparently this is where Agathe
Saulmann landed her airplane and took off from this field. If there was a little
runway on this field or not I don’t know. Perhaps there was. But
anyway, this is the spot. Felix de Marez Oyens is the son of
Agathe Saulmann’s first husband. He lives in Paris, where he’s an art dealer
and an expert on rare books. He now represents a group of
the Saulmann heirs. -You call it ‘ein
Märchenschloss’. A ‘Märchenschloss’ — a fairytale house.
Only 11 objects from the family's considerable collection have been found
so far — in five German museums and three private collections abroad. Felix
de Marez Oyens is visiting Erlenhof for the first time; until now he
only knew it from photographs. -The desk in this picture, which was
Agathe’s, which was standing here at an angle. It was from that desk that she
started her correspondence with Julius Böhler on the necessity or the
planning of the several sales at Adolf Weinmüller's auction
house in Munich in 1936. On December 18, 1935 Agathe Saulmann got in
touch with art dealer Julius Harry Böhler: -We are currently trying to sell our
factory and liquidate our estate. Might you possibly be interested
in selling our collection? Before she received an answer the
Saulmanns had to flee the country — and leave behind everything
they had built up here. -At the moment it became clear that the
Saulmanns had left, the authorities imposed the so-called Reich Flight Tax.
That was nearly 140,000 Reichmarks that the Saulmanns had to scrape
together and pay in a hurry. The tax, originally enacted to stem the
flight of capital from Weimar Germany, became in the hands of the Nazis a way
of seizing Jewish property. These supposed debts to the state were
posted in the official government bulletin, the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger.
The Saulmanns were also listed here. In 1936 more and more Jews began to
flee from Germany. Many of those who owned artworks turned to their long-time
art dealer Julius Böhler. In many cases, they were being forced to hurriedly
sell off works that they had originally bought through him. In Spring of 1936
Böhler answered Agathe Saulmann’s letter: -Regarding your collection in Erlenhof,
I have looked up the items in the catalogues and I would be
happy to sell them for you. -This is the building where the Böhler
art dealership was located back then. The dealership, which had once been
named ‘Antiquary to the Royal Prussian Court’ had a reputation for
trustworthiness among its clients. -This shows how well-established he
already was in Munich around 1900 — and also that he had the financial clout
to put up a building like this — with more than 20 exhibition rooms. It could
be called basically a miniature Bavarian National Museum. And it shows how this
trade was flourishing in those years. In the early 20th century, sales to
wealthy Jewish clients all over Germany were booming for the dealership.
Reputable collectors like James Simon, Alfred Pringsheim and James von
Bleichröder purchased art at Böhler’s. When the Nazis seized power, this clientele
broke away practically overnight. -I not only imagine Julius Böhler walking
through here, but also his clients, including collectors who might have been
in dire straits and bringing objects that they were being forced
to sell in their predicament. From Florence, where she was living in
exile, Agathe Saulmann again turned to Böhler. She still believed
they might be able to meet. -I’m considering selling the German
artworks first. I believe that if we could discuss this in person, we could come
to a satisfactory arrangement. An appraisal of our works at Erlenhof should
probably take place after our conversation. -This correspondence shows her difficult
situation, the pressure she was under. And her desperation. After they’d left
all their property behind, to have to carry on this correspondence from abroad
with the dealer, but also with the Tax Office as to how they could keep them
from confiscating all of their property. -The objects I just scanned are all
objects from the Saulmann collection that are registered in the online Lost
Art database as still missing. These are not only works of fine art, but also
handicrafts, furniture, everyday objects. You can almost recreate in your
imagination what the family home looked like, it’s interior décor.
That’s what makes this so moving. -We have a total of around 40-thousand
transactions that we have been able to reconstruct for the period that the
Böhler Archive covers. Of course only part of that dates from the period 1933
to 1945. Since many dealers worked together, including people like
Weinmüller and Böhler, I’m sure that this archive, this trove of documents,
will allow us to shed light on more questions. This might well include
questions about the Saulmann collection. Today the Julius Böhler art dealership
is run from the family home in Starnberg near Munich by the fifth generation of the
dynasty. Florian Eitle-Böhler turned over his grandfather’s correspondence to the
Bavarian Economic Archive back in 1995. -This is our true home
and always will be. Recently he handed over the
company's entire archive to the Central Institute
for Art History. -I don’t have any more records here. It’s
all in public hands. It’s important to me to make it all transparent. I’m no
friend of sweeping things under the rug. We’ve tried to do that
for far too long. But what did Julius Harry Böhler tell
his family about his business dealings? -He liked to sit up there and look out
at the lake. And when he was there we usually hid or tried to stay out of
the way. We weren’t allowed to bother Grandfather. That's the way it was. My
mother would say, 'Grandpapa is there, don’t make so much noise.' That seems
normal if you’ve grown up with it. Today I wish it had been
different, but that’s how it was. That was a fairly unusual act — to
turn over all the company records for research purposes. Did Meike Hopp and her
team have a hard time persuading him? -We talked with him for a long time and
he said we could come and visit. He still had the archive with the index cards and
the portfolios of photographs. That was an amazing moment when we went
down into the cellar and found these steel cabinets with the photo
portfolios about the objects that were sold. Around 9,000 photo portfolios
were preserved. In addition there are the index cards about the sold objects,
which can tell us from which collection or from which seller an object came.
And also who ultimately bought it. The archive from the Böhler art
dealership is providing provenance researchers with essential data. For
the years 1933 to 1945 they document several thousand transactions. In the
summer of 1936 the Julius Böhler art dealership saw its turnover climb to six
times that of the previous years to nearly 1.3 million Reichmarks. Böhler
profited from the situation. Among his biggest purchasers were the Pinakothek
museums in Munich. The name Julius Böhler appears again and again on the lists
of provenance in their depositories. For instance, for numerous objects from
the collection of the Berlin banker James von Bleichröder. Provenance
researcher Andrea Bambi has devoted a detailed
study to the collection. -James von Bleichröder was the son
of Gerson von Bleichröder who was an important banker in Berlin. The
family — or he himself — owned an art collection that is documented in an
auction catalogue from the Lepke Auction House in Berlin, where the
collection was sold in 1938. The sale included many paintings, but also
very valuable decorative objects such as pieces of
furniture, etcetera. After James von Bleichröder died of
natural causes in Berlin in 1937, his entire collection was auctioned off
by the Lepke Auction House, and the integrity of the collection that the
family had accumulated over two centuries was lost forever. The rest of the
Bleichröder family was persecuted by the Nazis and forced to sell
off the estate under duress. Among the objects sold at the auction
was the 'Raising of Lazarus' painted around 1530 by a southern German master.
One of the most active bidders in the room was Julius Böhler
and he purchased the painting. -We have the invoices from the Lepke
Auction House to the Julius Böhler art dealership here in Munich. There it was
sold to Böhler for 3,600 Reichmarks and three quarters of a year later
Hermann Göring bought it for the enormous sum of 8,000 Reichmarks. So
it more than doubled in the space of nine months. Of course someone like
Böhler knew that when he sold it to Göring he didn’t need
to ask a cheap price. Hermann Göring, a leading Nazi who
had been made supreme commander of the Luftwaffe in 1935, was one of the
biggest beneficiaries of looted art. He accumulated a huge collection of
artworks, many of them from Jewish owners. He was particularly keen to
acquire medieval and Renaissance artworks, especially female nudes. For
provenance researchers, any hint that a work belonged to the ‘Sammlung
Göring’ — or Göring Collection — is a suggestion that
it may be looted art. -For Julius Böhler, as for a lot of them,
such as the Weinmüller Auction House, the fact that the Jewish art dealerships,
which had had a strong presence, and which were the big players, no
longer existed meant the market was completely
turned around. -That was something the Nazis exploited.
There was a tense financial situation at the time, which became evident in the
art business. After 1933, the so-called Aryan dealers like Adolf Weinmüller
exploited it to establish their own firms and push the Jewish firms
out of the market. The Weinmüller Auction House was
Böhler’s first choice for auctioning off the Saulmann collection. He didn’t tell
the Saulmanns that since early 1936 he himself had been a 50-percent
silent partner of the auction house and took
a cut of its profits. -That Weinmüller dealt in — quote —
unethical things or traded in looted art, what is called looted art today — back
then they didn’t have that term I think — and why my grandfather was involved in it
and when, I don’t know anything about that. In the summer of 1936 items from the
Saulmann collection were sold at an auction billed as an ‘old German art
collection.’ The proceeds of 40,000 Reichmarks were not enough for the
Saulmanns to pay their Reich Flight Tax. -In addition to that, Julius Böhler picked
out a number of especially valuable pieces from the collection and bought
them himself at the auction. That was in order to sell them later for many
times the price that he paid at the auction. Some of the buyers
were public museums. Böhler was very familiar with the
Saulmanns’ collection, since his dealership had helped them assemble it.
Now Böhler was dismantling it and profiting all the more. At the big auction
in the summer of 1936 he bought the Madonna and Child and sold it
just a year later at a profit to the Liebieghaus
museum in Frankfurt. -He sold it for six times the amount. The
money that flowed in from the sale of the art collection went directly to the
Tax Office or to the art dealer who had been commissioned with the sale. The
Saulmanns themselves didn’t see any of it. It’s hard to separate. Did he
maybe want to help Agathe Saulmann by saying, 'You’re under time pressure
and I know a way we can get this done quickly'? At the same time he was
a dealer and making a profit. That’s the morally
questionable element. -Factually, you can imagine that if a
dealer can get hold of more goods or has a chance at getting high-quality
goods cheaply, he would be acting uneconomically if he didn’t take
advantage of the situation. On the other hand, dealers like Julius Böhler
and Adolf Weinmüller and many more were quite aware of the predicament the
Jewish collectors were in at the time. -There were instances in which he
brought the artworks of persecuted owners to them abroad, and then there
were cases in which he was clearly a profiteer. Once we’re finished with the
‘Böhler Project’ I think we’ll be able to put a percentage to his actions: to what
extent was he a profiteer, how much did he help people, and how
much did he do people harm. It is still unclear how closely Julius
Böhler was connected with the Nazi regime. What is clear is that none of the
participating partners in his dealership were Nazi Party members. But as Reich
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made clear, the party was intent
on ensuring that all forms of culture would be
subordinated to the regime. Thanks to the Nazis’ cultural policies,
numerous works of dubious provenance have ended up in the holdings of German
museums. This dark legacy in public collections is something that to this
day imposes a burden of responsibility. -One of the bizarre aspects of the Nazis
— alongside the genocide, alongside the Holocaust — is that the leaders tried
to deck themselves out with art. That’s long been a tradition among those who
hold power. But in this case, the humanity that is essentially the basis of
art is coupled with the inhumanity of their political and military actions. And we
will never entirely resolve this paradox. In 1936, Adolf Hitler visited the Italian
fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Florence. By then, Ernst and Agathe
Saulmann had once again been forced to flee — this time to France. They
left behind their former vacation home in Florence and other
valuable art objects. Not long after their arrival, France
fell under German occupation. The Saulmanns were interned in the Gurs
concentration camp. At the same time Hermann Göring had discovered France as
a new source of art to loot. He asked Julius Böhler to act on behalf of the
Third Reich in France. Böhler refused and Göring reportedly left the
art dealer’s mansion in a rage and never bought works
from him again. -The market was driven by the frenzy
on the part of the Nazi elite. They’d developed this image of the great art
collector who was also a representative of Nazi ideology. Having an especially
valuable art collection was a mark of status. So these people were prowling
the art market, although they weren’t necessarily all that knowledgeable. Or
they didn’t have the best advisors. So that meant that the art dealers who
were there — like Weinmüller, for example — were able to sell
mediocre to inferior goods to this Nazi elite at
absurdly high prices. One blatant example was the painting 'Girl
Feeding the Chickens' by Hans Thoma. -Basically this painting is
emblematic of that time. In accordance with this new taste in
art, Ernst Buchner, the director of the Pinakothek museums, bought numerous
works by Hans Thoma, a darling of the regime. He financed the
purchases by giving Böhler a number of valuable
works in exchange. -Strangely enough, he made the
decision to draw on works that had been sacrosanct — he gave away a
Renoir and a Monet. Those are bitterly missed gaps in our collection today. In
other words, he took two significant works by artists of the caliber
of Renoir and Monet and handed them over to
Böhler, an art dealer. -In the mass of records we received
we have reports of several thousand transactions by the Julius Böhler art
dealership in the years 1933 to 1945 alone. So it will be a huge amount of
effort to digitize all this, and it will be a huge effort if we’re going to analyze
and assess all of the transactions. But we have to do it, because any one of these
transactions could provide a decisive clue to an expropriated, looted or in some
way illegitimately traded piece of art. When World War II ended in 1945,
Germany was in ruins. Gradually the crimes of the Nazis came to light. In
that summer Hermann Göring’s remaining art treasures were discovered hidden in
a train near Berchtesgaden. But that was only the tip of the iceberg when
it came to the plunder of artworks. -As soon as the cleanup of the ruins
began, it was clear that how to deal with looted cultural assets was going to
be an issue, and so was restitution of real estate or material goods
to the persecuted families. And at the time ways were
found of addressing it. In August 1945, Allied forces set up the
Munich Central Collecting Point. It was a depot for looted artworks and cultural
artifacts with a view to restoring them to their owners or possible heirs. It
was located in a former Nazi Party administration building, which today houses
the Central Institute for Art History. -Regrettably, the topic of looted
art under National Socialism was somewhat forgotten. It may have been
on people’s minds immediately after the war, during the reparation process,
but then over the decades it fell into oblivion in the public consciousness.
Of course there were people in the museums who knew that there
was a problem, but they weren’t really interested in
following up on the topic -If Ernst Buchner, my predecessor three
generations back, as it were, played an active role in the Old and New
Pinakothek museums — at a period when they had been bombed and the ruins
had to be rebuilt, then that was definitely a mistake, given his intense
involvement with the Nazi system. But at the same time, there were clearly
people here in Bavaria who wanted him as someone who was
knowledgeable about the museum business. They wanted him to help
rebuild the collection, rebuild the buildings, revive the institutions and
organizations. We also have to keep in mind that at the time, West Germany
wanted to enjoy its postwar economic miracle, and wanted to believe that the
Nazi era and Nazi guilt had been overcome. In 1998, more than four decades after
the end of the war, the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era
Assets marked a decisive moment for the families
affected by expropriation. -We must dig to find the truth. This
means that all researchers must have access to all archives and by that I
don’t mean partial, sporadic or eventual access. I mean access in full.
Everywhere. Now. The American diplomat Stuart Eizenstat
had initiated the gathering. Forty-four countries signed the Washington
Declaration, committing themselves to a set of 11 principles regarding
artworks confiscated by the Nazis. -To create a sense of urgency, it’s
a moral obligation. The Washington Principles were not a legally
binding treaty. They created a moral obligation to find
just and fair solutions. -Until the Washington Conference the
topic of Nazi looted art was not on the agenda. Apart from the descendants or
the heirs or in some cases survivors who had been forced to flee, no one
was really interested in it. The Washington Conference fundamentally
changed that. Representatives of non- governmental organizations and four
dozen governments came together to talk about this topic, and that
put it back on the agenda. -It is perhaps regrettable that it
wasn’t Germany, where these deeds were carried out, that provided the first
impetus in 1998. But overall, because it came from the Jewish community, it
ended up generating huge momentum. -The Holocaust was not only the greatest
genocide in history. Six million Jews and millions of others. It was the greatest
theft in history. And the Third Reich didn’t steal all these artworks and
cultural objects and books and instruments just to get more money for the
Reich. That was a part of it. But that wasn’t it. It was that this was a part and
parcel of the genocide. It was cultural genocide. It was to eliminate everything
connected to Jewish culture, Jewish ownership, root-and-branch. And many
of the artworks that we are talking about - when the press gets it, OK, they
read about the masterpieces. But most of the art that was looted had much
more sentimental and family value than it did value on the open market. And
so the Washington Principles were designed to find what we called
‘fair and just solutions’. -We gather here this week not to achieve
miracles but rather to do everything within our power to replace dark
with light, injustice with fairness, contention with consensus
and falsehood with truth. The jointly agreed search for truth and
justice continues to this day. A global digital network has provided new
opportunities for provenance researchers in recent years. Germany
puts more than 10 million euros a year into digitization and provenance
projects related to looted art. After the catalogues of the Weinmüller
Auction House had been digitized, researchers in the summer of 2014
became aware of an object that for years had been part of the
collection at Berlin’s Bode Museum. -Every artifact has a biography, of course.
So this is not just the Sculpture Collection, it’s also an archive. And
here we've come to the Three Angels from the collection called ‘S. in R.' This
piece has been in the collection since 1999. Two or three years ago a colleague
drew my attention to the fact that it appears in the catalogue of the
Weinmüller Auction House, labeled ‘S. in R. Collection’. That was code
for 'Saulmann in Reutlingen'. The digital Weinmüller catalogue
had made it possible to link the item in the museum
to the Saulmann collection. -Back then nothing was known about
its provenance, and people weren’t intensely concerned with provenance.
Once we started to research it, it soon became clear that there was this
connection with Saulmann. And in fact, the catalogue describes a group
of angels with the infant Jesus. When we compared the images in the
catalogue with the object itself, we saw that the object was missing the wing on
the left, seen from our perspective. It’s symbolic, in a way. What we have
here is an angel that cannot fly. Once the provenance was
confirmed, the museum had to act. -This is an important piece of art history
and we were hoping to keep it for our sculpture collection. So I looked
up prices on the art market for comparable works and we made
the heirs a fair offer. They accepted and so we were
able to purchase the piece. -How can it be that the institution that
has the work in its possession is the one to decide they will keep it?
For someone who has a claim, that institution can never be independent
and impartial. It’s very problematic. -Obviously it’s hard for the curators
and directors of a museum to return artworks that have played a central
role in their collection when they discover that they have been wrongly
acquired. But there is no question. They must be returned. In many cases we
have found ways of telling the heirs how important it is for us to keep the
work in the collection — and asking if we can either keep the artifact or
artifacts or collection on permanent loan, at least for the time being. Or can
we buy it back? But these options are only possible if the
legitimate owner agrees to it. Since the restitution and subsequence
purchase from the heirs, a plaque on the work makes a brief reference to its
former owners Ernst and Agathe Saulmann. -We were impressed of course by the fact
that they’d taken this initiative. And that was a somewhat moving moment
because it was an acknowledgment of what had happened and a genuine attempt,
not only to restitute it, but to put something right that was clearly
part of a terrible wrong. And of course the Saulmann collection is only a
small element in what is a sea of expropriations of very
important collections. Unlike the angel sculpture, the
Madonna and Child in Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus museum was sold at auction
by Sotheby’s in London after its restitution to the Saulmann heirs in 2015.
It went for 22,000 pounds, slightly below its
appraised value. -We’ve maybe recovered just about ten
items out of hundreds. A couple were quite interesting or maybe perhaps even
reasonably important. Most of them weren’t terribly important. But of
course to us it’s all of interest. -With the beginnings of restitution,
Germany has restituted 16,000 art and books; Austria 30,000; dozens in the
United States; hundreds and hundreds in the Netherlands. But we still have
that rest of the glass to fill before we implement and honor the Washington
Principles. And more important: honor the memories of those who were killed
and those from whom these works were brutally stolen as part and
parcel of the Holocaust. -Ten restituted artifacts out of more
than two hundred in the Saulmann collection is terribly few, or at least
it sounds like terribly few. And you also have to keep in mind that these were
pretty prominent collectors with large collections and with a real culture of art
collecting. At the same time, though, there were many families that owned
only one or two works of emotional importance — antiquities, a portrait of
their grandmother, maybe a vase that had been passed on for generations —
and those were also confiscated by the Nazis. When you reflect on that,
it becomes apparent what a massive number of objects we’re talking about. But
it is also clear that each individual object is representative of the larger
issue, and that it’s important to fight for the true provenance
of each and every object. In 1948 Agathe Saulmann took up that fight.
After her husband died she began her legal battle for restitution. Her
claims were successful at first. In March 1950 a court ordered the
return of the cotton weaving mill, the company grounds and the Erlenhof
house to Agathe Saulmann. But there was nothing left to recall the
life she had once led here. -It would’ve been pretty
heartrending to come here and be reminded of it all.
Surely. Agathe Saulmann hoped to turn over the
facilities in Eningen to the United Nations to house child refugees
from around the world. -And her return here to the area and her
claims at the time got quite a bit of publicity. Not only because of the claim
itself, but also she was quite a striking character, of course, who had been a minor
celebrity in the area before the war. The then-owner of the mill appealed
against her restitution claim and the court decision. During the appeal
Agathe Saulmann committed suicide in Baden-Baden on June 18, 1951.
It was her fourth attempt. -Hello! What a beautiful
horse, what a beautiful color. After Agathe Saulmann's death, her
daughter Nina took up the restitution claims. Felix de Marez Oyens’s half-sister
continued to do detailed research on the fate of the family’s art collection.
In the 1960s she asked to see the catalogues of the Weinmüller Auction
House, but was told that they had been destroyed during the war. Now we
know that they were rediscovered. -When my sister came here again in '62,
’63, it was to try to trace the artworks. And she didn’t
succeed.
