Safehaven names

Part 1: raw texts

 url: https://www.archives.gov/research/holocaust/finding-aid/military/rg-226-3g.html

Military Agency Records RG 226

Interallied and Interservice Military Agencies Records

Records of the Office of Strategic Services (RG 226) 

Records of the Research and Analysis Branch

Holocaust art research digital tools: Lempertz and artworks listed in the (defunct) Nazi Era Internet Portal

Art provenance research tools:

The Cologne auction house of Lempertz was included in the Art Looting Investigation Unit Red Flag list of names in 1946. In recent times, the name has appeared in connection to several claims for restitution of artworks. Until recently American museums published artworks that had gaps in their provenance 1933-1945 in a database called NEPIP (Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal) (https://www.aam-us.org/programs/the-nazi-era-provenance-internet-portal-nepip-archive/)

This video shows artworks gathered from NEPIP and other sources that mention the word "Lempertz" in the provenance published by museums. 

Note: Some of the mentions concern the German auction house. Some do not. Some concern transactions prior to 1933, others after 1933. Inclusion on the list does not mean that the artwork was looted or sold in a forced sale, only that it contains a specific word.

Link to database used in video: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/9769949/ (Enter the word or name you want to search for in the box)

German sales catalogues published by the Getty Provenance Index and Heidelberg University tend to stop or peter out after 1945, so it is very difficult to use digital tools to analyze Lempertz and other auction sales in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s when Nazi looted artworks were laundered via auction houses with little scrutiny. 

Gathering mentions of Lempertz (and other auction houses) in museums provenances is one workaround for this lack of transparency.

Link to Getty Provenance Index

https://www.getty.edu/databases-tools-and-technologies/provenance/

Link to CSV file downloaded from old Getty GPI for search on Lempertz

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTJweR5KAilTRyV0naGWjbLpXjfCNes52bUms-901DtZv99GWDBfi4HMxJfrOVFWEiRa21MAtmXDl6E/pub?gid=1417510852&single=true&output=csv

Link to Heidelberg University German Sales catalogues

https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/en/germansales//recherche/volltext.html

(photo credit from MFA, Boston museum, The Cumaean Sibyl Donato Creti (Italian (Bolognese), 1671–1749) about 1730 ACCESSION NUMBER 1984.138 PROVENANCE November 23-25, 1983, anonymous (German private collector) sale, Lempertz, Cologne, lot 1482. 1984, sold by Piero Corsini, New York and London, to the MFA. (Accession Date: April 11, 1984) https://collections.mfa.org/objects/34617/the-cumaean-sibyl

Austrian Advisory Board Decisions

The Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board adopts decisions on the basis of dossiers presented by the Commission for Provenance Research. Below is a list of persecuted collectors as well as the urls to the reports.

Who owned Pissarros? What else did they own? Where are they today?

What else?  German and French Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis often owned artworks from several different artists. If one focuses on claims for one artist, can one then expand the search to see what other artworks were stolen?

In this post we look at artworks by Pissarro which are being searched for by the families of Jewish art collectors who were plundered and persecuted during the Nazi era. And then we ask: what other artworks were owned by (and possibly stolen from) these same collectors?

To gather these artworks, and the information about them, we will use Wikidata queries. The graph structure enables us to start from one point (the collector) and move to other artworks owned all around the world. (if the ownership information has been entered in Wikidata.

Databases consulted: Lostart.de and ErrProject

PART ONE

Lostart: Collectors whose heirs are searching for PISSARRO artworks lost or seized during the Nazi era:

Aaron, Clémence Georgette

Blumstein (Familie)*

Bondi, Felix

Braunthal, Max

Dreyfus, Edgar*

Flavian (Friedmann), Catherine und Salomon

Friedmann, David (Breslau)

Glaser, Prof. Dr. Curt

Goldschmidt, Hedwig und Jacob*

Hatvany, Baron Ferenc

Heine, Max & Margarete 

Herz, Dr. Emanuel Emil

Hinrichsen, Dr. Henri

Kainer, Margret und Ludwig

Katzenellenbogen, Ludwig und Estella

Lindauer, Jules

Mendel Kaplan

Nathan, Martha

Ploschitzki, Johanna (geb. Zender)

Posen, Anna und Sidney 

Sachs, Carl (Sammlung)

Schusterman, Grégoire

Semmel, Richard

Silberberg, Max (Sammlung)

Simon, Hugo

Sommerguth, Gertrud und Alfred

Steinthal, Fanny und Max (Sammlung)

Stern-Lippmann, Margaretha und Siegbert Stern

Strauss, Ottmar

Westfeld, Walter

ERRProject: French Jews whose artworks by Pissarro were looted by the ERR Nazi looting organization

Bruno Stahl

Claude Raphael, Paris, France

Frau Jules Rouff, Paris, France

Galerie Marcel Bernheim et Cie., Paris, France

Georges Levy, Paris, France

Georges Schick, Nice, France

Hedwige/Hedwig Zach/Zak, Nice/Paris, France

Hugo Simon, Paris, France

Jules et Madeleine Lindauer, Paris, France

Max Heilbronn, Paris, France

Mr. Kantorowitz, Paris, France

Oskar and Marianne Goldschmidt, Neuilly, France

Paul Etlin, Saint-Marcel par Aubagne, Bouches du Rhone, France

Paul Rosenberg, Bordeaux, France

Pierre Wertheimer, Paris, France

Raoul Meyer, Paris, France

Roger Levy , Neuilly s/Seine, France

Salomon Flavian, Paris, France

Simon Bauer, Paris, France

Remarks: There are 48 German and French art collectors who owed Pissarros in these Nazi-looted art databases. Hugo Simon and Jules Lindauer appear in both LostArt and ERRPROJECT but otherwise there is little overlap.  To have a more complete view of Pissarros looted from (or acquired under duress from) Jewish collectors, one would need to consult databases in The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Poland, and elsewhere. In short, this is a glimpse or a sampling, not a complete overview.  

The appearance of any of the above names in a provenance for any artwork is an obvious red flag.

Are there any patterns we might be able to detect using the Wikidata general knowledge graph?

To find out, we will group the Wikidata identifiers (where they exist) in a variable called ?LostPissarro using VALUES

Wikidata Query

#title:Pissarro owners in Lostart.de

SELECT ?myQids ?myQidsLabel ?myQidsDescription 

WHERE {

  VALUES ?myQids { wd:Q126835436 wd:Q94292296 wd:Q124216935 wd:Q125884667 wd:Q97133770 wd:Q112450 wd:Q324935 wd:Q55842863 wd:Q98887 wd:Q1334632 wd:Q123758642 wd:Q19295051 wd:Q1361426 wd:Q110491536}

  ?myQids rdfs:label ?myQidsLabel.

 #?ownedby wdt:P127 ?myQids.

#  ?ownedby wdt:P18 ?image.

  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],mul,en". }

 FILTER (LANG(?myQidsLabel) = "en")

}

WD: 

* not found

Q126835436,Q94292296,Q124216935,Q125884667,Q97133770,Q112450,Q324935,Q55842863,Q1334632,Q98887,Q123758642,Q19295051,Q1361426,Q110491536,Q131534758,Q131424365,Q104532626,Q22670686,Q131534959,Q94867126,Q125811605,Q125811605,Q20191393,Q1913457,Q1635718,Q94788180,Q108549525,Q126092724,Q100323618,Q2037856,Q2546745

myQids	myQidsLabel	myQidsDescription
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q55842863	Max Hermann Heine	German Jewish art collector (1877-1933)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q94292296	Felix Bondi	German lawyer and art collector (1860-1934)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q97133770	David Friedmann	German Jewish businessman and art collector -(1857-1942)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q110491536	Estella Katzenellenbogen	German Jewish art collector persecuted by the Nazis (1886-1991)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q123758642	Margret Kainer	German Jewish art collector (1894-1968)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q124216935	Max Braunthal	German Jewish art collector (1877-1946)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q125884667	Salomon Flavian	art collector
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q126835436	Clémence Georgette Aaron	French art collector, plundered by Nazis (b. 1867
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q98887	Henri Hinrichsen	German music publisher, died in Auschwitz in 1942
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q112450	Curt Glaser	German Jewish art historian and art collector persecuted by Nazis, refugee (1879-1943)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q324935	Ferenc Hatvany	Hungarian painter and art collector (1881-1958)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1334632	Emil Herz	German publisher (1877-1971)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1361426	Ludwig Katzenellenbogen	Jewish industrialist, refugee, Holocaust victim, husband of Tilla Durieux (1877–1944)
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q19295051	Ludwig Kainer	German draughtsperson and art collector (1885-1967)

WikidataQuery to see what was owned by these individuals

https://w.wiki/CUi7

https://w.wiki/CUqd

https://w.wiki/CUqf

with image of painting https://w.wiki/CUqq

https://w.wiki/CVCX

https://w.wiki/CVFT

with images of paintings https://w.wiki/CVJw

https://w.wiki/CVM5

LostArtQids https://w.wiki/CVfd

LostArtQids with objects owned https://w.wiki/CVfg

Question: How many of the artworks searched for by 

Q126835436,Q94292296,Q124216935,Q125884667,Q97133770,Q112450,Q324935,Q55842863,Q1334632,Q98887,Q123758642,Q19295051,Q1361426,Q110491536,Q131534758,Q131424365,Q104532626,Q22670686,Q131534959,Q94867126,Q125811605,Q125811605,Q20191393,Q1913457,Q1635718,Q94788180,Q108549525,Q126092724,Q100323618,Q2037856,Q2546745

Are represented in Wikidata?

Task: Compare Lostart listings to Wikidata listings

Nazi-looted art provenance research: names to verify in provenance texts of art museums

Names of Concern to verify in Art Provenances for European artworks created before 1945 and acquired after 1932, contains persons and organisations

(Wikidata Queries run January 25, 2025)

Merges persons of concern and organisations of concern in Nazi looted art and includes, where available Status,  GND, VIAF, Proveana and LCCN identifiers as well as alternate spellings for entity matching in provenance texts.

Download data in CSV format

Url of Public Google Sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTuf7QIW4T15_5YJURSlvhZalwsdVrCNHiv5Iq4PaY-AepMw-rovx4aw9cleEI8S3NPInv4uMk9S5XD/pub?gid=103406480&single=true&output=csv

Description: 

The dataset contains 745 entries and 10 columns, with the following details:

1. Columns Overview:

   • item: Contains Wikidata URIs for the entities.
   • itemLabel: Labels or names of the entities.
   • itemDescription: Descriptions of the entities.
   • status: Provides information on the entity's status (e.g., related to Holocaust restitution cases or flagged as red flags).
   • altNames: Alternative names for the entities; this column has some missing values (449 non-null out of 745).
   • GND: German National Library identifiers; partially populated (423 non-null).
   • Proveana: Proveana-related identifiers; partially populated (132 non-null).
   • VIAF: Virtual International Authority File identifiers; partially populated (488 non-null).
   • LCCN: Library of Congress Control Numbers; partially populated (302 non-null).
   • RunDate: The date when the data was run/compiled.

More Names of Concern: art galleries, museums and auction houses

 In addition to art dealers and collector, several commercial art galleries, auction houses and museums are registered as Art Looting Red Flag Names or have links to Holocaust art restitution cases. This list should be added to the human "Names of Concern" when verifying art provenance texts.

DATASET: Art Provenances AFTER Restitution of Looted Art

Claims for Nazi-looted art or duress sales sometimes result in restitution or settlement agreements which cause the restituted artwork to be sold at auction.

Below are artworks whose provenance, as published by Christie's auction house, mentions a restitution or settlement agreement with the heir of a victim of Nazi persecution.

These provenance texts provide valuable information to art historians and Holocaust researchers, offering insights into the art market networks that dealt in Holocaust-linked artworks between the time they left the possession of the persecuted Jewish collectors and the time they were restituted.

(original source of information: Christie's auction website)

_____

Dataset:  CSV Download 

_____

URL: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT9UtnanPSGuAIi63ObN4G4xtK2Ya6_eIzgIAM2ILah-kxKJhHRmvgeFdCnWdKxcEDfHKpQvNJfUNCh/pubhtml?gid=1713651722&single=true

Contextual Information for Nazi-era Provenance Research - Wikidata Sparql Query

Holocaust victim, art looting Red Flag name, Nazi party member, or persecuted person?

Art historians, provenance researchers, museum curators, scholars of the Holocaust and the art market,

If you would like to know whether a person in a provenance is a Holocaust victim, a looting Red Flag name, a Nazi party member, or a persecuted person, here is a Sparql query in Wikidata that can help:

https://w.wiki/7gg3

                                                       (collectors, dealers)

Clicking on the link above runs a Wikidata Sparql query.

The link below is more complete but runs slower...

https://w.wiki/8rbj
(collectors, dealers, curators, art historians)

Picasso in Museums around the world

PROGRESS REPORT

Twenty-five years have passed since the Washington Conference on Holocaust era assets.

Yet there is still no central database of museum artworks with their provenances. Some museums - big museums, university art museums - still publish no provenance at all.

Projects are announced, appear, disappear, each separate. There is no central tracking of Nazi era provenance gaps.  The scale is enormous. The number of artworks with unclear ownership history for the Nazi era remains extremely high.

Given the enormity of the task, this post looks at the situation in museums for a single artist: Picasso.

(update ongoing)

 

Collection	Before 1945	Image?	Provenance?	Nazi-era Gaps?
MoMA	659	yes	sometimes	yes
NGA	258	yes	yes	yes
Pompidou	59	yes	no	yes
Musée Picasso	4000+ all dates	yes	no	unknown
Albertina	40	yes	no	yes
Hermitage	36	yes	no	yes
Fondation Beyeler	22	yes	yes	yes
Museums in Denmark	133	yes	yes	yes
UK Collections Trust	16	no	yes	yes
Pinakothek (Munich)	14	no	no	yes
Kunstmuseum Basel	66	yes	NO	yes
Kunstmuseum Bern	9 -on display or Gurlitt	yes	yes - PDF	yes
Metropolitan Museum	56	yes	yes	yes
MFA	29	yes	yes	yes
DIA	21	NO	yes	yes
Harvard Art Museums	20	yes	yes	yes-11
Yale Art	35	yes	yes	yes
Cleveland	19	yes	yes	yes
Princeton Museum	6	yes	NO	yes
Emil Bührle Collection	5	yes	yes	yes
Musée d'Orsay	1	yes	yes	yes
Rose Art Museum	4	yes	no	yes

***

 

Links:

Museum of Modern Art - MoMa (USA)

Query for Picasso (all)  1246 artworks all dates

Query for Picasso before 1945 

(659 artworks is an estimation, because the query picks up some other artists as well)

NGA (USA): 

Query for Picasso created before 1945 

MFA Boston (USA)

Query for Picasso (all)

UK Collections Trust:

 Query for Picasso created before 1945 with gaps in provenance

Pinakothek (Munich)

Query for artworks by Picasso

Museums in Denmark

https://www.kulturarv.dk/kid/SoegKunstnerVaerker.do?kunstnerId=1312

Rose Art Museum (USA)

* no provenance information *

Query for Picasso (all)

DATASET: Toledo Museum of Art Provenance Archive

This art provenance dataset contains publicly available information originally published online by a cultural heritage institution which has been formatted as a CSV file for easy download and analysis with digital tools.  It is intended to facilitate research into Holocaust-era provenance for scholars, art historians and families. 

Toledo Museum of Art Provenance Research

DATASET DOWNLOAD CSV FILE

(based on

http://www.toledomuseum.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Provenance-Research-lowres.pdf
archived at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121224083005if_/http://www.toledomuseum.org:80/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Provenance-Research-lowres.pdf )

Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg in Lost Art (Fundmeldung)

German Lost Art Foundation Listings for the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg

Property looted from Jews in Vienna: Unser Wien MAP

http://maps.tacticalspace.org/unserwien/map.html

Behind every orange dot, property looted from Jews after the Nazi Anschluss of 1938

Map by Tactical Space, based on the inventory of stolen property under the Nazis, in the study by Stephan Templ, Unser Wien.accessed January 7, 2022

http://maps.tacticalspace.org/unserwien/map.html

http://maps.tacticalspace.org/unserwien/

Unser Wien Map

Unser Wien (Our Vienna) is a book co-authored by Stephan Templ and Tina Walzer that details how hundreds of Jewish businesses in Vienna were seized by the Nazis and never given back.

Continue to the map

Stephan Templ is an Austrian citizen, author, and journalist who has been jailed by Austria because of a restitution claim he made on behalf of his mother for Nazi-looted property.

This project is a translation of the addresses listed in the book as a digital map. This map is part of the Open Maps project. Credit for location entry and translation goes to Melanie Lyn. Technical implementation by Josh Harle.

The Art Loss Register Ltd Speech given at a Symposium in Amsterdam on 30th January 2008 hosted by Sotheby’s Auctioneers

 Our research began in August 2002 when we were asked to record a picture by Picasso ‘Still Life with Painting’ on the ALR database by two claimants living in England and the USA.   

As proof of ownership, they showed us a page from an exhibition catalogue for an exhibition of Dutch paintings held at the Stedelijk Museum from February to April 1939.  

Although the lender was noted as ‘Private Collection, Amsterdam’, the archives of the Stedelijk Museum held documents that could prove that the lender of the Picasso was their great-aunt,  Dr Meyer-Udewald, then living at an address in Vijzelstraat, Amsterdam.   

Within a week, we traced the Picasso to a private collection in the USA where it had been since 1952 but we had little idea then that we were facing four years of meticulous research in eleven countries to piece together how the Picasso had come to rest where it did.    

In the course of that research, not only did we reconstruct the provenance of this early Picasso but we discovered that, thanks to a Will written in 1925 by a Mr Schlesinger of Hamburg, that the claimants who had approached the ALR were not, after all, entitled to claim the Picasso as a war loss as their great aunt had only been granted a life interest in it.  

On her death, whenever that took place, the Picasso was to revert to Mr Schlesinger’s wife and children.    We discovered Käthe Schlesinger and the three children emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1938, settling in the USA and we located the heirs and advised them about the Picasso.   

Dr Meyer-Udewald, who was also Jewish, had emigrated from Hamburg to Tilburg in the Netherlands in 1936 loaning the Picasso to the Stedelijk Museum three years later.  In 1940, Dr Meyer Udewald moved to Belgium.  Once in Belgium, Dr Meyer-Udewald moved between safe houses in Brussels and Antwerp until she was betrayed and sent to the transit camp for Jewish prisoners at Malines.  

On 20 September 1943, she was deported from Malines to Auschwitz where she died.  Her premature death activated the terms of the 1925 Will of Ernst Schlesinger.  In wartime Brussels, the Picasso passed through the hands of Joseph Albert Dederen, a resident of Brussels and Dr Robyn, who loaned the picture to an exhibition in Knokke, its first public reappearance after the war.  The painting then surfaced at the Bollag Gallery in Zurich from whom it was purchased by the Galerie Benador, Geneva.  In October 1952, the Picasso was acquired in good faith by Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.   Following the ALR’s reconstruction of the provenance, we negotiated a settlement on behalf of the heirs of Ernst Schlesinger with the legal representative of Duncan V. Phillips.

The Art Loss Register Ltd

A Database for Nazi Looted Art Claims 

Speech given at a Symposium in Amsterdam on 30^th January 2008 hosted by Sotheby’s Auctioneers 

https://web.archive.org/web/20210914022316/https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iq3s0wJp68AJ:https://www.lootedart.com/web_images/artwork/Sarah%2520Jackson%2520Speech%2520for%2520Sothebys%2520Symposium%2520in%2520Amsterdam.doc+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Pinakothek Munich: artworks with no provenance transferred from the German state

Where to find the provenance of artworks held at the Pinakothek in Bavaria, Germany?

Not, it seems, on the Pinakothek website.

Frequently, the information provided in the Origin or Herkunft field limits itself to the mention: "on loan" or "transferred from the German state".

But there is no link or reference to any further information. 

Yet we know that many looted artworks returned to Germany after the war and then distributed to museums "on loan" or as "transfers").

How to verify whether or not an artwork held at the Pinakothek is referenced in the LostArt.de database, the DHM Munich or Linz databases?

To find out, we will look at a selection of artworks at the Pinakothek, many of which are "on loan" or transferred from State possession.

See file here 

Download CSV here

(please note: The dataset contains only a few hundred artworks out of the more than 8000 artworks created before 1940 that contain the word "Überweisung")

https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/en/search?phrase=Überweisung#filters={"yearRange":{"min":1400,"max":1940},"onDisplay":false,"publicDomain":false}

Tutorial for the Looted Art Detector: Using custom indicators

Note: 12NOV2024 The Looted Art Detector is undergoing an update on Pythonanywhere and will be back in service soon

Looted Art Detector: Part 2 Using custom indicators

example with : ALIU Red Flag restorers

The user can analyse provenances for any names or words that seem interesting.

The list below contains the last names of art restorers who were investigated by the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit for their role in the art market for Nazi-looted art.

Bruno Lohse Nazi Art Looter Transcription of ALIU Detailed Interrogation Report NARA RG239 DIR 6

The text below is a transcription of a document in the National Archives concerning Nazi art looting that was declassified in 1975. It concerns the notorious Nazi art looter, Bruno Lohse. This Detailed Interrogation Report was written by Monuments Man and OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit member James S. Plaut in 1945. It detailed the interrogation of Nazi art looter Bruno Lohse conducted from June 15, 1945 to August 15, 1945.

NARA : copy of transcription D. I. R. # 6 - Bruno Lohse, 1945-1946 

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/66892059/1/public?contributionType=transcription

A photocopy of the Detailed Interrogation Report Number 6 can be downloaded here: Download PDF

The text, transcribed in a digital searchable text, is below

Data Visualization Test

How to grasp the scale of the transfer from Jewish art collectors persecuted by the Nazi to museums in the United States, Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, as well as countries in South America?

Some experiments in data visualization.

First, an overview (attention: the figures are not real, they are only to test the visualization.)

The Nazis looted so much. Destroyed so many lives. How to represent this in a way that is understandable, meaningful - and actionable?

The devil is in the detail. 

CIR 4 LINZ S. Lane Faison describes Hitler's Linz museum as "a monument to Safe Art"

From June 1945 until the spring of 1946, Faison, Plaut, and Rousseau detained and interrogated hundreds of Nazi officials and collaborators on the whereabouts of looted works of art. - Monuments Men Foundation

"Special Nazi law covered the seizure of Jewish and enemy property." - CIR 4 Chapter IX Conclusions and Recommendations

 "Special Nazi law covered the seizure of Jewish and enemy property."

Excerpt from Art Looting Investigation Unit Consolidated Interrogation Report Number 4: Linz

Linz ALMAS

Maria Almas-Dietrich: Nazi art looter

"Art dealer; personal friend of Hitler, and for a time his principal buyer of works of art. One of the most important purchasing agents for Linz. Was under house arrest at Grafing, Bavaria, autumn 1945."

- ALIU 1946 Final Report

Art historians, "Almas" in a provenance text means: dig deep.

The probability of Nazi looting is high.

Below, artworks from the DHM Linz database that contain "Almas" in the provenance.