This month at the FBI field office in New Orleans, officials turned over an 1865 Claude Monet drawing to Helen Lowe and Francoise Parlagi 86 long years after the Gestapo seized it from the home of their Austrian Jewish grandfather who’d fled with his family to London. According to The Times-Picayune, Adalbert “Bela” Parlagi, a Vienna businessman and art collector, tried and failed to get his art back after World War II. After he died in 1981, his son also failed to track down the art. Francoise Parlagi contacted the Commission for Looted Art in Europe in 2014, which set in motion the process that finally returned Monet’s work “Bord de Mer (Sea Side)” to the family’s possession.

A Louisiana couple bought the Monet in 2019, unaware that the Nazis had stolen it.

A Louisiana couple bought the Monet, which could be worth millions, in 2019, unaware that the Nazis had stolen it. Bridget Vita-Schlamp said she and her now-deceased husband were shocked to learn of the drawing’s history but “were quick to realize that it needed to go back to the family.” She and her husband “lost a painting,” she said, “but the Jewish community had lost so much more.”

Parlagi, who lives in Switzerland, told the newspaper that while she was happy to be getting the art stolen from her grandfather, the moment was also forcing her to think about the families that will never be reunited with the property the Nazis took, and it was forcing her to think about those of her grandfather’s era who didn’t survive the Holocaust. “We, of course, feel totally privileged,” she said. “So many families aren’t able to have this conclusion.”

An estimated 20% of European artworks, books and religious objects once owned by Jewish families disappeared under the Nazi regime. Approximately 100,000 of the 600,000 known expropriated cultural items remain missing.

As this month’s news out of New Orleans makes clear, even this far into the 21st century, we continue to discuss the material consequences of Nazi genocide. Those consequences included the destruction of Europe’s finest art collections and the death of Jewish collectors and artists. Restitution endures as a legacy of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. Called the “last prisoners of war,” confiscated cultural property is a tangible connection to Jews’ families who were annihilated by the Nazis.

Two years ago, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law a bill requiring New York museums to display signage alongside works of art from before 1945 that are known to have been stolen or forcibly sold under the Nazi regime. New York is also requiring that artistic work created before 1945 that changed ownership in Europe while the Nazis were in power be entered into the Art Loss Register so people like Lowe and Parlagi can look for what was stolen from their families.

In order to legitimize the purchases of paintings for Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum in Linz, Austria, Nazi leaders confiscated collections from Jewish-owned and state museums through economic collaboration with art dealers and auction houses that used other plundering methods such as forced sales and exchanges. Jews desperate to escape Nazi Germany and Austria sold off all of their cultural assets to pay the expensive Reich flight taxes for exit visas. Or, as was the case with Bela Parlagi, the Gestapo would seize those things left behind by Jews fleeing in terror.

Called the ‘last prisoners of war,’ confiscated cultural property is a tangible connections to Jews’ families who were annihilated by the Nazis.

Art dealers who bought confiscated art during the Nazi period disguised their complex business transactions and lack of clear title to the artworks by creating faux paper receipts and bills of sale. As a result, the ability to legally prove Jewish victims’ loss of ownership remains an unresolved economic legacy of World War II.

For several years after the victorious Allies divided Germany and Austria into military occupation zones, those victors had no policy for confiscated artworks. Because the Allies returned whatever looted cultural property they recovered to its presumed country of origin and not to individuals, they put survivors and heirs at odds with postwar governments. The U.S. military was not interested in directing or enforcing a restitution policy, as its primary goals were the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, trying war criminals and resettling displaced persons. For decades after the war, few wanted to discuss the Nazi crimes of stolen cultural property.

Jewish survivors, who’d been stripped of all legal documentation by the Nazis, struggled to prove they owned what had been stolen from them, as governments often demanded documentation including photographs of the art, bills of sale and an expert’s report identifying the art dealer and the artworks. Some Jewish survivors didn’t file claims at all. Others settled for less money their art was worth because of the impossibility of presenting full documentation.

Government officials made Jewish claims a low priority to avoid paying restitution to owners and heirs. Unbeknown to the Jewish claimants, there existed a steady presence of covert antisemitic beliefs at play. The same museum curators and art dealers who collaborated with the Nazis, falsified sales receipts and obscured provenance were hired by the governments to review and appraise the restitution and compensation claims cases. Governments successfully attempted to secure properties for the state, allowing private citizens to keep looted goods, while resisting Jewish restitution claims.

Almost 80 years after the Nazis’ defeat, we must recognize that every item will not be found and that moral certainty is just as elusive today. Bureaucratic delays and legal issues contribute to the claimants’ frustrations. Unless the items belonged to a well-known collector, museum or library, Nazi-looted Jewish assets can never be accurately enumerated.

Government officials made Jewish claims a low priority to avoid paying restitution to owners and heirs.

Common to nearly all claims today are the difficult and costly tasks of producing evidence that was destroyed or nonexistent and challenging evidence from governments and art dealers that was most likely falsified.

Behind words like provenance and restitution are people’s lives and livelihoods, their memories and their property. Lowe said her family getting the Monet back made her feel “emotionally connected to her grandfather.” Her cousin Parlagi said their grandfather “wouldn’t have thought this was possible.”

But it is possible. As we just saw in Louisiana, it requires cooperation among governments, auction houses, art dealers and museums. Each entity has a duty to help return the things stolen by the Nazis to the owners or their heirs.

Anne Rothfeld

Anne Rothfeld, an independent scholar, publishes on European history, including the collaborative roles of art dealers with the Nazi regime during World War II and restitution of stolen cultural property in the postwar Allied military occupation zones.  She’s a research grantee/fellow of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.