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RESTITUTION OF HOLOCAUST ASSETS
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2000
U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Banking and Financial Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:15 a.m., in room 2128, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James A. Leach, [chairman of the committee], presiding.
Present: Chairman Leach; Representatives Lazio, Ryun, Toomey, C. Maloney of New York, Bentsen, Sherman, Inslee, Schakowsky, Moore, Forbes, and Lee.
Chairman LEACH. The hearing will come to order.
Yesterday we reviewed in some detail the issues of the settlement of the Swiss bank accounts and the progress in reaching agreement on payments to survivors and heirs of survivors of forced and slave labor during World War II in Germany.
Today we will hear testimony on the status of a proposed settlement of insurance policies, and then turn to the vexing matter of the rightful ownership of art works and other objects stolen or looted by the Nazis, by the Soviets, and perhaps by others before, during and immediately after World War II. Before introducing Secretary Eagleburger, who will testify on the important insurance issue, let me briefly address the art question that this committee previously reviewed two years ago.
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Since then, the Art Museum Directors Task Force has established principles and guidelines for the Nation's major art museums, and much work has been undertaken by museums around the country to trace the provenance of numerous paintings and other pieces of artwork. The example set by the North Carolina Museum of Art last week is, in the mind of this Member of Congress, the proper one. Upon learning that one of its most prized paintings, ''Madonna and Child in a Landscape'' by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, may have been stolen by the Nazis, the museum promptly reviewed the ownership trail of the painting from an Austrian family to a Nazi leader to the New York art market, to a Beverly Hills collector, who eventually donated it to the Raleigh, North Carolina museum.
Upon confirming that it was indeed a looted painting, the museum decided to return it to the grand nieces of the man from whom it was taken. It may be the first time ever that a major disputed artwork has been returned without legal action. It is a principled act of a principled museum.
We will hear this afternoon from a New York woman who has a far different story. Martha Nierenberg will document the endless delays and numerous broken promises she has encountered in seeking paintings taken from her family home in Hungary.
We will also hear from the distinguished leaders of several of the world's leading art museums and from organizations instrumental in this effort to ensure that art is returned to the families from whom art was stolen during the Nazi era.
Does anyone else seek to make any opening comments?
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Mr. Bentsen.
Mr. BENTSEN. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, let me once again commend you for the seventh hearing or the sixth series of hearings that we have had on the recovery of Holocaust assets, and let me also make a point of commending you for going beyond just monetary assets to other properties. And I think it is important that the panel and others understand, I am not aware of another committee room in the Congress where you have a Kenneth Noland or a Sigmar Polke or other Modern art hanging. Usually it is pictures of the former chairman, so I think you bring a special appreciation to this and you are to be commended. I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairman LEACH. I thank the gentleman. Does anyone else seek recognition?
Mr. Moore.
Mr. MOORE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, yesterday Mr. Bentsen engaged Secretary Eizenstat in a line of questioning that got at the concept of developing Federal legislation to create official safe harbors for members of your commission. And I guess I would like to hear your thoughts on whether that is something that you believe is appropriate, whether it is needed, and if so, about what kind of timeframe we should look at to do that. Thank you.
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Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
Let me say, in introducing Secretary Eagleburger, I know of very few people who have served in public office in the last generation who hold anything like a reputation comparable to that of the Secretary, and we are honored that he has come before us and very appreciative of the extraordinary work that he has undertaken on a unique, if not unprecedented, commission in the insurance arena, that is, of an international dimension. We are very appreciative of the time and effort that the Secretary has put in. He may have thought he was entering into a period of some retirement, and actually there may be great efforts to pull him out of this retirement into further public service, but what he is doing at this time is deeply commendable.
Mr. Secretary, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF HON. LAWRENCE S. EAGLEBURGER, CHAIRMAN, INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON HOLOCAUST ERA INSURANCE CLAIMS
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
When I was in Government and would come before a committee to testify, I never did what most people who come to testify do, which is to start off by saying how pleased they are to be before the committee. I didn't believe in doing that, because I didn't think that I should lie to the committee before I had a chance to testify.
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I can say, however, this time it is a pleasure to be here, because it gives us a chance to talk a little bit and I hope that I won't take too much of your time, but to talk a little bit about doing justice to a number of people, the number I think is still to be determined, but I think a substantial number of people who have not had justice done for them for some six decades and I view this commission of which I am a member as seriously and hopefully, successfully, trying in fact, to do justice.
You had testimony here yesterday about the foundation, the German foundation exercise. You have had testimony from Mr. Sher to my left, who is my staff director on the commission, so I won't bore you with a long history. Let me simply say that the commission itself was basically the idea and the consequence of pressure from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners of the United States, that is the insurance regulators from the fifty States. It was their idea in the first place to create this commission, largely to get claims paid that had not been paid in sixty years.
There was a Memorandum of Understanding that was drawn up between the companies and the regulators and the Jewish groups who also participate in this commission. That was all done before I was, in fact, approached to become chairman.
You have, I think, a copy of that Memorandum of Understanding from the last testimony of Mr. Sher, but if you wish, I can certainly leave another copy for the record now. It is important in the sense that it sort of sets out a road map of what it is that we are supposed to be trying to do, what the company responsibilities are and so forth.
I will tell you when you read it through, if you can answer all of the questions that it occasions, I would like to have time to talk to you privately, because I haven't figured all of them out myself. It is not the world's most elegantly written document. Having said that, it is fairly clear on the responsibilities of the various members of the commission.
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On the basis of that Memorandum of Understanding, we on the commission, again, through negotiations on the part of all of the members of the commission, have been engaged, and in my judgment, for too long, but we have now arrived at a fairly clear set of procedures to go out to the world and say to potential claimants, here is a mechanism whereby you can, if you think that you have a legitimate claim for insurance that has not been paid, you can come to this commission and we will make sure that your claim is considered, and considered seriously, by the companies that are engaged in the international commission itself.
There was no such mechanism in the past, and one of the things that we discovered as we got into this whole exercise was that there were—in the archives and the records of a number of the State insurance commissioners themselves, there were fairly large numbers of potential claims that had been sent to the New York State regulator, for example, and they had to sit there, because there was no way to engage the process with the insurance companies to try to get them considered. The State regulators had, on occasion, sent these potential claims to relevant insurance companies, but there was no mechanism. If the insurance company wanted to ignore the claim, they simply ignored it.
I think we now have reached the point where there is a clear means by which we can make sure that the companies do, in fact, consider the claims that may be made.
On the 15th of February, we will announce the opening of our claims process, and what that means, in effect, is that we will, through websites, through publications in newspapers, through cooperation with various Jewish groups, we will go out hopefully to most places in the world where there may be claimants and tell them here is how you make your claim. We will have toll free telephone numbers and we will do media advertising, and we are coordinating the process with some 10,000 Jewish and survivor organizations. I can go into more detail in the questions and answers. Let me simply say that we now, I think, after almost a year of negotiating with ourselves, have reached the point where we can now go out and hopefully generate the kinds of claims that I think may be out there.
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We have had a fast track claims process already in place, largely taken from these State regulators, the claims that they have had and not been able to do anything with, we have taken those and at least begun to push those out to the various companies to see if we can't get claims paid, at least on the basis of those particular documents.
I should say that the insurance companies, on the basis of this fast track, have made some 174 offers on potential claims. The offers have gone as high as $113,000 and the average has been over $10,000 in terms of offers made to claimants. So we have had some progress even before we got the mechanisms for filing and considering claims really established. We have, at least, gotten some claims considered, some paid, and I consider that, myself, progress, since we've at least begun to pay some people who for too long have been ignored.
One of the questions that still remains unresolved within the commission, and I know that you have had some discussions of it in general here already, is the question of what about the companies, European insurance companies, who may have been active, either they or their predecessors, in the Holocaust period, and they are not members of this commission?
I have tried very hard to try to get a number of these companies to, in fact, join the commission. I will just list for you briefly the ones that we have approached, and that have either not responded or have so far at least said they are not going to join the commission. Aegon, CGU, Gerling, Munich Re, Sorema, Royal and Sun Alliance, Swiss Life and Prudential.
I have sent letters to the various State regulators indicating my belief that they should become members of the commission. We will see in the course of the next weeks whether that is at all successful. I know there has been—and therefore, I will talk about it for a moment—some discussion of the Dutch insurance company Aegon, which recently bought TransAmerica, and there has been a good bit of fiction in and out of this subject. Let me set the record straight.
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I believe Aegon should be a member of this commission. I also believe Aegon should not be required to pay twice on claims that it has already paid once, and Aegon has an arrangement with a foundation in the Netherlands and have considered and paid a number of claims. That is fine and as far as it goes, Aegon is to be congratulated for that. But there are a whole host of potential claims that this process has not covered.
I believe Aegon should join the commission under the same conditions as the other members of the commission, but with the understanding that we will have to make sure that the claims that they have paid they will not have to pay twice.
On the other hand, I do not believe, as far as this commission is concerned, that we should have two classes of citizenship. The responsibilities undertaken by the five companies that are now in the commission should be the same responsibilities taken by any other company that joins the commission.
We have had a number of conversations with Aegon authorities. I will tell you now, nothing, as far as I am concerned, approaches a negotiation. Therefore, any claims that may be made that we have begun negotiations and have been unable to arrive at any agreements is incorrect. There have been no negotiations. There have been some conversations, and that is as far as it has gone. I would like to see Aegon join the commission, but I feel equally strongly that there are other insurance companies, and I named them, which also should become members of this commission.
Munich Re is another insurance company which I would particularly invite your attention to. Munich Re is a reinsurer, but it is also the owner of a number of companies that themselves have written insurance policies during the Holocaust period; and that, therefore, need to be represented in the commission and Munich Re ought to be the representative. It includes a big group. There are a number of claims against some of these companies that rest now in the hands of some of the State regulators. Munich Re needs to come into the commission as well.
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That leads me to a point, which is related to what you heard about yesterday, significantly, the German Foundation Initiative.
First of all, I should say to you that Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Eizenstat deserves tremendous praise for having pushed this issue when, in the beginning, at least there was remarkable lack of interest in the subject. And this foundation will be doing, as I hope we will be doing in the commission, and that is finally too long delayed doing justice to a whole host of people that have been ignored for too long.
One of the problems, if I can describe it that way, one of the issues that the commission and the foundation are going to have to work out amongst themselves is how the German insurance companies that are contributing to the foundation, how that contribution will be related to what their responsibilities are within the commission. This is not an impossible job to reach an agreement on. It will take some time and we have been doing some negotiating on the subject. The fundamental question against which everything else can be resolved is some sense of how much money the German foundation ought to be setting aside for the International Commission in terms of paying claims that the International Commission will receive as they relate to the German companies that are in the foundation.
Again, it is complicated, but it is not impossible to resolve once we have some agreement on the magnitude of the problem and how much money ought to be contributed by the foundation to the commission itself. But what it does raise is a significant question for me, at least, which is, I do not believe that we ought to be granting legal—what is the term—closure, to companies that while they are represented in the foundation, do not themselves participate in the commission, and do not themselves specifically pay claims that may be argued against them.
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So when it comes to the question of how those companies, if they are in the foundation and not in the commission, ought to be treated, I personally am of the view that legal closure should only be granted to those companies that have, in fact, fully participated.
There is no question, this is a difficult issue. Whether in the end when these negotiations are over, I will recede from that position at some point or another has yet to be seen. And we need to understand that if the Jewish groups and the companies and the regulators can arrive at a consensus on this question, I will certainly bow to their wisdom.
But at least in the beginning, I am of the view that the only companies that should get legal closure are those that, in fact, have participated fully in the commission. And we are going to have some difficulty negotiating that issue out, I think.
Let me close by saying I don't want to get into too much detail here, and if you have questions, I will be glad to answer them.
I know that there was discussion over whether RAS, which is an insurance company that is majority owned by Allianz, which is a member of our commission, should fall within the foundation or not. My strong view is it should not, it is not a German company. We will need to negotiate this out.
Let me close by saying one other additional issue that now I think is ripe, is that as you probably know, the Austrian chancellor yesterday indicated that he wanted Austrian insurance companies to participate fully in the process of restitution. And I can assure you that I will take that word from the chancellor as controlling as far as Austrian insurance companies are concerned. We have a number of them on our list of potential members of the commission and we will be approaching those companies soon.
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I would be happy—if the committee wishes—I would be happy not only to provide a copy of our Memorandum of Understanding, but also the letter that I sent to the insurance regulators, listing the other companies which I think ought to join the commission.
Finally, I would be happy to provide for the record, if you wish, once we have our February 15th opening of the claims process, I would be happy to provide all of the documentation that goes with that in terms of explaining call centers, telephone numbers, and so forth, and so forth, and how the process would work.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman LEACH. Well, thank you very much for that thoughtful testimony.
Let me just stress for a minute that I think I speak for the committee when I say not only are we indebted to your service, but the perspective that you apply to the issue is the perspective of the committee, and that there is no dissent from the perspective that you have suggested.
Second, just for the record, I would like to raise one concern relating to one of the companies, which I understand may be a misunderstanding, and so to that degree, that we can resolve it, I think we have an excellent chance of a company participating in the commission. One of the companies was concerned that with regard to a humanitarian fund that might be established, that a decision might be made that obligations would be allocated related to American market share, not related to percentage share of the market in the occupied countries during the War. Am I right that this is an international commission, not a commission related to what might, after the War, become a disproportionate market share of any given company?
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Mr. EAGLEBURGER. You are right, Mr. Chairman. I should say in the whole messy process of trying to establish how you evaluate claims, evaluate insurance policies, the whole question of trying to get this claims process ready, the companies and the Jewish groups and the regulators in their negotiation have been basing their estimates on market share in Europe. I have never heard of any question of market share in the U.S.
I should say that it is up to the companies to decide how they are going to share the costs of the humanitarian fund. It is not my job to do that, but I have never heard any judgment being made on market share in the U.S. It would be a silly process, it seems to me, and I can tell you to the degree my views on the subject would carry any weight, I would be totally opposed to. You can't come to a sensible agreement who pays what, unless you look at market share in Europe at the time of the Holocaust. That is the only way that it makes any sense.
Chairman LEACH. I appreciate that. One of the companies feels vulnerable that other companies may gang up on it.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. On the basis of what I have seen so far, the companies are enough in competition with themselves that I would find it extremely unlikely that they could agree to gang up on another company. That would be the first time in the history of the commission.
Chairman LEACH. I appreciate that. I just note that, in theory, the making of rules can give disproportionate liabilities for what might be considered unjust reasons. I hope, based upon your assessments today, that one of the companies that you have mentioned will be able to join the commission, and hopefully in the very near future. I personally am extremely optimistic.
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Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Let me say on the subject one more time, no company should be required to pay twice. All companies in the commission should be bound by the same rules so that there is no first and second class citizenship. And the question of basic contributions on U.S. market share, in my judgment, would be foolhardy and certainly would not happen.
Chairman LEACH. One final question. It is my understanding that the commission is looking to the establishment of a humanitarian fund. Do you yet know how large that is likely to be?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. No, sir, I don't. Again, we have to deal with this in two pieces. There is the humanitarian fund that would relate to the foundation, the German companies and the foundation. Then there is the humanitarian fund—the same fund, but two different contributors. There is the humanitarian fund, as far as the non-German companies are concerned. So first of all, we are trying to come to some agreement on what the humanitarian fund from the foundation, what that contribution ought to be. We will then have to do the same sort of negotiation on the humanitarian fund for the non-foundation companies.
Originally, when we didn't have the foundation before us, but were dealing simply with the commission as such, I was very strongly of the view we should not even approach the question of what the humanitarian fund ought to be until we had run through the claims process and had some sense of how many claimants there were. Because of the foundation, its existence, and because we have to now tell the foundation how much we think we need, both in terms of claims payments and in terms of the foundation, it is time to turn things on their heads and to come to a conclusion on the size of the humanitarian fund in the absence of any sense of how many claimants we have is going to be very much a question of sort of an estimate, again, of market share.
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But a lot of it is going to be pulled from the air on the basis of our less-than-confident judgment as to how much we are going to see in the way of claims. It is an issue that is now under negotiation between the three segments of the commission, with the chairman of the commission sitting there and getting more and more frustrated at the inability as of this date to come to any conclusions.
I can't tell you the size of either piece of that humanitarian fund. It is still under negotiation and we have another commission late in February. I devoutly hope we can come to a conclusion at that time. But on the basis of the past record, I certainly couldn't promise it.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
Mr. Bentsen.
Mr. BENTSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, first of all, let me thank you for the work that you are doing on this in your semi-retirement, I guess.
I am not going to get into the issue that I raised yesterday about what I guess Secretary Eizenstat called ''legal peace.'' I think my colleague from Kansas, Mr. Moore, wants to talk about that. But I do want to say, with respect to your comment, I think what you said was for those companies that do not enter into the commission, I take it your position would be that there should be no legal peace for those companies that have operations in the United States. Mr. Eizenstat said yesterday, I believe in his testimony, that it was his hope that companies that did come into the foundation and the commission, that the Government, our Government, would be able to persuade State insurance commissioners not to seek sanctions against those companies.
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Would it be your opinion that those companies, which might, by the fact of their being based in Germany, become part of the foundation, but not part of the commission, that the State insurance commissioners should still pursue those companies in order to get them in the commission in order to deal with the asset claims?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. That is my view at the moment. But I have to admit or concede that if the foundation is going to work at all, one of the clear sine qua nons, if that is the way that it is pluralized, for the German participation is that they get legal closure.
So my view is standing in the way of that. I understand that. I also understand that this commission, of which I am a member, in the end needs to recognize that I may have to change my position, because I don't want to torpedo the foundation. There are too many other vested interests here, too many other people that finally will be having justice done, I don't want to torpedo the foundation.
At the moment, I am of the view if they are in the foundation, it is an insurance company, and it is in the foundation and it does not participate in the commission, and I mean, by participation, it is there to pay claims if they occur against that company, for example, it is my view that they ought not receive that legal closure.
Well, let me be straight with you. In the end, if I have to retreat from that, I probably will do so. If that issue would, in fact, torpedo the conclusion of the foundation, I will probably have to say I don't like it, but the foundation is too important for me to stand in the way of it.
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Mr. BENTSEN. Can I ask you, though, there is some overlap, as I understand how the foundation is supposed to work, and yesterday we focused mostly on slave labor and forced labor, and there were other property issues involved in it as well, but that is a set amount, at least the way that it was discussed and the way that Count Lambsdorff discussed it, that is a set amount of remuneration to those who felt they were harmed, including those who may have lost assets.
Here with the commission ideally you are looking for real assets that can be identified, claims, and I have a follow-up question on how you are going to value that, assuming you can find the records, but here is where someone has a real live claim to an asset, to a policy, and so, isn't there some apples and oranges between the commission and the foundation?
The second thing, I seem to recall that Mr. Eizenstat was saying that there weren't all that many German insurance companies, other than Allianz that were around then and around now. The others have been reconfigured. So yes, there is some overlap, and I guess this makes it confusing, but wouldn't you agree it is a little bit apples and oranges?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. I think it is apples, oranges, and maybe some grapefruit.
My point is, having said that, the easiest answer to that is to say insurance is all over here in ICHEIC, and the foundation deals with everything else. That clearly is not going to work. And one of the things that the foundation wants to do is, in fact, encompass those German insurance companies as well as other German industrial aspects.
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Under those circumstances and because, as I say, I think the foundation is doing God's work, if you will, I want to try to make this apples and oranges some way, or another come to some sort of fruit salad. I would prefer clearly that all of the German insurance companies are in the commission, and that is where I stand now. I think it would be wrong to give them closure, legal closure if they don't participate. But, number one, I think there are a number of other German insurance companies involved here. Allianz is not the only player in this game. I mentioned Munich Re as an example, and there are a whole host of German insurance companies that Munich Re in one way or another is involved in.
What we are trying to do now in negotiations between the three parts of the international insurance commission is to arrive at an agreed figure that would cover what we estimate will be the claims against German insurance companies, in this case, Allianz, at this stage. The foundation would set that amount of money aside, turn it over to ICHEIC or something, we guess what the amount of claims will be and we guess at this stage, and that money comes from the foundation to the commission. We then also make an estimate—not an estimate, we agree on what the humanitarian fund component would be and we tell the foundation this is what we want on the humanitarian side.
Assuming that the foundation agrees when we go to them and say we want 500 million deutsche marks or whatever it may be, and they set that aside for the commission, we would have to operate within those totals.
Now, I feel very strongly that there has to be some cushion built into this, so if we are really wrong on the claims, there is some sort of a fund that we can then go to, which will make it possible for us to pay claims.
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Mr. BENTSEN. Yesterday, Mr. Eizenstat said, with respect to the Bundestag's legislation, enabling legislation of the foundation, one of the issues that the American counterparts had brought up was the question of accumulation and that the German legislation right now said that they were going to accumulate payments that were made and net those out of any payment from the foundation.
What you are explaining to me is what is being discussed now with respect to ICHEIC and the insurance is in effect—would those be netted out of the foundation, the 10 billion deutsche marks in the foundation for payment, or is that a separate amount of funds?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. It has to come out of the 10 billion. As I understand it now, the foundation figure, overall figure is 10 billion deutsche marks. We would have to—whatever it is, we, ICHEIC, agree should then be told to the foundation in terms of how much we want would have to come out of that 10 billion. It then gets to be a problem, as I said, if I want some confidence that whatever we think is going to be the amount we need for claims, if it runs beyond that, I need to have some guarantee that we are going to be able to pay some additional claims. We have not worked all of that out.
If we have that cushion, it will have to be outside of the foundation. The insurance companies will have to say ''we guarantee if it goes beyond figure X, we will pay our share to make sure that all of the claims are paid.''
What I don't want to see is a situation in which—and I don't think that it is likely, but a situation in which we say we want 10 million deutsche marks for claims, and we end up with 15 million deutsche marks worth of claims and no way to pay that 5 million. We have to find a way where there is a cushion for that 5 million.
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Mr. BENTSEN. You also could end up with a disparity between non-German insurance companies that are part of the commission and German insurance companies who are part of the commission, and you might end up in effect with a sort of reverse joint and several liability, that you exclude some and others and they get left holding the bag.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. My point is, I will turn blue and get on the floor and kick my heels before I agree to anything that does not provide an ability to pay whatever claims may come in. And if that means that there has to be an amount set out aside from the foundation, that may never have to be used or whatever it is, I am not going to be in a situation at all, ever, where there is a claim that is a legitimate claim, and I can't pay it, because we have agreed to a lesser figure. That does not mean that we can't work with the foundation and set a figure as long as I have a cushion out here somewhere, but what I want to avoid is precisely the point you made. I also don't want to make the other non-German insurance companies end up paying for something that is not their responsibility.
So once we have negotiated what we tell the foundation we want, I want to take the same process and negotiate with the non-German insurance companies, within the same framework, what is their contribution to the humanitarian fund and how much are we going to need from them for claims. In other words, if we can work out something with the foundation, I want to make sure we use the same framework to work out something with the non-German companies.
Mr. BENTSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Bentsen.
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Ms. Lee.
Ms. LEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me just say how important these deliberations are. In addition to dealing with the important work of ensuring that these claims are processed and collected appropriately, they really continue to educate us and serve as vehicles to remind us of our real obligation is to ensure that atrocities against groups based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin and political belief never happen again. Thank you very much for conducting these hearings.
Let me just ask Mr. Eagleburger one question, just in terms of process, and I am not very familiar at this point with how the State insurance commissioners—what their role is and how we should work with our State to make sure that the work that you do is done efficiently, effectively and in a way that ensures the best possible outcome?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Ma'am, in the first place, it was the Association of Insurance Commissioners that ended up creating this commission, because they were sufficiently concerned with what they saw in the way of potential claims that weren't being dealt with, and they recognized that if insurance companies, foreign insurance companies were going to do business in the U.S., they had an obligation to try to correct this sixty-year-old problem, if I may.
So they, in negotiation with the Jewish groups and the companies, in effect, created the commission in the first place. They have been very supportive throughout the process in terms of exercising their own influence with insurance companies to try to make them join the commission and to behave once they are in the commission.
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There was a question asked of me earlier regarding safe harbor legislation and so forth. But the commissioners so far have been very good in terms of doing what they can to protect the insurance companies within the commission from unnecessary harassment or legislation that would push them to do things that we are trying to get them to do voluntarily through the commission, but the companies all understand that should we fail in the commission, the insurance regulators of the fifty States have a good bit of authority in their own hands that could be unpleasantly exercised against companies that don't want to cooperate.
Anything that the Congress of the U.S. can do to help support these commissioners, and I recognize that fundamentally, insurance and its regulation is a State responsibility, not a Federal one, but anything that you can do to make the regulators understand that the Federal Government supports them in their efforts I think would be healthy and would be useful.
I must say thus far NAIC, that is the association of these regulators, have been superb in its support and has been very creative in its creation of the commission in the first place. They have done well, and at the moment, I can't think of anything specific that needs to be done to strengthen their hands. They have done well with it so far.
Ms. LEE. Thank you very much.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
Ms. Schakowsky.
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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Eagleburger, it is a real honor to meet you. I represent a district that has many Holocaust survivors and includes the city of Skokie. And my predecessor, Sidney Yates, certainly has left a legacy of working very hard regarding Holocaust remembrance, and so I feel a particular obligation to work on this on behalf of my constituents and the Yates legacy.
I have a number of questions that I want to ask, so first of all, with respect to your time, if I could submit to ICHEIC some of these questions.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Of course. And I will give you answers faster than when I was in the State Department.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I appreciate the offer of documents that you made earlier. I am sure that the Chairman would want them. I certainly would want them. If I can get a comprehensive set of claims rules that shows how you are going to be deciding when somebody is eligible. I don't know if these claims rules have been made available to the public yet.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. I don't think that they have, but they probably will be. I am happy to supply that. If I can wait until next week when we have our public announcement, then why don't we send the committee everything, how the valuations are, what the claims process is and so forth.
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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Great.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. We will get you everything.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Great. I am very concerned when you talk about the number of claimants that it is dependent upon the availability of good lists, and I wanted to raise some concerns that have been brought to my attention.
The Italian insurer Generali at first denied the existence of any Holocaust files, now has found 340,000 policyholders and they have created a computer disk of 90,000 that they say are unpaid, but my understanding is that ICHEIC has said that they will only publish about 5,000 names, which is a tiny fraction of the original list. Why not publish all of them or as many as possible?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. What we have done, and Generali is a specific case, and let me say, Generali, in my judgment, after a period of not being so sure, Generali has really done quite well in trying to meet its obligations. What they did give us was a disk with close to 90,000 names on it of unpaid policies. What we have done then is contracted with the Yad Vashem. You all know what Yad Vashem is. They have a substantial computer capability of seeing whether names on this list are likely to be Jewish or whether they are not. They now and have been for some time been in the process of going through that Generali list and compare it with their other means of deciding which names may or may not have been Jewish and don't ask me to explain that. It is very complicated.
My point is that they have now given us a list of names that they think are quite clearly Jewish. I don't remember the exact number, but we will publish that right away. They are going through it again. This may take two or three times. But what is wrong with publishing the whole hundred thousand I think is two things, at least until we have had a chance to look and see an analysis of what may or may not be a Jewish name. There are two problems with it: Number one, in terms of publishing the list of names and having people sort through and decide whether, in fact, this is a name that relates to them, it is, I think, not only highly inefficient, but very misleading to just broadcast this list of 60,000 names until we have done some analysis. That is point one.
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Point two, when I say publish names, we are not going to do this just once. In fact, I am going to talk about lists in a minute with you. As we refine these lists, as Yad Vashem says, this is clearly not a Jewish name, this may be, we will be publishing additional lists. To me, that is the more efficient way to do it, although it may take longer to finally get all of the names out.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. It would seem to me, if we are talking about a fairly narrow timeframe for claimants to make claims, to me it seems that publishing as many names as possible for people to look through.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. We have got two years from the 15th of February.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Allianz now says that they will now provide a partial list, 150,000 names over the next year or so, as I understand is a quote from Allianz. Or Winterthur of Switzerland, which says that they have located up to 45,000 files, and they assume that they were paid and I understand that the company denies any further responsibility for these, Zurich Raksa, who is claiming privacy laws, prevent the publication of names.
All I want to say is that it seems to me that we ought to be taking the position that the universe of names being out there should be as large as possible. I would think that would be true rather than a process that may take a lot of time to winnow down and may, as it does, leave out names. I am concerned that everyone in my district who is entitled to get those claims paid knows that their name might be there.
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Mr. EAGLEBURGER. First of all, I hope that I am as committed to getting everyone in your district that deserves——
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. And I appreciate your blue tantrum commitment to us.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. By the way, let me assure you that it is not going to take a year-and-a-half to get the lists.
Let me make a more general statement about lists, if I may. But conceding at the beginning of this, that getting these lists has proved to be more difficult than I hoped at the beginning. Not simply because of company recalcitrance, but also a question of, in some cases, fairly, and in some cases not, just how complete their own archives are. And certainly, the companies agreed and it is in the Memorandum of Understanding that they would provide these lists. But I have believed from the beginning—I think I am almost alone in this—that while the company lists are important, they are not as important as something else we are doing, and that is, the commission has decided, and we are in the process now of looking at every possible archive anywhere we can find it. And, for example, we have just gone through an Austrian archive that had about 70,000 names in it to try to pull out from that any potential Jewish insurance claims. Nobody had looked at this list before. There are lists in Belgium and the Netherlands and Poland. We are going to go through every possible one that we have the time and money to go through, because I believe that we are more likely to find potential claimants out of that process than we are out of anything that we get from the companies.
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Even if I were to say to you I had every confidence that the companies would give us everything they have got, I still believe we may find more out of the Austrian archives, which, by the way, was a question of when the Anschluss took place, these people were called in and had to list their worth. And in many cases in fact they wrote down that they had an insurance policy. These are the Jews that were called in after the Anschluss. So there is an archive here that I think is demonstrative of what may be the real way to find out names. So we are going to do that as well.
And I must say to you if we had everything, there is no way that we can get all of these lists of names out in one fell swoop anyway. But as we get names, we are going to put them on the website, and I don't understand all of these computer things, but we are going to put them out in every way that we can, but it is going to have to be a rolling process, because there are a number of archives where I think we may find some gold.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Let me just thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. In no way did any of these questions reflect my questioning your deep and long and wonderful commitment.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. If yours was not questioning that, you are the first one in a long time.
Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I am not.
Chairman LEACH. Mr. Lazio.
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Mr. LAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of quick remarks and I am going to have to apologize to you and the committee, Mr. Chairman for having to step out. I will not be here when Ambassador Lauder speaks or when Director Powell speaks, but I want to compliment both of them. They are titans in the art world and they have helped build two of our most impressive collections in our Nation. They also, I think, share a passion, and I think particularly so, because Ambassador Lauder spent much of his life advocating for fair and just compensation for Holocaust victims.
And to Secretary Eagleburger, let me just—without asking a question, let me just make the point that I am exceedingly troubled by Aegon and by the lack of participation on the part of insurance companies. I understand only one in Austria, perhaps only one in Germany right now, and you can give us feedback if you can, and there has been a particular reluctance among Dutch insurance companies to participate in the commission.
That certainly is not going to be able to stand. There has been tremendous progress and there has been progress since I last visited the National Gallery where Director Powell gave me access to some of the checkpoint documents, frankly, in rough shape in terms of cataloging and indexing. I understand there has been progress on that front. Unless we have a broader base of participation, unless the American Government and the State Department, in particular, uses its influence to ensure that those governments, those relevant governments encourage their insurance companies to get involved in this, I do not feel that we will have a successful conclusion to this chapter.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Congressman, let me say that there are no Austrian companies in the commission. The Austrian chancellor opened up a big door in which he said that Austrian insurance companies should be paying their claims and without quite saying it, he said that they should join the commission. I will certainly have an invitation out to them in a hurry.
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I can't agree with you more on the question of the companies that have a moral and probably a legal obligation to be participating that are not. I can only tell you that I will continue to push as hard as I can and get progressively nastier on the question of whether they should join or not. In the end I can't make them join, but I can be particularly difficult on the question of whether they ought to get legal closure if that is within the foundation exercise if they are not prepared to participate.
I do not believe that companies that have an obligation, and it is clear that they have one, to pay claims, and the best way to do that is through this commission. I do not see the merit to letting them off the hook legally if they don't participate. But I think we are going to have to negotiate on that subject with the foundation for awhile.
But I can tell you it is not that I want a huge commission, I would rather be given what has happened over the course of the past year. I can tell you that the fewer companies that are in there, the quicker we will get our business done. Having said that, we have got to have them in and I will do everything that I can to get them in.
Mr. LAZIO. To the extent that you think that a partnership with Members of Congress will be helpful, the committee would feel strongly about assisting you in your efforts.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. I appreciate it, and you may regret you made the offer.
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Mr. LAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Mr. Chairman, a question was asked by Congressman Moore about whether there should be some safe harbor legislation. I failed to do so earlier.
Chairman LEACH. That would be appropriate. Please proceed.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. I have to tell you I am ambivalent, and that is not usually my state of mind. Fundamentally, insurance and its regulation is a State responsibility. How much Federal legislation on this subject would help, I can't quite say.
I basically believe that the insurance regulators probably ought to have as much flexibility as they want. Now having said that, if the legislation were written carefully, I can see some merit in the sense that it might well encourage some of the companies that are not now in the commission to, in fact, join the commission.
So it is a fuzzy answer, but the best I can do at this stage is recognizing the Federal aspects of this and the questions of State authority, nevertheless, if it were carefully written legislation which didn't limit the ability of the regulators to do what they felt was necessary, I could see it could have some attractive aspects in terms of enticing other companies to come into the commission.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
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Mr. Sherman.
Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First, I join with several of my colleagues in commending Mr. Eagleburger for his work on this issue. We all strive for justice for Holocaust victims. We can also view this as simply a consumer protection issue. We should have justice for everyone who bought a policy in the first half of the 1900's, and I think it is absurd for any company to do business anywhere in the United States, and certainly not in California, if they delight in not paying a policy, or if their business practices are so bad that they don't even know to whom they have sold the policy.
Certainly no insurance company can establish its reserves, can report on its soundness, can be in a position to assure new policy buyers that it has the money to pay old policies unless they have a list of who they sold the old policies to, and perhaps the age of the person who is insured and no company should sell a single policy in the United States if they don't know what the claims will be against their reserves, and yet these companies say ''we don't know who the insureds are and we don't know their ages.'' Certainly companies that are that sloppy cannot assure that they will be able to pay the insurance.
If we look at this as a consumer protection issue, also we will not focus exclusively on Jewish names. First, many Jews don't have Jewish names. Second, consumer protection is not limited to just those who suffered in the Holocaust. Many families were destroyed and disrupted, many villages from South Europe to Western Europe, and if a family has not been in a position to make a claim, we ought to help them. I should also note that Romanian people suffered in the Holocaust as a direct result of efforts to exterminate them or to partially exterminate them. So we ought to insist that a comprehensive list of all insureds who were born before 1910 and whose policies have not been cashed in, been published, if there are some insureds who are alive, well, and in touch with their insurance companies who want to send in a letter saying ''Please don't include my name, I am 86 years old and I don't want anybody to know I have insurance,'' fine.
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But how many people, given the two World Wars that Europe has suffered under, how many people born before 1910, how many policies issued before 1941 are not in a category where heirs should not be aware or made aware that there is an insured? The Internet makes it perfect. We could take all of the lists from all of the companies and put them in alphabetical order, put them on the web and tell people the age of the insured, the town in which they lived when they bought the insurance policy, the date of birth or their age or year of birth, and certainly no company unwilling to participate in this process should be selling to consumers anywhere in the United States.
Now, I know that insurance is traditionally a State issue, but I see some of these companies trying to raise international concerns, ''Oh, you can't do that to us, you can't interfere with our trade,'' and certainly any trade agreement the United States may be a party to that provides sanctions, if we insist that companies pay their insureds, let them come with the sanctions. Let some company say that they want to profit from what Hitler did, and if America doesn't like it, we should be sanctioned.
Let us see if that is what the WTO is all about before we get further involved in this process. I am confident that if we insist that those companies that want to do business in this country, and those companies that want to escape the civil litigation joys of the United States, must publish a list of insureds, and it won't just benefit those with Jewish names.
Mr. Eagleburger, I don't know if you have a response.
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Only briefly. First of all, I can't argue with you at all. This is an issue that ought to be applicable to any and all insurance claimants. I can only tell you that my charter and the Memorandum of Understanding focuses on a specific group. Please don't make my commission broaden its role or I will probably end up even more crippled than I already am.
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The only other point I would make and don't take me wrong on this, I am not saying that this is a blanket excuse, I will say, however, in terms of insurance company records that in some cases and that is all, in some cases, I do think that they have some legitimacy when they say ''our records were destroyed during the War.'' How much that applies, I can't even tell you. I can tell you in a couple of cases that I have looked into, there is some legitimacy to it, but only some. And that is not to say that your basic point isn't correct, because I think it is. On the other hand, some companies have something of an excuse with some of the their records for the period, that's all.
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I would point out while the commission scope is limited, the scope of this Congress and this committee is not, and perhaps our committee, in conjunction with other committees, should hold hearings with a goal of writing consumer protection legislation so that only those European companies that do their best—and I realize records were destroyed during the War—to publish such a list, are allowed to approach American consumers. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you very much.
Mr. Forbes.
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the committee's diligence in reviewing these issues. They are critically important to all of us. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here today. I wanted to ask you, if you would, my friend from New York, Mr. Lazio, raised the point of the many companies that are not participating. I know in the case of the Dutch, for example, that they claim that they paid beneficiaries of their policies and that, therefore, there was no need really for them to participate or to contribute to the fund. I was wondering, Mr. Secretary, how valid or invalid that is, and if ICHEIC has had an opportunity to get documentation from the Dutch and others who may be making claims that, in fact—or suggesting that they had paid claims, and if we had been able to get that kind of documentation?
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And as a follow-up to that, I know certainly many of these insurance companies have U.S. subsidiaries, and I was wondering if you can comment, Mr. Secretary, on ICHEIC's ability to sit down with some of those domestic-based subsidiaries and find out just how much we can encourage them to actually participate and contribute to the fund?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Let me answer the second part first, which is the fact that these European insurance companies have U.S. subsidiaries or are owning large American insurance companies is fundamentally the only reason that these European companies are in the commission to begin with.
As far as I have been able to tell, the American insurance subsidiary has no particular entrance into the files and the things that we need from a European insurance company, we have to get from the European insurance company. The official of the American subsidiary, I am sure, behind closed doors, are saying to the European owner, ''For God's sake get me out from under this. We have to cooperate.'' I believe that is happening, sometimes with more success than others.
But, I guess, fundamentally, my answer to the second part of your question is while the fact that it is the American subsidiary that has drawn the European companies into the commission itself, when it comes to the kinds of questions that we now have to deal with, whether it is claims or valuation of claims or whatever it is, the only way in which we are successfully to deal with these questions is through the parent European company.
On the question of whether we have any evidence with regard to Aegon on how well it has done and whether there are any potential claims or not, the only way I can answer that is to say that there is no question through this Netherlands foundation, has participated in the claims-paying process on the claims that have been filed through them. I have no idea how many other claims there may be. I am told by a number of people who may or may not know that there are a number of claims that have not been paid, that really pertain to Aegon.
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The only way I can come to grips with a real answer to your question is if Aegon joins the commission, we will find out. I don't intend to let them be charged twice. If they paid a claim, they paid it. Whether it is in the Netherlands or elsewhere, but the only way we can find out for sure is to have them join the commission and have them participate in the whole process and pay whatever claims show up. I will make you an educated bet that we will find that there are still claims out there.
Mr. FORBES. Mr. Secretary, hearkening back to your former life here at the State Department, can you comment for my edification as to what kind of coordination there may be with diplomatic efforts, and at what point a decision is made that it needs to be included in any diplomatic approaches that this Nation may make?
Mr. EAGLEBURGER. I would be happy to, because this is a case where I can say with total honesty that the Department has been superb. There is a fellow sitting behind me, the one with the mustache. His name is Bindenagel. He is a foreign service officer I have known for a long time. He is in charge of the whole State Department and now liaises with Eizenstat as well. When Eizenstat was in the State Department, he was the contact. He still is.
He has been superb in terms of any time I have needed anything in the way of State Department help, I have gone to him and we have gotten it. The Secretary of State, I have had to ask on one occasion for support, and she was right there right away. I have not only no complaints, I have to tell you that the Department has been superb. That is not something I was always able to say in the past, but in this case they have been really great.
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Mr. FORBES. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. I appreciate your good work.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman LEACH. We do have a vote on and I want to call on you, Mrs. Maloney. If we can do it in three or four minutes and then we can excuse the witnesses.
Mrs. MALONEY. I just wanted to thank the witnesses, and also a particular witness, Glenn Lowry. He is the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has done a great deal of work for art museums in resolving the issue. He is from my district, and I am glad he is here.
Chairman LEACH. Let me, as the Chairman, thank you for your great participation on this panel, Mrs. Maloney.
Let me just conclude by saying that I am optimistic that in the near term, we can get a resolution of the Dutch issues, and that I think that will be a very strong step forward, both for the precept of the commission, but also more importantly, for resolving the underlying issue for which the commission is established.
In any event, on behalf of the committee, I would like to thank you, Secretary Eagleburger, and also your aide, Mr. Share, for his fine work and dedication to this issue.
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Mr. EAGLEBURGER. Mr. Chairman, this is unique in my experience. This is the first hearing that I have had in, I don't know how many years, I am not going out black and blue.
Chairman LEACH. No, sir, you are not. You are going out red, white and blue. Let me say that the hearing will be in recess pending the vote. There is a vote on and why don't we set a time certain for when we will reconvene. The hearing is in recess until 12:15.
[Recess.]
Chairman LEACH. If I can ask the second panel to assemble.
Our second panel consists of Mr. Earl Powell, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Mr. Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Ms. Lyndel King, Director, Weisman Art Museum of Minneapolis; Ms. Sharon Page, Head of the Secretariat, Tate Gallery, London; Mr. Jonathan Petropoulos, Researcher, Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, and Mr. Ronald Tauber, President of the Art Loss Register.
If there is no objection, the panel will go in the order of introduction, and we will begin with Mr. Powell, who heads one of the great symbols of Western civilization, and we are proud that it is located in this city.
Mr. Powell.
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STATEMENT OF EARL A. POWELL III, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. POWELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Members of the committee, good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you again to discuss the subject of works of art seized during the Third Reich and to tell you about some of the National Gallery's initiatives in this area since we last met two years ago. I was also pleased to be a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors Task Force on the Spoliation of Art during the Nazi World War II era. The Task Force's report, issued in June 1998 established important principles and guidelines to which the member museums subscribe.
At the hearing two years ago, I spoke about the National Gallery's role on the Roberts Commission, established in 1943 by President Roosevelt to encourage and assist in the preservation of cultural properties in Europe's war-ravaged areas. Headquartered at the National Gallery, the Roberts Commission proposed the founding of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. Army to assist in protecting and restituting cultural property.
Among its many other tasks was to establish the collecting points in postwar Germany to which works of art and other cultural objects, hidden by the Nazis throughout Germany and Austria, and subsequently discovered by the Allies, were transferred. At these facilities, works were identified, photographed, cataloged, and restituted to their countries of origin eventually. One of the largest of these was the Munich Central Collecting Point and works that were processed there had come from European museums and private collections, particularly from France and the Netherlands. On extended loan from the U.S. National Archives, the National Gallery currently houses portions of the Munich Collecting Point material—the existing negatives and microfilm of the original inventory cards.
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Over the past two years, the Gallery has worked diligently to make these records more accessible and understandable to the public. To that end, a computerized index is being developed by Gallery staff, and is designed to be used as a finding aid for those seeking to use the records. This computerized index cross-references artist, media and presumed owner to the Munich inventory number. The completion of this index will help facilitate locating specific works of art within the collection. This is an extremely valuable tool, as few know the Munich number for the works of art they are researching and studying. And it is a very time-consuming task. Prints are being made of each of the approximately 43,000 glass and film negatives and computer records created for the more than 150,000 objects. The Munich Collecting Point archive is a valuable resource; it is available to the public, and over the years we have welcomed many individuals doing research on this subject, including authors, family members and other art museum staff.
The National Gallery has always been concerned with and has conducted research on the provenance of works of art in its own collection. For example, the Gallery is publishing a projected 32-volume systematic catalog of the entire collection. Written by Gallery curators and other scholars, each volume is devoted to a particular school of painting, sculpture or decorative arts, and includes comprehensive scholarly essays on each work, including details on the provenance, oral history of ownership, of each work of art. Twelve of these volumes have been published since the systematic catalog project began some sixteen years ago.
The National Gallery's collection is one of the finest in the world with major achievements in Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. We are at the forefront of computerized access to information on the collection. The Gallery's website, launched three years ago, features an extensive section on the collection, offering searches by artist or title, numerous tours by school or medium, foreign language tours, and in-depth studies on specific artists and works of art.
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The collection is the cornerstone of the website and known provenance information is available online for every painting and most of the sculptures in the collection. In keeping with the AAMD task force recommendations, extensive research has been undertaken in the last several years by Gallery staff on the almost 1600 European paintings in the collection that date from before World War II. In addition, it is routine procedure for the Gallery to conduct ongoing consultation with the Art Loss Register which, as many of you know, maintains an international database of claimed losses.
I am pleased to participate on the panel with its chairman, Ronald Tauber. The Art Loss Register staff has always been very responsive to ours and others' requests. We also work closely and on a continuing basis with the President's Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U.S. I am delighted to share the panel today with their Research Director for Art Issues, Jonathan Petropoulos; he and his staff have been very helpful in our ongoing research.
Finding a gap in known provenance of a work of art in any time period is not surprising or complicating in and of itself. When a work of art has been sold at auction or through a dealer, a previous owner's name may have been withheld for any number of legitimate reasons. During the World War II period, the picture is further complicated, since many works which had been looted were restituted to their legitimate owners in the years following the War and records of these returns, many of which are held by foreign governments, have not always been easily available.
Nonetheless, Gallery staff conduct extensive research using materials available at the National Archives and elsewhere to clarify the provenance of the collection. More resources have become available in recent years; these take the form of international websites of this material and those of individual scholars sharing their expertise electronically as well as more European archives becoming accessible. Working groups, such as those at the American Association of Museums annual meeting this coming May, are also contributing to available scholarship. To date, the Art Loss Register review of Gallery works with provenance gaps has found no match with their database of claimed losses, or with numerous published sources of losses from World War II. This extensive research being conducted by the Gallery is ongoing.
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I would like to tell you about the research undertaken on one picture in the Gallery's collection that illustrates both the often complicated nature of tracing provenance and the high level of international cooperation the National Gallery has received.
The Gallery's painting ''The Marriage of the Virgin'' dating about 1491 by the Italian Renaissance Master Luca Signorelli, was owned in 1931 by the Goudstikker Gallery in Amsterdam. No additional provenance information was known, except its purchase in 1955 by New York collector and Gallery benefactor Samuel H. Kress. There was some cause for initial concern as recent scholarship revealed details of the 1940 acquisition of the Goudstikker Gallery and its contents by agents of Hermann Goering. Research by Gallery staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, uncovered an inventory list of the Goudstikker Gallery's contents that had been sold to Goering's agents. Further research showed that the Gallery's painting had not been chosen by Goering himself, but that it had remained in Nazi possession. In attempting to determine its whereabouts between 1940 and 1955, we contacted Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, the Chief Inspector for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, who I understand will be testifying to the committee on a subsequent panel.
Her prompt and extremely helpful response in the end proved that the Signorelli was one of a small number of paintings that had been restituted to the Amsterdam dealer's widow after the War. Dutch archives provided the Gallery with a copy of the actual receipt signed by Desiree Goudstikker in 1949 for the pictures. The provenance could not have been clarified without such international access and cooperation.
The Gallery has always requested full provenance details for proposed acquisitions to the collection, including export licenses where required, and when purchasing a work of art, a warranty of title from the seller that the work is free from any claims. Further scrutiny includes submitting information on proposed acquisitions to the Art Loss Register. In addition, as is customary with many major art museums, the National Gallery publishes annually a detailed list of all works of art acquired during the year and in our case, a description of our collection is available through the Gallery's website.
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The Archives of the National Gallery preserves and makes available to researchers and scholars historical materials relating to the National Gallery's past. In response to the great interest generated by this period and subject in recent years, the department has produced a Guide to Research Resources Relating to World War II, which I am happy to make available to anyone. It is on our website also. Subsequently, it was expanded and made available on the website, as I just mentioned. The guide directs users to documents and records relating to wartime activities that are available for study and research at the National Gallery. These records include files, photographs, and oral histories of particular interest to those researching the field. For instance, documents reflect the involvement of Gallery employees and others on the Roberts Commission and the officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program, including correspondence, fascinating glass slides of the MFAA's packing activities in Germany, donated personal papers and journals of travels in Europe, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, to name just a few.
In all aspects regarding this subject, the National Gallery adheres strongly to the statement of purpose and guidelines established by the Association of Art Museum Directors.
At this time, Mr. Chairman, I can assure you that we have not received a single claim for unrestituted looted art, but if we did, we would seek to review such a claim promptly and thoroughly.
Similarly, we have not found any concrete evidence through our own research that any painting in the Gallery's collection was illegally confiscated during the World War II era and not restituted, but if we did, such information would be given the same high priority.
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I would like to thank you and the committee for the opportunity to discuss this important topic and for your invitation today.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Powell.
Before introducing Mr. Lowry, I would like to make one add-on observation.
The Roberts Commission, which the gallery was so instrumental in forming, created an Officer Corps which was involved at the collecting points in Germany. That Officer Corps, in a famous letter, in fact, a unique protest of the United States Army, suggested after the War, that it would be improper to take any artworks confiscated for permanent display in the United States, although some were sent on a touring expedition.
I only stress this because as we look at this whole issue of looted art as well as the issue of economic crimes committed by the Nazis, it is singularly impressive that the United States not only never attempted to take territory after the War, but never attempted to take valuable objects after the War, in contrast with other countries.
And I think it is very important that it be noted that the National Gallery played an instrumental role in that process of development of procedures, because it was not a unanimous position of the American people, as it would be a natural instinct to want to confiscate certain assets. But the role of the National Gallery was impressive and in continuing to maintain those records is also impressive.
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As the National Gallery of the United States, I think it is appropriate that the national legislature extend its accolades for a long history of propriety in this particular area, and your leadership is appreciated.
We will now go to Mr. Glenn Lowry, who is Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Mr. Lowry.
STATEMENT OF GLENN D. LOWRY, DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK CITY
Mr. LOWRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members of the Banking Committee, and especially Congresswoman Maloney, whose kind, but unexpected, words earlier were heartening.
On behalf of the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, I want to thank you for this opportunity to discuss the significant progress made by American art museums in resolving the fate of works of art stolen by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.
Let me begin, as I did when I had the honor of testifying before this committee two years ago, with an unequivocal statement: The Museum of Modern Art does not, and will not, knowingly exhibit stolen works of art. Like our sister institutions, we maintain our collections with scrupulous regard for our professional and ethical obligations.
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Within that context, it is crucial to understand the enormous complexity and practical realities of resolving issues of provenance. Questions of provenance are nearly as old as the history of art, and rare is the museum that has never had to address the possibility that someone may lay claim to a cherished work on public view as their personal property. Museums have been able to address conflicting ownership claims responsibly and ethically and these long-standing professional practices will continue. In the unique context of Nazi depredations, museums must be able to assure themselves and the public they serve that they have good title to the art in their collections.
I would like to spend a few minutes describing what the American art museum community has done to address this important question since several of us last appeared before this committee. As we promised you two years ago, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the AAMD, created a task force chaired by Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Within a short period, this task force on which I was honored to serve, as did Rusty Powell, developed guidelines that were accepted by all of the major art museums in the United States. These guidelines have also served as the basis for the recommendations of the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, and for the additional guidelines promulgated recently by the American Association of Museums, a group representing some 3,000 museums of all kinds.
The guidelines call upon American museums to conduct a comprehensive review of their collections to ascertain if any works were unlawfully confiscated during the Nazi era and never returned. To the extent that problems come to light, the guidelines provide a framework for museums to address them candidly and responsively.
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As new information has become available through the efforts of researchers and archivists around Europe and the United States, we have incorporated that data in a systematic review of our collections and we will continue to review our holdings as more information emerges.
At the Museum of Modern Art, we have committed several members of our curatorial staff to provenance research, and we have added additional full-time staff dedicated solely to this effort. We have also greatly increased the level of scrutiny we give to new acquisitions, whether by gift, purchase or bequest. Other American art museums have taken similar measures.
Working with newly available archival and historical resources, museums have added depth and breadth to the understanding of their collections. We have also worked with our European colleagues who are also making efforts to address potential problems with works of art in their collections. Several European governments, too, have taken the initiative to transfer from national collections to their rightful owners looted works that were never returned after World War II. Although much remains to be done, we are seeing an increasing awareness and sensitivity on both sides of the Atlantic, and activity on this issue on a scale that no one could have predicted two years ago. Our staff has met with people involved with research and restitution programs in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Poland, Russia, Britain, the Netherlands and even Australia. We have exchanged information with researchers, art historians, reporters, lawyers, art dealers, auction houses and political leaders. These efforts will continue, because they are an integral part of our educational mission, and because they are part of our relationship with the communities we serve.
It is gratifying and encouraging to be able to report to you that despite the enormous devotion of resources to this issue, American museums have, to date, discovered very few problems with their collections. More important, when problems have appeared, we have squarely addressed them. At the Modern, for example, despite an enormous amount of scrutiny both from ourselves and from the press and others, we are not aware of a single Nazi-tainted work of art in our collection, a collection of more than a hundred thousand objects. That is not to say there are no serious questions, but the key is that following the AAMD guidelines and in cooperation with our European colleagues, we have the mechanism and the will to resolve whatever questions arise.
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By way of illustration, I would like to describe for the committee the process the Modern followed in the single instance to date where we faced the possibility of a problem with a work of art in our collection. About a year ago, I received a letter from the representative of a major European collection. His letter raised the possibility that a painting that the Modern had owned for many years, a gift from a prominent American family, had been taken from his family before or during the Second World War. We immediately responded, and agreed to conduct a full investigation. He made his information available to us: a photograph of the painting hanging in his relative's home and certain transportation records created by the Nazis. With his cooperation, the Museum undertook a huge amount of research in an effort to establish, among other issues, when the photograph was taken, whether the painting in the photograph is the same as the one in our collection and whether the picture was sold before the War to another collector in Sweden.
We made all of this information available to the family. I am pleased to report that in this year-long, ongoing inquiry, we have had the unstinting assistance from a number of European sources, including the Musee National d'Art at the Pompidou Center in Paris and an important Swedish archive. We, and the potential claimant, are working together in good faith, and on a confidential basis, both of us knowing that we will reach a mutually satisfactory result. If the picture turns out to have been taken from his family and never properly restituted, we will act responsibly, appropriately, and promptly.
I do not want, however, to leave with the impression that every problem that arises has an easy solution. Often the issues involved are complex and knotted in difficult questions of inheritance and post-War restitution. Take, for example, the two paintings by Egon Schiele that were part of an exhibition of Schiele's work on display at the Museum of Modern Art from the Leopold Foundation in Vienna.
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On New Year's Eve, 1997, the Museum of Modern Art received letters from two families claiming to be the rightful heirs of two different paintings in the exhibition. We had exhibited both of the paintings, along with about 150 others by the same artist, without incident at the Museum for three months. We had no reason to believe that there was any cloud on the paintings' past. Both of the pictures had been exhibited around the world for decades and both had been reproduced frequently in books. The exhibition closed on schedule, but the two paintings remained in New York, because the Manhattan District Attorney subpoenaed the pictures. For the last two years, we have fought a protracted and ultimately successful battle in the New York State courts.
Our point was not that one side or the other was the proper owner—a museum is neither equipped nor empowered to serve as judge and jury in a dispute over other people's property—but rather that the current New York State law protects works of art on loan for public exhibition from any kind of seizure.
Although we had assumed from the start the good faith of the people claiming the pictures, it now appears likely that neither family had a bona fide claim. In the case of one of these two claims, the painting was claimed by a former reporter for the New York Times. As it turned out, her claim was based upon her being the widow of a son of the pre-War owner's cousin, who, in turn, was not an heir to the painting.
The other claim is even more convoluted. The man who asserted his family's rights in the painting wrote to us about his vivid recollections about seeing the picture in his aunt's house in Vienna before the War. But, according to the pre-War owner's grandson, the claimant never saw the painting, never set foot in the house in Vienna, and is not, as a matter of fact, an heir, a fact the claimant recently conceded in a British newspaper interview. Despite all this, the U.S. Justice Department has commenced a forfeiture proceeding to reclaim this alleged heir's painting, politicizing our courts and making it almost impossible to engage in the kind of meticulous and dispassionate research required to ascertain the exact history of this painting immediately before and after the Second World War, and who, today, is its rightful owner.
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I mention this example not to discuss the merits of the claim or to delve into the extremely sensitive moral and legal questions of who may rightly assert claims and when they should do so, but to demonstrate that the process of determining what, if any, art in American museums was looted by the Nazis and never returned to the proper owner, and then trying to determine who the proper owner might be, is an extremely complex undertaking, and is made even more so when the works in question are loans to, rather than objects owned by, the relevant institution.
Just as we have learned that American and European museums, working with the AAMD guidelines, can play a vital role in reuniting looted art with its rightful owners, we have also learned most emphatically that use of criminal process is not an appropriate way to address this issue. With the immensely valuable participation of groups like the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress, we have seen that the most effective means to resolve problems involving the return of Nazi looted art requires good faith, discretion, and cooperation between museums and claimants, not the blunt instruments of subpoena power and forfeiture proceedings.
For museums and for the public, involvement of criminal process is counterproductive. Take again, for a moment, the case of the Schiele paintings we borrowed two-and-a-half years ago. So far, other than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and untold hours of time, the paintings have been locked away in storage, inaccessible to the claimants and inaccessible to the public. And because of this, many foreign lenders, both public and private, have raised serious concerns about lending to American art museums—all sobering and unintended consequences of the various legal actions surrounding the case.
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The AAMD guidelines, through the rigor with which they have been accepted and put into practices by American museums, repeatedly demonstrate their worth. There is not a single art museum in this country that is not aware of the importance of this issue and the urgent need to diligently review the provenance of the works of art in their collections. These efforts pay off. The North Carolina Museum of Art just days ago reached the conclusion that a painting in their collection has been taken from an Austrian family before the War and never returned. Precisely as the AAMD guidelines direct, the North Carolina museum carefully considered the factual record, discussed the matter reasonably and respectfully with the family's representatives, and then concluded that the painting belonged to the family in Austria.
I am confident that, should any further issues arise for American museums, they will be addressed and resolved with equal measures of good faith and due consideration. The guidelines, and the spirit of fair and appropriate conduct that motivated us to write them, are deeply ingrained into the operations of American museums.
As this committee concludes its inquiry into this issue, it may draw considerable satisfaction from the fact that America's museums are forthrightly addressing the question in regard to our own collections and in the art we borrow and that we will continue to provide for the American people outstanding exhibitions of fine art.
Thank you very much.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Lowry.
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Ms. King.
STATEMENT OF LYNDEL KING, DIRECTOR, FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM, MINNEAPOLIS MN
Ms. KING. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Lyndel King, Director of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, and I am testifying here today on behalf of the members of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the AAMD. We are grateful for the opportunity to be here, and thank you and the committee for your continued efforts to shine a light on one of the most tragic periods of history in the Western world.
AAMD, which was founded in 1916, has followed the troublesome issue of provenance of works or art since 1963, when we included a section in an issue in our publication Professional Practices. In late 1997, AAMD began a serious discussion, specifically about Holocaust looted art, which led six months later, to the publication of Guidelines on Nazi Looted Art, which has been mentioned by both my colleagues.
The AAMD greatly benefited from the then-recent work of scholars like Lynn Nicholas and Hector Feliciano. Their research and scholarship provided museum professionals with valuable information and background not easily available. It caused us to look again at what we owned.
As a result of the scholarship, the discussions and the guidelines, American art museums, which may have works that could be Nazi looted, have rededicated themselves to be vigilant and thorough in their provenance research. However, we need to put this in an appropriate context. Approximately 50 percent of all of the museums that are members of the AAMD, and probably a higher percentage of all art museums in the United States, could not have Nazi looted art, because they either have no permanent collections, or have only contemporary American or regional art.
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After the publication of the AAMD guidelines, we surveyed our membership in 1998, and again in 1999 about their progress in researching their collections. In 1998, 80 percent of the survey respondents said they had either completed or were in the process of doing the required research. In 1999 that number was 100 percent. Glenn Lowry made mention of the Cranach painting at the North Carolina Museum of Art which will be restituted. This is an example of a medium-sized museum following the AAMD guidelines and doing the right thing. The point is the system is working.
Museums are researching their collections and they are making information available through print and electronic publications, and when the validity of claims is established, they are returning the works. One of the issues continually cited by museums doing provenance research is cost. This is especially, but not exclusively true for smaller and mid-sized museums, whose research staff and budgets already are stretched.
Because provenance research is laborious, time-consuming, painstaking and requires a multilingual staff and hours of investigative work, the process is exceedingly slow. Let me quote from the experience of one mid-sized museum curator in putting together an international exhibition: ''We have been putting a great deal of energy into the issue of provenance, but we are a small museum and have no resources to hire additional qualified hands to do the intensive research that may be warranted. For our recent exhibition, we devoted extraordinary time, sixteen months, and effort to determining that neither domestic nor international loans were likely to be subject to claims. Our immunity from judicial seizure application was successful, but required the peculiar Catch-22 that we guarantee there was no possibility of competing claims of ownership. If we could provide such assurance, we wouldn't need immunity. There were works for which we simply could not get information regarding the crucial years.'' In this case, her small curatorial staff was stretched to the limit, not only by the provenance research, but also by the hours spent in conversations helping the then-USIA understand that they could not guarantee, as such, that there would be no claims.
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However, her greatest challenge came in arranging a loan from a private collector. She discovered that the painting she wanted to borrow had been looted, but she did not know if it had been properly restituted. The collector agreed that she should undertake the provenance research which, as she said, was not easy or straightforward to accomplish. Happily, she was able to determine that the painting had been properly restituted and then resold.
This example gives us insight into several issues facing museum researchers, the most vexing being that there are no short cuts to filling gaps in provenance. It may be relatively easy for journalists or others to establish that a work of art might be labeled as ''having suspicious gaps in provenance,'' but filling in those gaps, providing conclusive evidence one way or the other is the hard part. Even after exhaustive research, it is often concluded that there is no definitive answer to the missing information.
Another museum curator wrote that after reviewing the provenance of 2,100 works, it was found that 800 were acquired after 1933, and of those, 500 paintings needed varying amounts of additional research. She concluded her report by saying, ''We have been in contact with dealers, collectors, scholars, curators and auction houses. We have also consulted the staff of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and the Commission for Art Recovery and other recognized experts in this field. In addition to utilizing the National Archives in College Park, we expect to look into records of various European archives as well. But with 500 paintings to research, the results will not be immediate.''
In discussions with large, medium and small museums, they have made a number of suggestions for how to expedite the task at hand. The first two suggestions are the same from all museums: additional resources to do the investigative work and the creation of sophisticated cross-referenced universal databases to assist with the chore. In addition, museum colleagues tell me that it would be useful if there were a better cataloging and cross-referencing system at the National Archives. An example that was given was if a researcher finds a reference for a debriefing that might shed light on a particular painting, there is no easy way to find the transcript of the debriefing. The researcher might be directed to a box that could hold the transcript, as well as hundreds of other pieces of paper, none of which is indexed. The task is daunting.
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Another suggestion is that dealers and auction houses, which are often not forthcoming with information, should be obliged to open their records, maybe after a certain period of time. It has also been suggested that there be some organized way to preserve and eventually open the records of dealers who go out of business. When a dealer goes out of business, the records are often lost or destroyed which could mean gaps of provenance would never be known.
Museums understand the imperatives of researching their collections, and as you have heard today, even with limited resources, they have plunged ahead. However, the additional research burdens on the small museums often force them to walk a very fine line: Do additional research and cut important community programming, or do the research, but at a slower pace and maintain programming. Some are still struggling to find the balance, but all are working at it. The important thing is that in spite of obstacles, museums are unquestionably moving forward. If progress appears to be slow, it is not for any lack of will or moral force.
While American art museums are committed to weighing and investigating claims to specific works, it must be recognized that museums hold their collections not for the benefit of the museum, its staff or its trustees, but for the American public. Consequently, we have an obligation to assure the public that any work taken from the public domain is lawfully taken.
As one museum director said, ''We only have one chance to do the right thing. If we return a work of art to the wrong party, or return a work of art that should not have been returned, we are not likely to have a chance to undo that.'' This means that slow, unsensational research must take place. Museums, small and large, are aware of the seriousness and the complexity of the issues. They do not want Nazi looted art on their walls, and they are doing the right thing.
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Thank you for your attention.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Ms. King.
We also want to pay particular respect to a British citizen, Ms. Page, from the Tate Gallery in London.
STATEMENT OF SHARON PAGE, HEAD OF THE SECRETARIAT, TATE GALLERY, LONDON U.K.
Ms. PAGE. Thank you to the Chairman and committee Members for inviting me along. U.K. museums have been doing an enormous amount of work over the past eighteen months to address the issue of looted works that may be in their collections, and it is great to have this opportunity to tell you what we have been doing and maybe share some experience with you.
I am Head of Secretariat to the Tate Gallery in London, and from that perspective, have been involved in the only claim made so far on a national museum collection in the U.K., and hopefully I can share some of my experience from that.
I am also a member of the U.K. National Museum Directors Conference, working particularly on works wrongfully taken during the Holocaust period, and hopefully I can share experience from my work in that working party, too. For people who don't understand, the National Museum Directors Conference is a voluntary organization that represents directors of all of the nationally funded museums and galleries in the U.K., although I am pleased to say that our work has also been picked up by some of the non-national institutions as well, so it is not just the nationals who have been involved in this particular work.
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I think the history of the National Museums involvement in this particular issue began in June 1998 when the National Museum Directors Conference decided to set up a working party to look into the issues of works of art looted during the Holocaust, and I was proud to be part of the working party established then. We began our work in the summer of 1998, and in November 1998, completed a statement of actions and principles which was adopted by the National Museums and which I was pleased to be able to launch at the Washington conference here in December 1998.
The initiatives in the U.K. have been driven by the museums themselves, we have had a lot of support from the government, but it has been very much a self-help exercise. The working party was very keen that our statement of actions and principles offered real practical guidance to museums in the U.K. on ways in which they could practically address the works in their collections.
Therefore, our statement focused on carrying out research into existing works and collections, how to deal with acquisitions in the future, how to handle claims, how to be as open as possible with information about works in the collections and also some practical guidance on international loan exhibitions. 1999 really saw the implementation of the work set out in our statement. In April 1999, all of the National museums and galleries published an action plan which set out information about the institutions, about their collections and about the people that could be contacted in the event of a claim, but most importantly, set out the areas of their collections where they would be focusing their research and the timetables they proposed to stick to in terms of publishing the outcome of that research.
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From the Tate Gallery's perspective, our collections database was able to locate those works in our non-British collection which we had acquired post-1932, and which had been made pre-1946, and that identified about 600 works which formed the first tranche of our research. I am pleased to say in April 1999, the non-national museums in the U.K. published their own statements of action and principles, which is very much based on the national version, and they are also now undertaking research into their collections. At the end of this month, we will be publishing the results of that first tranche of research, which will include setting out what research has been carried out and most importantly, publishing on a website the list of all of those works where we have been able to identify gaps or question marks over the provenance in the period between 1933 and 1945.
It is very interesting to hear from my colleague here on the right that the kind of problems faced in the U.S., which have been also faced in the U.K. in carrying out this kind of research. It is extremely detailed, it is extremely resource-intensive, and in some ways, the easy thing is to find the gaps or the question marks. Unfortunately, provenance of works of art is not an exact science. It often revolves around letters from individuals, entries in exhibition catalogs, records in files and archives, and one of the problems that we have encountered is that the first stage of finding the gaps is easy up to a point, although it is labor-intensive. The really difficult thing is to take things on to the next stage, which is to fill those gaps to try and answer questions, and at the moment we are trying, as far as possible, to use our resources sensibly. So for example, fifty museums are not all writing at the same time to Christie's or Sotheby's to say ''can you answer a question on this particular gap?''
One of the things that we have also done in the U.K. is to establish an independent advisory committee for U.K. museums and galleries. This committee was established in April 1999, is headed up by a high court judge, and includes representatives from the art world and from Jewish interest groups. We meet with that group regularly to tell them what we have been doing and really seek their guidance as to whether we are doing the right things or heading in the right direction, and to ensure that we are being as transparent as possible about what we are doing, because the ultimate aim of our research is to make available all of the information about the works in our collections, all of the information about works where there may be gaps or question marks, so that people carrying out research and making claims know where to look to.
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One of the other things that we have done in the U.K. is published some detailed guidelines to help museums and galleries carrying out this research. It is complicated, and as my colleague has pointed out, particularly for smaller museums, maybe just run by volunteers, not only is it a daunting task, but understanding what they are looking for is a real challenge, and we have tried to set out some basic criteria so that all of the research that is being done is being done on a similar basis so we can make comparisons, so that people are not making assumptions about things unnecessarily and giving them some guidelines as to the various different databases and research resources so they have some idea as to where to start.
I think I said earlier that the Tate Gallery is the only national institution, in fact, the only museum or gallery in the U.K. so far who has received an actual claim against a work in its collection. The National Museum Directors' Conference work, because it has been a museum-driven initiative rather than a government-driven initiative, has focused on what we can do. But one of the things that this particular claim has highlighted is, once again, the legal framework we are operating within and the constraints that that puts on us in terms of dealing with claims. It has been an amazingly interesting exercise to be involved in. I think it was hugely useful to us, the work that the National Museum Directors Working Party has done, because we were in a position to deal with that claim quickly, to immediately develop a relationship with the claimant and work together with them to look at the details around the claim and try to take it forward.
However what the claim has highlighted is the complex legal situation that exists, and it is not just in the U.K., I think it exists in the U.S. and other countries where one is trying to balance the genuine claim, the issues around a claim and also a museum's constitution. In the U.K., all of the national museums and galleries are founded by acts of Parliament, which basically set out our powers and what we can do and can't do.
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U.K. museums are also charities, and so we are working within the constraints of charity law. And we are hopeful that we can work within that framework with the claimant, but also with government to actually balance our responsibilities as trustees of a public collection which we are holding for the British public, but also the very valid and worthwhile claims coming from claimants.
Just to sum up, I think it would be useful to look forward at some of the other initiatives and ways in which this issue can be addressed elsewhere. As part of the guidelines, we have produced guidance to museums in terms of dealing with acquisitions moving forward and we have, in addition to rigorous provenance checking, we have tried to encourage institutions to introduce some form of agreement when they acquire works of art, which seeks basic assurances from the vendor, that they own the work that they are selling, that they are able to sell it and, to the best of their knowledge, there are no third party claims.
Unfortunately, having that form of agreement on the table is one thing. Actually getting it accepted is another. I think museums and galleries find enormous resistance to that. There is still an emphasis in the art world to basically say ''Here is a work of art, take it or leave it, we give you no guarantees.'' I think there is a lot that can be done to try to take forward having a formal rigorous approach to selling works of art and getting a better balance between the risk on the purchaser and having to keep their fingers crossed and some assurances given by the vendor who should have some knowledge about the work that they are selling. We have heard the problems faced by museums in terms of international loans. We have developed some guidelines which we are hoping to take forward at an international museum exhibition conference this year to try to introduce guidelines for international loans, which, once again, will get the balance right between due diligence on the part of borrowing institutions and basic warranties on ownership from lending institutions.
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Finally, in the U.K. there is a House of Commons select committee meeting in the spring of this year which will be looking at trade and cultural property generally, but no doubt will be focusing on issues around works of art looted during the Holocaust. I think all of us involved in museums in the U.K. will look on with interest as to what the outcome of that committee will be and its impact on this particular issue. Thank you very much.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you very much, Ms. Page.
Our next witness is Jonathan Petropoulos. Please proceed.
STATEMENT OF JONATHAN PETROPOULOS, RESEARCH DIRECTOR FOR ART AND CULTURAL PROPERTY, PRESIDENTIAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON HOLOCAUST ASSETS
Mr. PETROPOULOS. Mr. Chairman, Committee Members, it is an honor to be with you here today. My remarks will summarize my written statement. I will divide my comments into four areas and highlight what I consider to be the most important issues. Let me state that the views I am expressing are my own and not necessarily those of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States.
The commission's conclusions will be contained in its report to the President and the Congress to be issued later this year.
First, with respect to the number of items of cultural property looted and returned, it is remarkable that the data are so imprecise. Despite intensive engagement with the restitution process by most European states and the U.S. Government, and the research of a number of scholars, we are just not sure how many works were stolen, how many were returned to the rightful owners and how many are still missing. I would stress two points in this regard: First, the research process in this area should be a cooperative one and experts around the world should arrange to share information; and two, the figure for looted works not yet restituted to rightful owners is the most elusive of all and estimates feature the greatest range, from 10,000 to 110,000. We will probably never have a precise number for this last category, although the numbers are startling nonetheless.
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It is important to stress that the Nazis systematically looted cultural property not only from the very rich, but also from ordinary people. The real story of the mass theft of a cultural legacy is far more than one of a few extraordinary collections of museum quality paintings. Second, because of the efforts of Congress and the Clinton Administration to focus attention on this issue through events like the Washington Conference on Holocaust Assets, museums and other institutions, at least in this country, are increasingly making their records available to scholars and the interested public of survivors and their heirs. In addition, through the interagency working group on declassification of Nazi era documents, the United States Government has declassified millions of pages of documents which relate to Holocaust assets in general and art and cultural property in particular. This effort continues.
There is a growing body of scholarship on looted art and the issue has penetrated the consciousness of academics, politicians and policymakers. Nevertheless, if one looks at the restitution cases since the early 1990's, whether it is the Monet exhibit in Boston, the Matisse in Seattle or the Cranach in North Carolina, the information that a work had suspicious provenance almost always came from outside researchers, not from the museums themselves.
There is a need to continue to push for public access to sources of information about provenance, whether in governmental or non-governmental archives in the U.S. or abroad.
My third category concerns works in private collections. My main points are, one, that the majority of works looted from Holocaust victims are not of museum quality and may have been destroyed or ended up in private collections. I would estimate their location, in order of importance, to be Europe first; the U.S. second; and then Latin America and South Africa. Two, that those works that have survived will steadily re-enter the market, especially as a result of generational change. Three, as a result, the art-dealing establishment will play a crucial role in identifying victims' art.
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As a historian, I suggest that if we are to truly understand the way in which art flows internationally, we must understand the role of art dealers. This will require greater transparency in the art market than previously was the case.
Finally, with respect to the work of the Presidential Commission, I am pleased to report, consistent with the charge of our chairman, we have undertaken a critical, no-holds-barred study of the role of U.S. forces as they encountered victims' assets, and activities of various Federal agencies as they sought to control the entry of potentially looted art into the United States. We have learned that the United States had a policy of restituted looted art be returned to the country of origin, but that the policy was not always followed.
We have learned that the United States Government established procedures intended to prevent looted art from entering the country to find a market after the War's end. The regime appears to have functioned well, but there were exceptions. We have learned that the U.S. forces, while acquitting themselves in the restitution process, returned more objects than any other nation and seemingly, had the fewest number of problems, did make mistakes.
Finally, we have learned that there were random instances of theft by U.S. soldiers and occupation forces. The reasons for these deviations are varied and complicated and we are still trying to understand them. The commission's report will analyze both the development and the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. restitution policy. It will also assess the nature and scope of policy deviations and mistakes. My written remarks expand on these themes in greater detail.
I thank you once again for your continued attention to this important issue and for the opportunity to contribute to it.
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Chairman LEACH. Thank you very much.
Our last speaker is Ronald Tauber. He is with the Art Loss Register.
STATEMENT OF RONALD S. TAUBER, CHAIRMAN, THE ART LOSS REGISTER, INC.
Mr. TAUBER. Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the committee, before I begin, I think the committee should take note of the presence in this room of some of those persons who are really on the front lines of trying to identify and recover stolen art.
In addition to Jonathan Petropoulos, who is at my right, my colleague, Sarah Jackson from the Art Loss Register in London; Dr. Constance Lowenthal, who heads the Commission on Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress; and Lynn Nicholas, who wrote the seminal book that really put us all into this business. I think it is important to give them credit, in addition to the experts on the panel.
Chairman LEACH. Maybe we can have them stand for a second.
Thank you very much.
Mr. TAUBER. I am very pleased to report to the committee as Chairman of the Art Loss Register, and I would like to begin by describing our business, which is broader than Holocaust issues, but of which the Holocaust issues comprise an important part. The Art Loss Register is the largest private organization dedicated to the recovery of stolen and missing works of art, to the deterrence and the prevention of the trade in stolen art and to providing a centralized clearinghouse to acquirers of art in order to determine good title.
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We maintain a computerized searchable database of 100,000 lost and missing works of art. We are a private company organized and owned, in part, by major companies in the art and insurance markets, and by a not-for-profit company conducting art research. We have a staff of art historians in offices in New York, London and Cologne, and our service is used by 90 percent of the world's major auction houses and by galleries and museums to determine provenance.
In the nearly ten years of our existence, the Art Loss Register has been instrumental in the recovery of $100 million of works of art. The recovery process begins with the registration on our database of lost items by the victims or their insurers. We then systematically check the offerings of the major auction houses against items listed on our database. Last year we checked more than 300,000 individual auction lots worldwide prior to their sale. We also respond to inquiries and searches from major museums, dealers and galleries, financial institutions and law enforcement agencies around the world. When we match an item searched by us with an item on the database, we always notify the theft victim, the party who has searched and law enforcement authorities. At that point, the work of art is usually detained and the parties either negotiate a settlement, often with our help, or adjudicate their competing claims. We are not the judge and jury. Our job is to try to find the location of items that are lost. Our systematic methodology and infrastructure allows loss victims to register their losses with us and provide them with the reasonable hope that their valuable works of art may be recovered. At the same time, and equally importantly, we provide a clearinghouse for acquirers who seek assurance that particular works of art are not stolen.
We have been very effective in recovering stolen items. Our recoveries usually result from matching auction house searches or dealer or police inquiries with items on the database, but sometimes recoveries are made after protracted negotiations by us on behalf of one or both parties. In every case, our recovery process involves notification to and cooperation with law enforcement authorities. Just last year, we recovered a Cezanne still-life stolen in Massachusetts in 1978. It was recovered in Europe and then sold by the family from whom it was stolen for more than $25 million. We have also recovered several Picassos, a Monet, a Manet, and many other works of art, including those of much lesser value in monetary terms, but which are equally precious to their owners.
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In 1998, we organized a special effort to identify the location of World War II looted art. We dedicated some of our most experienced professional staff to this undertaking, and we encouraged the registration of looted art on our database. We do not charge any fees to individual claimants, either for registration of loss or for assistance in identification of location or recovery. This pro bono effort has had the financial support of the major auction houses, particularly Sotheby's and Christie's. We have also invited other organizations active in this area, such as the Commission on Art Recovery, to pass to us their collected claims in order to be included in our records.
I am very pleased to report to this committee that our efforts have borne significant fruit, both in recovery of art works and in helping to mold the standards and perceptions of the art community toward greater openness and a willingness to confront the difficult issues surrounding Holocaust looted art.
Several thousand Holocaust claims have been registered since our initiative began eighteen months ago. We accept claims not only from individuals, but also from organizations, including those representing Jewish communities in Europe. In just the past few months, for example, we have registered a Brueghel painting confiscated and then auctioned in Vienna; the contents of a studio of an artist in Paris; a 15th Century Hebrew manuscript that was removed from a bank vault; a collection of Japanese porcelain confiscated in Hannover, Germany; a group of Dutch Old Masters missing from a Milan warehouse; and a private library that was confiscated in Breslau, which is now part of Poland.
Once an item is registered with us, it is continuously checked against auction house offerings and dealer and other inquiries from around the world. In this way, we can help uncover the location of looted items. At the same time, we also operate as the best source of reliable information to auction houses, dealers and museums on the issue of whether a particular work has a questionable provenance.
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Our experience has led us to four basic conclusions. First, the auction houses in the United States and the U.K., and, to a growing extent, the art trade in general, have become sensitive to Holocaust issues and are supportive of efforts to find a just resolution of Holocaust claims.
Second, museums and public institutions in the United States and Western Europe have become aware of their responsibility not to hold art with questionable provenance and increasingly are dealing with difficult questions in moral as well as strictly legal terms.
Third, works of art which were looted from Holocaust victims and are now held by private individuals as opposed to institutions continue to be very difficult to identify and competing claims relating to them even more difficult to resolve.
Fourth, the maintenance of a comprehensive registry and the acceptance of due diligence standards which require a consultation of the registry by the art trade and museum community constitute a practical program for the recovery of looted art.
A few examples will illustrate these conclusions. In December 1999, our London office identified a 17th Century Dutch landscape in an Old Masters catalog that was up for sale in London. That picture had been looted by the Gestapo in Berlin and had been placed on our database. This same painting had been sold twice before, and each time the family sought recognition of its rights and to put a stop to the sale. This time the claimant, an American citizen, was informed of the pending sale as was the auctioneer. The picture was withdrawn from sale and negotiations are underway between the claimant, the auctioneer and the consignor. Other identifications at auction include a Sisley painting confiscated in Budapest, a church interior and a genre painting both sold in Brussels during the occupation, and a $1 million Bonnard painting confiscated from a French dealer that surfaced with a Swiss provenance in New York last year. Each of these works was withdrawn from sale when its history was identified and discussions are underway to achieve negotiated settlements.
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An extremely encouraging development in the art trade is the decision of the organizers of Europe's largest and most prestigious art fair held each year in Maastricht in the Netherlands to ask our company to check 4,000 items against our database prior to sale. This brings a very important group of dealers into the same standard of due diligence and responsibility as the major auction houses. These dealers and others seek assurance that works of art are neither subject to contemporary claims of theft nor tainted by spoiliation during the War. As you have heard, museums in the United States and in Western Europe have been in the forefront of those willing to accept responsibility for ensuring the integrity of their collections. You have heard about the North Carolina case which is extremely important. Another case which also received a great deal of press involved our company and Jonathan Petropoulos, to my right, who together identified an extremely valuable Monet ''Water Lilies'' on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from the Musee des Beaux Arts in Caen, Normandy, as a picture confiscated from a French dealer during the occupation. Both the Museum of Fine Arts and the French museum cooperated in the return of the painting to the dealer's heirs, who are Americans still active in the art trade.
In general, museums have become active searchers of our database prior to acquisition of works of art. Searches by museums around the world have increased by more than 300 percent in 1999 as compared to 1998. These searches protect the institutions against unwittingly acquiring or holding works that may have been looted during the Holocaust, or simply stolen from someone's sitting room. I think it is worth a moment to list some of these important museums with the hope that it will encourage others to do the same: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery here in Washington, DC.; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Art Gallery of Ontario; Cleveland Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Worcester Art Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; National Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Tate Gallery in London. Museums are also checking prospective loan exhibits, no doubt a positive development from the Modern's painful experience with the Schiele.
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Not surprisingly, works of art embedded in private collections remain the most difficult to identify, and claims relating to them are the most difficult to resolve. We have made some such identifications including a Venetian painting by a contemporary of Canaletto confiscated in Vienna and now held by a private collector in France. Thus far, the current possessor has been unwilling to enter into any discussions with the claimant, an American citizen, and the claimant may need to resort to legal remedies.
A similar case involves a major Impressionist painting which was apparently stolen by the Nazi-appointed liquidator of a Paris art gallery and is now in a private collection in Switzerland. On the other hand, we have been able to jump-start discussions between a family in Israel and a London dealer representing a private collector who bought a painting from a dealer in Berlin after it was confiscated by the Gestapo in the 1930's.
In another case, our company was able to match a picture inquired about by a London dealer with a claim for a painting looted in Warsaw, which was lodged with the World Jewish Congress. Settlement discussions are now underway.
I have given you these examples with the intention of demonstrating that practical steps taken by practical people can make a real difference in recovering works of art and in changing the standards of the art world. My message to you is a positive one. The Art Loss Register is identifying works of art one at a time as they reach the commercial marketplace and as institutions check their collections.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the committee, I think that the single most important step a Holocaust victim, or his or her heirs can take to locate a missing work of art, is the free one of registering it on a centralized database. The standards and custom of the art trade are changing to require due diligence checks on a centralized database prior to acquisition or sale. The system of loss registration and due diligence checks can and does work to identify the location of lost works.
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Once identified, the Art Loss Register and others, including advocacy organizations, can be effective in achieving just resolutions of difficult situations.
Mr. Chairman, the victims of the Holocaust and their heirs need and deserve the support of the Congress and private and public organizations in keeping the spotlight on their legitimate quest for justice. Those of us working in this area welcome and appreciate this committee's and Congress' continuing interest. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Tauber.
Let me begin with you, Ms. King. At our last hearing on this subject several years ago, the AAMD strongly recommended the creation of a dispute resolution mechanism. Have you proceeded to set one up? Do you find it perhaps unneeded? Was it a factor, for example, in the North Carolina decision?
Ms. KING. The AAMD has not formally moved to set up any dispute mechanism. I think this is probably outside its purview, but it has recommended in its guidelines that other solutions than in a court of law be sought, and I think the North Carolina case is a good example of that. When the claim was substantiated, lots of careful research was done in advance, but when it was substantiated, the museum and the representatives of the heirs worked directly together in mutual conversations to come to a solution. So this is the kind of response that I think the AAMD guidelines would hope would always happen, but no, as to this date there have been no formal body set up. It may be that this will happen in the future, but it has not happened yet.
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Chairman LEACH. The only reason I raise it is that one gets a sense from the several museums that have testified, the four of you in each of your museums, that a great deal of due diligence has been applied and given the extraordinary depth of the collections, I don't know your museum as well, Ms. King, but of the three other museum directors, it is extraordinary how few challenges have been registered, not how many.
But I don't know if that is a universal circumstance. Do you have a backup process that you recommend? In effect, I have the sense that it is left to each museum. One has full confidence in the museums at the table, and I think, in general, one would have in most museums. Is there such a thing as—if a museum was perplexed, could they call upon some sort of an institutional mechanism?
Ms. KING. I think that there are a number of places that small to medium-sized museums can go, some of them are represented at this table and in this room, for assistance with their research.
I think certainly the network of colleagues that we have through the AAMD is also a good resource. The number of claims has not been monumental. As museums continue to do their research and start to publish the results of their research more and more, it may obviously increase. But at this point, I think it is possible to handle it on a case-by-case basis.
Chairman LEACH. Mr. Petropoulos and Mr. Tauber, do you have any sense on the magnitude of the Holocaust-era problem with American museums? Do you think that it is extremely modest? Do you think that it is substantial? How would you characterize it?
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Mr. Petropoulos.
Mr. PETROPOULOS. I have been in touch with researchers conducting studies at several American museums, and it is my impression that they are finding works where there are questions. It is very rare to identify a work that clearly has a provenance going back to a Holocaust victim. We have discussed some of the difficulties in doing research and connecting that chain from the victim to the present owner to the museum. It is very, very difficult to do that.
But my experience has shown that museums that are conducting the self studies are finding works where there are so-called red flags. These works usually passed through the hands of art dealers who had collaborated with the Nazis and there are some questions. I think that in cases where museums find art works that belong to victims, they are doing the right thing. They are sensitive to this issue and they are committed to justice, and as Lyndel King said, the process is working. I think the process can work a little bit better and I have some recommendations along those lines. And in this respect, I think the National Gallery is exemplary, and I would single them out for praise. What they are doing on the Internet with their database is something that I hope that other institutions would follow. I think that we need to use the Internet to facilitate research.
I think that in terms of the databases, I would like to see some indication if the works have red flags on them. If there are concerns, I think this would facilitate research so that scholars don't have to go through thousands and thousands of entries. I think it would be helpful if the museums conducting the self studies could be more transparent and let us know when they have issues, when they have questions. And I would also like to see more interfacing among museums with their individual databases. I think there are certainly works in American museums that rightfully belong to Holocaust victims, but I think the process is working, and we are all working together to research the issue.
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Chairman LEACH. Mr. Tauber, would you like to add anything?
Mr. TAUBER. I pretty much agree with what Jonathan said.
We don't think of it as a huge problem in terms of numbers in American museums, but each work of art is a separate case, and it is important that public institutions come to understand that the moral issue is at least as important as the question of the size of the problem, and our experience is a very positive one with museums.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
One of the differences between the Anglo-Saxon world and much of the continent is the difference between our law, which we derive from your country, Ms. Page, and that is, in America we don't allow, and our legal system is from Britain, the notion that a good faith sale stands if there is an item that has been stolen, and on the continent they do. So it means that the legal circumstances are a little bit different. Are you finding a difference with your other European countries in this regard related to law, or do you find that the museum directors have a synonymity of interest, that is, in effect, above the law on the continent?
Ms. PAGE. I think, to a certain extent, the legal issues we face are similar to the ones in Europe and the U.S. There are two aspects. There is the issue around the passing of title to works of art and the concept of the good faith purchaser and the appropriate limitation period, and I know that in some European countries there has been primary legislation to try and address this, and I think there have been two approaches; one, to broaden the powers of museums or galleries to give back works in circumstances where maybe the legal position is not strictly clear in terms of ownership.
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There have also been moves in terms of extending the limitation period so that particular clock gets to tick longer. In the U.K. the position is clear. If there has been a good-faith transaction and the appropriate limitation period has passed, then the person in possession of the work of art cannot be challenged legally. I think the slightly different position in the U.K. flows on from the fact that all of our national museums are, as I say, bodies created by acts of Parliament, which creates a rather unique set of circumstances, which sets out the powers and the ways that we can and can't do things. One of the particular idiosyncracies of ours is museums' powers to deaccession works from their collections. Some national museums in the U.K. have no powers at all to dispose of works from their collections, which they have title to which obviously has a legal impact on this particular matter. Some museums do, but it is restrained. On top of that, there are charity law issues in terms of charities dealing with assets.
I think the point that you raised earlier about alternative dispute resolution is actually very important, and at the moment the national museums are exploring ways with the government in which they can help museums reach equitable solutions where there are claims, because the issues are enormously complex. If they were cut and dry, then the problem would be very easy to solve. But I think it would be really useful for U.K. nationals certainly to have an independent body to help us reconcile the interest of the claimants with our responsibilities as trustees of public collections.
Chairman LEACH. Let me kind of reraise this in the context of a comment of Mr. Lowry's. Mr. Lowry was very firm in suggesting that the courts have been politicized, and I am wondering if you had a dispute mechanism arrangement that was set up by AAMD, that you would have a clear-cut alternative to the courts that a party would know existed and if that could then serve as a disincentive to seek legal action, because what is clearly presented in this panel, is reputable museums that are absolutely committed to going to the final mile to do the right thing. On the other hand, if one is a claimant, how does one have a sense that he or she is going to have their circumstance looked at in a way that they might have some doubts about an individual museum's judgment with what might be perceived to be an individual museum's self-interest against them. So, if you had an established panel that hopefully would seldom meet, but might be called upon, might that serve as a disincentive, just as we have arbitrations in the commercial arena?
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Mr. Lowry, because you have presented a little bit of an aggrieved party circumstance and the dilemma of two significant paintings that are out of public purview, because of a court action, does that strike you as an appropriate circumstance or inappropriate?
Mr. LOWRY. I don't want to suggest that we are an aggrieved party, but I do agree that what we have learned from the experience that we have gone through is that the court system is a cumbersome one and a blunt one, when in fact what is required is a finer, more sensitive mechanism for resolving these kinds of problems.
I think, in fact, that Lyndel King is right in asserting that the current situation that American museums find themselves in and the framework of the AAMD guidelines provide by and large, and certainly for the moment, a mechanism that seems to be working for museums and for claimants. One has to remember that two years ago, those guidelines did not exist, that the Schiele incident was one of the first really high-profile situations, and there was no path for anyone to follow, and in the heated fray of the moment, a number of initiatives began on the part of the district attorney, with no understanding of the situation, that caused, perhaps, a chain of events that today I don't think would actually have occurred.
I do believe that any time one can find a mechanism, whether through the AAMD or other parties that can diffuse a situation and focus on the problem and avoid a lengthy legal battle that can also be very costly, that has to be a better outcome than going through the courts.
I do think, as well, that several organizations, several which are in this room, are providing that vehicle which can aid a claimant in presenting a case before a museum, the Commission for Art Recovery being one of several, and that I think we should take some heart today as Americans that we have faced this problem squarely, and that, in fact, our museums and potential claimants have an alternative to the court system that seems to be working.
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And so I don't know that one has to rush to creating the kind of arbitration mechanism that we thought two years ago would be essential, in part because we had no idea then what the magnitude of claims was going to be, what the rate of claim would be, and I think we are in a much more stable situation today, and a lot of very good work has enabled claimants to know how to make claims, and institutions to know how to respond to those claims.
Chairman LEACH. That raises another philosophical issue that wasn't on the table several years ago, and it is maybe a reason for a court that a museum might prefer. It strikes me that as difficult as it is to do provenance research in some circumstances, because of the enormity of the Holocaust as a tragedy, it is also very difficult to do genealogical research on the claimants' side, and claimants can be very potentially honest in believing that they may be the proper claimant and they may not be. This could be a terrifically honest mistake or a mischievious one. A museum might come to the conclusion that its provenance is imperfect, but it may not know who the proper owner of that particular artwork might be, and I don't know if there is another organization or another approach or another process that has to be brought into the picture if, for example, a museum determines that its painting is improperly provenanced, that does not mean that it knows to whom it belongs.
I don't know if that is a dilemma that is being addressed in this whole circumstance or not, or whether we really have a case of it. I can visualize one of your museums going through basic research and coming to a conclusion that relates to improper ownership, and yet having not the foggiest idea where to turn. Is that a dilemma or not?
Mr. LOWRY. I would certainly agree that is a problem. Mr. Petropoulos rightly recognizes and suggests that to the degree museums can identify those works where there is a gap in the provenance for this period that we are considering, and can then at least post information about that object on the Internet or through any other widely accessible means, it at least puts out into the public domain the potential object that might form——
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Chairman LEACH. Let us say that someone makes a claim and you give it to the person, and then you discover that someone else has a stronger claim, is the museum liable? Where does this take you? Is that a subject of review in your organization?
Mr. LOWRY. Absolutely. In an unrelated issue to the Holocaust, but one that involved a claim for a group of paintings by a well-known Russian avant guarde artist, Kasimir Malevich, that we settled amicably with the heirs of Malevich a little less than a year ago, we spent almost three-and-one-half years trying to determine who the heirs were.
Chairman LEACH. Was one of his the Black Square?
Mr. LOWRY. Red Square.
Chairman LEACH. He had a black one. Much like Joseph Albers.
Mr. LOWRY. We never doubted that we had to come to a resolution with the heirs. What was involved, however, was determining who the heirs were and then being sure that they were all of the heirs, and those heirs were scattered in Canada, in Poland, in Ukraine, in Russia, and I believe in Australia, and they didn't know each other, and yet they all, through genealogy, had a legitimate fractional interest in Malevich's work.
Once we were able to get the heirs together and then construct a mechanism that protected the museum in the event that an unidentified heir came forward during a reasonable period of time and asserted his or her claim, and we were able to agree on that mechanism with the existing heirs, we were able to settle the issue very quickly.
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The single most important issue for any museum trying to resolve one of these claims is to be absolutely certain that it is, in fact, returning the work to the rightful heir. Inheritance in Europe is more straightforward, as I understand it, than it is in the United States, so this is not an insurmountable problem. It is just one that requires diligent research and the willingness to do that research in an environment that isn't charged where one can actually spend the time to make sure that the information is correct.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Lowry.
Mr. Bentsen.
Mr. BENTSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me follow up on your line of questioning, because I think there is another dilemma here, and Mr. Lowry raised that in talking about the case that MOMA, the Modern, has been through and the paintings that have been seized by the district attorney.
I applaud the work done by the American Museum Directors Association, but the bigger problem is an international problem, because there will be some heirs who, because of the difference in laws and laws of possession and rights in different countries, may find that their only court of recourse may be in the United States, and so they have to exercise that option at any opportunity, and I am not talking where it is within the museum's collection, because that is one problem. I am talking more about when shows are put together and exhibits are done and they come from private collections, it may be, and I am curious whether you think this is a problem or not, but it may be that there are some works that may be the only time that those works actually surface, and the art world I have always perceived it, particularly at the higher levels of the fine arts world, as being rather secretive, and so for some, their only chance may be a court in New York or maybe the Federal court system in the United States. And I understand the dilemma of those, such as the National Gallery, such as in my hometown of Houston, because you will find collectors in other parts of the world who will be reluctant to put their works on exhibit for fear that they might not get them back. That has to be weighed against the potential rights of those who might have the rightful owners. Is there any sort of potential for a conference to create some international standard among dealers and museums and auction houses to somehow try to get a handle on this, because obviously, the laws are different, as the person from the Tate was saying, the laws are different in Great Britain than they are in the United States, than they are throughout Western Europe, and certainly Asia as well.
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I understand your frustration, but I think if you wanted to look at it from a claimant standpoint, they might say this was our only shot.
Mr. LOWRY. I think there are several factors that come into play here. First of all, there is a group of museum directors from the United States and Europe that now meet at least once a year generally in Europe—sometimes we meet more frequently than that—and where the issue of Holocaust restitution has been a very hot topic, and where we have sought to both establish standards and working relationships among ourselves, the museum group, to at least facilitate some of these problems. Whether or not one could ever establish common laws and common practices across as many countries as are involved and as many different professional entities, dealers, auction houses, museums, individuals, I don't know.
What is I think clear, though, is that the single best way to find potentially lost works of art is to have them on public display. And therefore, by enabling those objects to come on to display as happened with Monet's ''Water Lilies'' in Boston where they are brought into the public focus, where one can now say that painting, which belonged to my relative, is in that collection, at least the needle in the haystack has been identified. That, to me, is of far greater consequence than in a sense worrying about which will prevail, because now at least we have linked the two together, the potential claimants and the object.
And my fear is that in an overly litigious environment, what happens is that people or institutions won't lend those works of art, they will not surface, and the problem of identification becomes adumbrated manyfold. This isn't to say that one should never go to court. I am not suggesting that. What I am suggesting is that I believe personally that a climate that encourages those works of art to come out of the closet, as it were, and to be seen, documented and identified is an enormous step right now, because that is the greatest difficulty we have.
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And we should seek both, I believe, at home and with our colleagues abroad to find mechanisms that when those objects have been identified, then allow a fair process to adjudicate and resolve the ownership situation. That is certainly the way I read it. I think the AAMD and all of the sister institutions in this country have looked this problem squarely in the face.
We have a vehicle now, which we didn't have two years ago, to enable our institutions to deal with these problems and to encourage claimants. And I believe that we have established a very healthy dialog with our colleagues in England, but actually beyond that, in Belgium and France and Germany and elsewhere, where an awful lot of information is being exchanged, and where we are trying to create the best possible case for a potential claimant to come forward. But nothing will be better for that, nothing will encourage it more than seeing those works of art in some kind of public arena, because that is when it happens.
Mr. BENTSEN. Sure.
Mr. PETROPOULOS. I would add on the point of international cooperation that it is my understanding there are now seventeen national commissions representing countries around the world. And the United States, as you well know, now has the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets, and there have been concerted efforts to communicate and to share research.
Just last month in Stockholm, Sweden, there was a conference devoted to Holocaust education, but researchers did meet and talk about issues that concern them. And my colleagues, led by our Chairman Edgar Bronfman, went to Stockholm and met with these other representatives, and the executive directors of the Presidential Commission traveled throughout Europe and went to Paris, Vienna, and Budapest and had some very productive meetings with the representatives of the other national commissions. There isn't any institutionalized way of sharing this research other than the periodic conferences convened, such as the Washington conference in December of 1998.
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But parallel with the progress that we have seen in the American museum establishment, I think that this is reflected in the international realm as there is much more cooperation today than was the case a couple of years ago.
Mr. TAUBER. I think this is really an area where the Congress and the United States Government can have a constructive role. I think your question is an excellent one. The willingness of claimants in the United States to forego legal claims in the United States at those moments when a picture actually gets here, will depend upon the willingness of the ''home'' country of that picture, in this case Austria, to adjudicate claims fairly.
If claimants would have as much confidence in their ability to get a fair hearing in that country as they do in the United States, this question wouldn't exist. I think it is perhaps in your power to help that along by making sure that enough pressure is put on those governments to allow fair hearings of these claims.
Mr. BENTSEN. That is my concern. I mean, I am not aware of an extradition treaty that applies to assets or certainly to objects of fine art. And again, I mean, I can see both sides of it. It creates a real dilemma for you, because there is a taint already with the experience that MOMA has been through, I am sure, and that there may be works that you cannot get now for traveling exhibitions that people will say, we are going to keep it out of New York State, or we are going to keep it out of United States as a whole. But on the other hand, a potential claimant may feel that while they might get a fair hearing in Great Britain, they might not get a fair hearing in Austria or some other country.
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I don't want to necessarily pick on one country or another, because I am not familiar with their legal structures, but that is something that we need to be concerned about. And certainly if the Congress—and I don't know that this is being advocated—but certainly if the Congress were to consider some sort of—or the U.S. Government, the Executive Branch on its own—to consider some sort of what was called ''legal peace'' in other earlier hearings we had, giving some immunity, I think we would have to ensure that the rights of claimants were somehow protected and not forfeited in that.
And so it is a very difficult question. And I am not—my training is not in the law. It is in economics, which is much more confused. But I think that that is something that we have to think about. It puts you all in a really a devil of a situation, more so than us. And so I don't know the answer to it.
Let me ask one other question to Mr. Powell. And before I say that, though, I would strongly encourage that the Museum Directors Association perhaps meet with your counterparts. And I don't know if there is international organization, but look at the idea of creating some, at least a discussion about this, a formal discussion about this at the international level of how you might do it, because it could rise to a greater problem. And since we are already engaged in the foundation dealing with reparations in Germany, you heard some of them were here for the earlier discussion related to insurance assets, that it might behoove you to do that.
Mr. Powell, you talked about the work that the National Gallery is doing in creating this database for the public, the worldwide public. Are you—is the National Gallery funding that out of its ongoing appropriations, and are you receiving additional appropriations, or is that coming out of what was your projected amount?
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Mr. POWELL. That is coming out of our appropriations. We haven't asked for additional funds for that. We have had a research team in place for quite some years now that have been engaged in this. And, you know, you will hear from all of us, Congressmen, the more resources, the more research. It is a direct ratio. Our initiative has come over the years directly from our regular staff.
Mr. BENTSEN. Is there something—and I don't sit on an appropriations committee, but is this something that is referenced in your annual request that comes up to the Hill?
Mr. POWELL. It is not line-itemed out exactly that way. It is part of our curatorial research program. It is in the budget.
Mr. BENTSEN. Great.
Mr. Petropoulos, in your testimony you said that while you found the museums in the United States and in Great Britain and in Europe are spending a great deal of time and researching their own collections and providing information, that that was not necessarily the case as it related to private dealers and auction houses, is that correct, and gathering information was still difficult?
Mr. PETROPOULOS. Dealers and auction houses are clearly very sensitive to this issue of Holocaust provenance, and larger auction houses have engaged researchers to investigate the provenance of their works. One of the representatives of Sotheby's is here today. And I think Sotheby's and Christie's are making a concerted effort to investigate the works they sell.
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It is difficult to know what is happening in our trade more generally though, especially with respect to the smaller galleries. I don't think that the galleries have made as much progress in terms of coming to terms with this issue as have museums. I think that we would all make more progress in understanding this history and restituting works that have never gone back to victims or heirs if we had complete, full cooperation and complete transparency of galleries in our trade.
And, you know, there is just a tremendous variety. Some dealers are quite cooperative. And I would note that in cases where dealers cooperate, that is a very important resource in terms of our research. A scholar like Hector Feliciano was able to use some gallery archives and really find some very exciting results. So I think that this is a crucial research resource, and I hope that our trade will cooperate fully, but it is my impression that they haven't come as far as museums in this respect.
Mr. BENTSEN. And even the dealer organizations, I note there are one or two strong organizations in the United States. I don't know about the rest of the world. Have they been active in the same way that the museum directors have been?
Mr. PETROPOULOS. Yes, they have, in the sense that they have convened symposia and panels and events. They have discussed this issue. But these associations have no regulatory authority, to my knowledge, and there are no guidelines which dealers are obliged to follow other than the U.S. legal code.
So, it is very much voluntary on the part of dealers whether they want to cooperate with researchers and open their archives. And I think most dealers are fascinated with this topic, but there is nothing binding with respect to the art trade.
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Mr. BENTSEN. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Bentsen.
Mr. Forbes.
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I welcome you all here today. I appreciate the time you have devoted to the committee's work and to helping us with this very important issue.
Mr. Lowry, if you would, the guidelines that are in place that the museum directors have adopted, when does the Modern pursue those guidelines?
Mr. LOWRY. They are in constant existence. In other words, the guidelines frame a course of action that—first of all, the guidelines call on all American art museums to methodically and continuously and diligently search their collections for provenance.
Mr. FORBES. I understand what the guidelines do. I am wondering when do you begin the process using these guidelines?
Mr. LOWRY. In either of two ways. One, if someone contacts us and says that they believe painting X or drawing Y belongs to them, because they are the legitimate heir of a previous owner, we immediately go into a sequence of events to discuss with them why—what object, what their information is. We on our own immediately convey to them all of the provenance information we have about that object.
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And as I related earlier, in the only case that has come up to date like that, by working directly with a potential claimant, who happens to be European, and who shared with us his information, we immediately exchanged with him our information. Neither of us in a sense had absolutely conclusive information. We then identified together——
Mr. FORBES. Mr. Lowry, I appreciate that. You have already shared that with the committee. But what I was trying to get at is does the Museum of Modern Art wait for a family or an individual to contact you before you do this research, or are you looking at, if you will, World War II era acquisitions? Are you working with the art recovery folks and their database? Are you taking the initiative, is my question, to find the ownership, if you will, or title of ownership for the works that are questionable in your position?
Mr. LOWRY. The answer to that is yes.
Mr. FORBES. So you are doing that as well as waiting for people to contact you.
Mr. LOWRY. Yes.
Mr. FORBES. If I may ask, first of all, how many individuals have contacted the Modern to raise the question of ownership of one of your pieces?
Mr. LOWRY. At this stage, one.
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Mr. FORBES. Only one.
Mr. LOWRY. Only one.
Mr. FORBES. And how many works of art have been investigated for questionable ownership?
Mr. LOWRY. Well over 300, 400. I don't have the exact number in my head, but we have certainly gone through—we have 3,500 paintings in our collection, of which approximately 420 fall into this period. The rest were made afterwards or were already in our collection before the War. Of those 400, we have gone through them, the records, scrupulously. We have found a couple of instances where the provenance has a gap, and we have begin assiduously working with the colleagues trying to fill the gap. If we actually knew that there was a problem and that we could identify the owner, we would have done so.
Mr. FORBES. It concerns me a little bit. Again, I appreciate all of you and the sensitivity that you are bringing to this issue and your willingness, obviously, to track down the rightful owners of questionable art that has come from that era. But I also think it is fair to say that until we have some kind of resolution dispute to resolve some of these questions—and, again, I think we are talking about 3,000 museums that are part of the directors guidelines apparatus, if you will—or adopted, or willingness to pursue those guidelines, and you have got 100,000 works of art at the Museum of Modern Art, it would seem to me that we have got a long way to go to resolve perhaps some of those questionable ownerships. Is that fair to say?
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Mr. LOWRY. I have a very different opinion on that, if you will give me——
Mr. FORBES. Sure. Please.
Mr. LOWRY. One, as Lyndel King pointed out, the actual number of art museums that might have potentially looted works of art in them is in the hundreds, not the thousands. The 3,000 museums referred to include natural history museums, science museums and so on.
Mr. FORBES. That is fair.
Mr. LOWRY. Two, within that context, the number of works of art in any one of our institutions that falls into this period, that is 1933 to 1945, that were not in our collections before 1933 is a small fraction. I can't tell you the exact percentage across the Nation, but it is a percentage. And consequently I believe that American museums are well equipped to continue conducting the methodical investigation that they have begun. I think we are not going to find the thousands of cases that we thought might be found before. We might, and if we do, we will deal with them.
Mr. FORBES. You said there are about 400 works of art that would fall within the periods that you believe needed investigating and/or had questionable ownership title?
Mr. LOWRY. There are no more than that within our painting and sculpture collection, which is the primary collection where it is easiest to track information.
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Mr. FORBES. And you have done a thorough review of all 400 to date?
Mr. LOWRY. Yes, we have.
Mr. FORBES. How many staff do you have doing this?
Mr. LOWRY. We have 42 curators on staff at the museum, not all of whom spend all their time on this.
Mr. FORBES. How many staff do you have dedicated to this?
Mr. LOWRY. There are two full-time staff doing this virtually nonstop plus some part-time staff.
Mr. FORBES. So you had two people who investigated all of these 400 trails of ownership.
Mr. LOWRY. Two people who took the leads in investigating it, but it gets parsed out to other curators.
Mr. FORBES. Have you worked to compare some of your records with the records accumulated at the Munich collection point?
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Mr. LOWRY. We have worked with the Munich collection point and other records, including some of the ERR records and beyond.
Mr. FORBES. How many of those 400 have questionable ownership?
Mr. LOWRY. I would frame it how many of them have gaps in their provenance, which is not the same as questionable ownership.
Mr. FORBES. Fine. I understand that.
Mr. LOWRY. I think we are down to at this point somewhere in a dozen, dozen plus, maximum.
Mr. FORBES. If we might, the Schiele work that was derived like the Dead City III from the Grunbaum collection, the article in the New York Times a couple of years ago, as you might recall, said that you folks were looking into that one in particular to see if there were Grunbaum works that had been stolen from the Nazis. Whatever happened with that particular investigation?
Mr. LOWRY. I believe you are referring to a painting that belonged to the Leopold Foundation. We were not and did not investigate that work of art, because it did not belong to us.
Mr. FORBES. OK. You did not have that Schiele; that was not owned?
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Mr. LOWRY. We did not own that picture. It was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art by the Leopold Foundation in Vienna.
Mr. FORBES. The U.S. forfeiture complaint against the ''Portrait of Wally'' alleges that the provenance recited in the Schiele exhibition catalogue was inaccurate. What, if anything, has the Modern done differently now to make sure that the provenance is accurately recorded?
Mr. LOWRY. We spend a great deal of time looking at the provenance and studying the provenance of incoming loans, works we borrow from other institutions, certainly do a much greater scrutiny of those loans than we did two years ago. That said, I am not sure that even under those circumstances we would have caught the problem with this painting. It should also be said that it is not at all clear that the Bondi family—in fact, that's now clear that the Bondi family who asserted the claim were not the heirs. They have now admitted it.
Mr. FORBES. But there is a question as to who is the heir; is that correct?
Mr. LOWRY. Well, the heir has not asserted a claim; yet, at least.
Mr. FORBES. Would you be contacting the heir or——
Mr. LOWRY. The heir has contacted the U.S. Attorney asking the question, who is Mr. Bondi? What standing does he have? And then inquiring why this is going on.
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Mr. FORBES. But if there is a questionable provenance here with this particular work, do you feel compelled to be in touch with the heir and to make sure to your satisfaction that, in fact, it was not handed down fraudulently?
Mr. LOWRY. Of course.
Mr. FORBES. So you folks have talked with the heir.
Mr. LOWRY. You have to understand this is now in front of the U.S. Attorney. So we have—and we are—what is before the Attorney at this point is who has standing on this issue. And we are—I guess the word is in litigation over who has standing. So we—the heir—what is interesting here, if you will forgive the digression, is the assumption has been that the Bondi family was the heir. And we were in contact with the Bondi family. Now it turns out that the Bondi family is not the heir. And the heir has been in direct contact with Bondi family's lawyers and with the U.S. Attorney. Remember, we are—in this particular instance—we were only the playing field on which this transaction occurred. We did not have ownership or even possession.
Mr. FORBES. No, I appreciate that. It really gets to my concern—or my question—that the museums, not just the Modern, but all the museums, how aggressively are you being in trying to find out if there are questionable titles of ownership on the works that you hold?
And, you know, there is been great effort here to, frankly, make sure that we in this committee understand that you all—and whatever exceptions I apologize—but that most of you believe that court action is absolutely the wrong way to go. Yet, by your comments, I think you suggest that it may be a very appropriate forum in this instance. For example, had the U.S. Attorney not been involved in those two Schiele works, would they be back in Vienna today? And we would still have a question about, you know, the ownership.
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And I think it is fair—I would believe it is fair for any family that was robbed of their precious art to ask the question, you know, that we have this right. And if it needs the courts to be involved—and I appreciate the guidelines. I think the guidelines are good as far as they go. I think in the testimony here this afternoon it was clear that, without a dispute resolution mechanism—and at this point there is none—that maybe the courts are the place to fight this out. Absent that, I am not quite sure where you go.
Now, earlier, Mr. Lowry, you had questioned court action and how it would be a disincentive for people to want to loan their works. I guess I would suggest that maybe they would be concerned about loaning their works if the ownership was questionable. But if there was no question as to ownership and they had the appropriate documentation, then I think every one of you, your institutions requires—taking a great leap here—I am assuming that all of your museums and all those who acquire works do so with some hopeful documentation that suggests that there is no questionable ownership, at least in this day and age.
Mr. LOWRY. Well, I think that, in fact, what has happened in the case of the two Schieles, where a court action was initiated because someone said they were an owner and in the heated politics of the day the district attorney immediately acted on that, what has happened is the person wasn't an owner, wasn't an heir. And so the Leopold Foundation was subjected to a year-and-a-half of having one of their works of art held in this country, and it was finally released.
Mr. FORBES. You are saying that as a conclusive statement. Is that absolutely conclusive? It has absolutely been established that that person does not have any ownership rights? My understanding was that had not been established and that is still very much a question mark.
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Mr. LOWRY. As far as I understand, sir, that is only on the second picture, which is the one that was then seized by the U.S. Attorney. And as it transpired after that seizure, and the claimant then had to concede that he was not the heir. So the degree to which our court system has effectively provided victims of the Holocaust access to their works of art, has to be measured against whether they even had the right to make the claim.
I say that only because the lesson here is that the court system is cumbersome, expensive, and I think at the end of the day not fine-grained enough to get to the actual critical issues at heart which have to do, often, with cases of inheritance and ownership, rather than theft.
Mr. FORBES. Well, I appreciate your comments.
I do think that there is call for a heightened sensitivity when you think that we have got fifty years, if you will, of works that have disappeared. And whether it is hundreds or thousands, depending on your point of view, I think that it is fair to say that, you know, if it has to be somewhat of—in your—I guess you would characterize it maybe dramatic action, when you have the court step in and put on hold any movement of those works off of our shores so that we can at least try to rectify ownership. I guess one would—I would certainly suggest that in the end it is good to know whether it was or was not an object that had been taken inappropriately and passed on through the decades. I would suggest that.
Let me just ask this final question. And I have tremendous respect for the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. He is an outstanding member of the New York community, and he has given much time and effort of his own accord. And I just was wondering if Mr. Lauder had involvement in these issues in the Museum of Modern Art?
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Mr. LOWRY. Well, as the chairman of the board, he has been responsible for ensuring that the museum, one, adhere to the AAMD guidelines, and our board has asserted commitment by the institution to do that, too, because this is obviously an issue that he has taken a leadership position in. He has urged the museum to ensure that we have been especially scrupulous in combing our records and in finding equitable and swift solutions should we come up with a problem.
And in the case, although unrelated directly to the Holocaust, of the Malevichs that is precisely what we did do.
I think there is a particularly heightened sensitivity to this question at the Museum of Modern Art. But I would argue there is not a single American art museum that is not hypersensitive to this. There is not a single museum that wants to go through the agony of a court case.
And, therefore, I think we are working, at least in this country, in a very receptive climate to, one, doing the due diligence required to not just search the collection once, but to search it each time new information emerges about potential claimants or potential sources of improper activity. And that information surfaces as archives are being constantly plumbed. And there isn't a single museum that would not make an extraordinary effort to reach an equitable solution with a claimant in this country. I believe we are operating in this country with a claimant that understands the problem, where our public institutions are committed to being as constructive as possible, and we would not tolerate knowingly having——
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Mr. FORBES. I think that has been well established, and all of you have said that today, and I appreciate that. Again, you said there were 400 works that you thoroughly reviewed and are satisfied about their provenance, if you will.
Can I ask how much the Modern devotes financially to the review? I know that that has been a concern all of you have raised about the monies it takes to do this work. Would you share with us, Mr. Lowry, the budget that is set aside by the Modern for this kind of work?
Mr. LOWRY. Much like the National Gallery, it is not set aside in a line item budget. It becomes part of curatory responsibility. So we apportion responsibility of individual curators to conduct this kind of research. So it would be very difficult to come up with an absolute figure, because you would have to take the 42 curators on staff, figure out the exact percentage of time each one devotes to this and calculate the cost. But we have absorbed within our budget these additional responsibilities. It just added it onto the work that our curators do.
Mr. FORBES. Would you be willing to make public those findings in the 400 reviews that have been done by the Modern?
Mr. LOWRY. Sure. I don't see—I mean, most of them are very straightforward. They are precisely—that is, they are currently listed in various museum publications.
Mr. FORBES. And one final question, if I might, how many of those works of art continue to have questionable provenance of the 400?
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Mr. LOWRY. It is approximately a dozen or so. I don't have the exact number before me. But we will not stop until we have got it down to zero. Although it may take years before it does go to zero.
Mr. FORBES. Mr. Tauber, you had said in your statement that there were several thousand requests from families of Holocaust era victims that had contacted the Art Loss about possible questionable ownership of art. Can you just share quickly here how do you process that? I mean, do you have to track down the work itself and where it is located? And if you can do that—or do you share your full database with some of the folks who are here today in the other museums?
Mr. TAUBER. We treat any Holocaust claim that is registered with us as we do any other theft. We process it by describing it accurately and putting it on a searchable database. We then respond to the fact that it was registered by looking at everything that reaches the commercial market that comes to our attention; that is checking essentially every auction lot that is offered by any of the major auction houses, including Sotheby's and Christie's, and going much further down into smaller auction houses around the world, responding to many dealers who check with us in increasing numbers as they get works to be sold, and museums and other public institutions, when they are about to acquire works or, in the case of some museums like the National Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, when they are checking their existing collections.
In addition to the 2,000—those weren't 2,000 claims, those were 2,000 works—we also check anything that is inquired of us against the published lists of looted works to see if they match anything on those lists.
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Mr. FORBES. So they contact you to say there were 2,000 works of questionable provenance, if you will.
Mr. TAUBER. In the last eighteen months, yes.
Mr. FORBES. How many of those were at the Modern?
Mr. TAUBER. None.
Mr. FORBES. None. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Mr. Tauber, have you found any question marks about art in the Capitol?
Mr. TAUBER. You mean in taste or in provenance? In this room, we have checked out——
Chairman LEACH. We are not going to allow that. I am tempted to tell you that I have a secret subpoena asking for our first four witnesses to list the five greatest American artists of the 20th Century, but that would be highly classified if it were to be revealed.
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Let me thank this very thoughtful panel. Your commentary has not been heard by many Members of Congress, but I will tell you that the record that is set will be available for many people in many different ways. So I am particularly appreciative that all of you have taken the time out of your lives to address the extraordinarily profound subject. Thank you very much.
Our final panel consists of Martha Nierenberg, an art collector; Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, Head Inspector for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science at The Hague; and Ronald Lauder, who is Chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery.
We will begin with you, Ms. Nierenberg; and welcome to the panel.
STATEMENT OF MARTHA NIERENBERG, ART COLLECTOR
Ms. NIERENBERG. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman—and there isn't anybody else here.
My name is Martha Nierenberg. I am here to tell you about my quest, so far unsuccessful, to recover my family's heirlooms which were lost in the course of the Holocaust. Among those heirlooms more specifically we are talking about ten paintings which are now hanging on the walls of two museums in Budapest, two government-owned museums, and they were part of the Herzog Collection.
Chairman LEACH. Excuse me. If I could ask you if you would bring the microphone very close, and just slightly about chin level is best.
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Ms. NIERENBERG. Good. I have an accent—Hungarian accent.
Chairman LEACH. That is respected in this committee. I would tell you Mr. Soros has spoken from this same microphone, so it picks up the Hungarian lilt.
Ms. NIERENBERG. These ten paintings include works by van Dyck, Lucas Cranach, Gustave Courbet and Mihaly Munkacsy and also Velazquez.
The Herzog Collection was assembled by my grandfather, Baron Mor Lipot Herzog, who was a banker in pre-War Hungary. My grandfather selected and purchased the art throughout his life up to his death in 1934. Then the collection was inherited by his three children, oldest of which was my mother Erzsebet—Elizabeth—Herzog Weiss de Csepel and her two brothers, Istvan and Andras Herzog.
This was a very large collection containing hundreds of items, including paintings of Old Masters as well as Modern works by Renoir and Monet and other Impressionists. It also contained one of the largest collections in private hands of El Greco paintings. After my grandfather's death, my mother and uncles divided the collection among themselves.
Unfortunately, in World War II, Hungary was among the Axis Powers. Just as in Germany, laws against Jews and even people of Jewish origin were gradually introduced. However, the situation in Hungary didn't become desperate until March of 1944 when the Germans marched into the country. Adolf Eichmann was delegated to Hungary with the explicit purpose of exterminating the Hungarian Jews and people of Jewish origin. Eichmann personally led the Waffen SS efforts to exterminate the Jews from Budapest. Some 600,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, and most of them then perished. Many, many perished. My uncle, Andras, was placed in a forced labor unit; and he didn't survive the War. We don't know how he died, we don't know where he died, but it certainly was as a result of the Holocaust.
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My mother and father, along with many others, sought to save their art works from the Nazis. The Herzog Collection was mainly hidden in the cellar of one of my father's family's industrial factories. Despite their efforts to prevent the looting of the art, the Nazis—actually the Hungarian Nazis—found the hiding place; and they took it up to the Majestic Hotel, which was Eichmann's headquarters, for inspection. There was a great deal of publicity about that at that time. Eichmann shipped most of the most important pieces of the Herzog Collection to Germany.
Now, fearing for our lives, my father's family, a very large family, agreed with the Nazis on a plan to lease these factories and the equipment for a period of twenty-five years, and then we would be free to go to the West. This is what happened. We left the country in May, 1944. All of that toward the end of the War. My mother and myself and my siblings, we ended up in Portugal. But my father had to stay behind as a hostage. That was part of the deal.
In Portugal, I came to the attention of the American Ambassador, who was Samuel Baruch, Bernard Baruch's brother, at that time, because I played tennis; and he liked to watch tennis. And, anyway, he was very nice to me and then urged me to come to America, which I did, and arrived here on December 27 of 1946. I was very anxious at that point to finish my studies in chemistry, was accepted at Harvard in graduate school and did some work there and then later some other work in biochemical research, then married; and I have four children and ten grandchildren at this point.
My mother and sister and brothers eventually came out also, and even father eventually joined our family, and we were reunited. We all became U.S. citizens. And my mother, who was trained as a doctor and psychiatrist in Hungary, in Budapest, and then later studied in Vienna with Anna Freud, had to take all her exams all over again to be relicensed in this country. And she did it on first try, I want to tell you. She died in 1992.
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I inherited that portion of the Herzog Collection which she had inherited from her father. I certainly fondly remember these Herzog paintings in my grandfather's house and also some of them in our own house. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transformation of the former East Bloc countries, little, if any, information could be obtained about the state of the Herzog Collection and other looted properties. For this reason, and because my family had left Hungary, I was unaware of what had become of this collection.
With the opening of Hungary to the West and the rise of the democratic regime in Budapest, we started making inquiries. We learned that many pieces of the Herzog Collection, both those owned by me now, and those that were inherited by the two brothers and now my cousins' property, were being openly exhibited, hanging on the wall of these museums and identified as the Herzog Collection, in the Museum of Fine Art and in the National Museum. These paintings, while taken to Germany during the War, were shipped back to Hungary in 1946, in the winter of 1946 and April of 1947, by the American forces that had found them. The Hungarian museums then received these paintings, but only for the express purpose of safeguarding them until their owners could be identified and located.
In September of 1995, I retained counsel, and approached the museums and the government about rectifying this situation and returning my paintings to me. There followed many months of negotiations. And in April of 1996, I traveled to Hungary, to Budapest, and met with the Minister of Education and Culture and his assistant. This resulted in the creation of a so-called ''Experts Committee,'' three people from their side and three people from ours, from the legal office, to determine the ownership of the paintings. The Experts Committee met several times over another rather long period of time, concluded that indeed these paintings were my property. Based on the Experts Committee's findings, we then made a friendly proposal to resolve the issue.
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Unfortunately, then a new government came into power, and they were unwilling to continue this process. They apparently believed that they could not support anything that was done by the prior government. The new government suggested that we start everything from scratch and have a new committee and go through the whole thing again, and they certainly didn't want to accept what has been done before.
Then, due to endless delays and numerous broken promises as to deadlines and so on, we felt that there was no choice but to commence a lawsuit in the Hungarian courts, which we did in October of 1999 with the assistance of the Commission for Art Recovery. By that point, we had been in contact with the Hungarian authorities for almost four years, and there had been no progress.
These delays are significant in part because of my age. As you look at me, I am going to be 76 in less than a month. And the Hungarians continue to delay. It seems to me that they expect at some point that I will just give up and go away.
Since we believe Hungarian law clearly supports my right to the possession of the paintings, litigation in Hungary was the logical decision. I was told that a lawsuit in the United States was virtually impossible and may well have involved months or years of litigation over jurisdiction, venue, sovereign immunity, and other preliminary matters. We hoped that suing in Hungary would lead to a decision on the basic issue, my ownership rights, more quickly than in the United States, where the merits of the case might never be heard at all.
However, the Hungarian government continues to delay. The defendants have asserted several minor procedural defenses and only yesterday stated in court their position on the basic elements of my case. Even then, the defense statement was lacking in consistency and detail. The judge required the defendants to file a further statement with their position with regard to each of my paintings.
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For example, they have raised formal, petty, invalid arguments about authentication of a U.S. affidavit. They also formally raised an objection because my late brother's estate was not a party to the lawsuit, ignoring the fact that in his will he left all his art to me.
Finally, the Hungarian government asked the court to impose a cost deposit requirement on me as a non-Hungarian litigant, although the government knows that I am a Hungarian citizen in addition to being a U.S. citizen. If the cost deposit were imposed, I would be required to pay the Hungarian court several hundred thousand dollars to secure a claim by the government for legal fees. I believe the government is just trying to scare me away, but it will not, and I don't think it would work. However, most claimants of looted art in Hungary must deposit large sums before asking the courts to decide their case.
Mr. Chairman, I am determined to do everything I can to obtain justice and recover my family's legacy. I would hope that a country clearly wishing to be part of the West—Hungary is a member of NATO and seeking membership in the European Union—would deal with the merits of a claim such as mine for recovery of Holocaust art rather than engaging in old, tired bureaucratic games. The Hungarian government should do what is right. It should accept the conclusion of its own Experts Committee, acknowledge my ownership rights, and negotiate an end to the lawsuit.
Yet this lawsuit is not just about me and my family's legacy, but also on the broader principles of right and wrong. The Hungarian government should do what is right for the owners and heirs of looted art. It should begin by acknowledging that it controls an unknown number of fine art pieces that were stolen from Jews and people of Jewish origin. It should make serious and renewed efforts to identify those artworks and return them to their rightful owners. It should also provide a clear, short, workable process for others who might wish to assert their claims, a process that doesn't require hiring of lawyers and posting large sums of money for bond.
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Instead, the Hungarian government has done everything it could to make it impractical and impossible for me to recover my paintings. My attorneys have pressed my claims both through diplomatic channels and lawsuit, but the response from the Hungarian government has been uniformly discouraging. Hungary's position is remarkable in that it differs from that taken of many European countries which have faced the issue and returned looted art. Germany, for example, has renewed its work on the principle that looted art must be returned. And France, in recent years, has made exhaustive efforts to examine its museums and archives to determine what objects were stolen during World War II. Even the Russian Federation has passed laws recognizing victims of Nazi persecution. Hungary, however, continues to benefit from the horror involved in the exploitation of property stolen from Jews and people of Jewish origin during World War II. In effect, they are ratifying Eichmann's actions.
My hope is that Congress and the Administration would intervene in Hungary and advise the government in the strongest term that its prize collections cannot be founded on stolen art. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you very much for a very moving personal story which also reflects the history of the century so poignantly.
Ms. Rappard-Boon.
STATEMENT OF CHARLOTTE E. van RAPPARD-BOON, CHIEF INSPECTOR FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE, MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, CULTURE AND SCIENCE OF THE NETHERLANDS
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Ms. VAN RAPPARD-BOON. Mr. Chairman, it is a great honor for me to talk today to your distinguished committee on the efforts the Netherlands is making toward research and restitution of art looted and lost during World War II, both on a national level and by individual museums. Just yesterday I had a telephone call from a museum in Amsterdam telling me that they had decided to give back a drawing to the original owners whose name we discovered last week, and I am very touched by this result of our work, because I have talked with the owners and it is the only object which is left from the house of their parents.
In Holland, as in other countries, the last few years have seen a new awakening to the history of the World War II and its aftermath. Where previously the atrocities committed by Nazis occupied the center of interest, nowadays the handling of looting, recuperation and restitution after the War have also become the focus of attention. My short expose on what happened in Holland after the War in matters of restitution and reinstatement of property rights will concern itself only with art as that is the only subject about which I feel that I can speak with any authority. Thus it should be concerned with the larger issue of doing research on the problem of looted property, bank accounts, insurance, and so forth.
Looting of art by the Nazis in Holland was much less done to public collections or famous collections as it happened in Eastern Europe than to private owners of a few cherished paintings or some old furniture and some blue and white Delftware. Of course, there was the looting of synagogues, the Jewish libraries and the Jewish Historical Museum, all perpetrated by the ERR, but to me the image that best illustrated the looting of Dutch homes is the endless list of the Dienststelle Muhlmann, the central organization for the looting of German occupation made.
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The thoroughness of the German administrators shines out from the detailed list made by policemen—and often Dutch policemen—visiting Jewish households before they were looted: Ein tisch, ein stuk balatum, wasche, and finally, the items which would interest us, ein bild. Some weeks later after the family had been deported, some other civil servant would visit the same house and note, alles ist noch da, everything is still there and, alles ist mitgenommen, all has been taken away.
This looting of the Netherlands was known to the Allies and the Inter-Allied Declaration of 1943 formed one of the measures to offer a solution both to looted property and that sold willingly to the Germans. As has been described extensively, to counter the selling to the Germans, the government in exile in London had promulgated laws which expressly forbid this.
As soon as the War ended, efforts to track down works of art in Germany and to return them to their original owners were gathered together in a single service called the Netherlands Art Property Foundation, SNK. This service cooperated closely with the Allied forces in Germany, especially the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Service. On the basis of detailed lists made up from forms on which the missing works of art were reported by private persons whose art had been looted or confiscated, or by persons and art dealers who had sold works of art to the Germans. Lists were made by the foundation itself based on the administration of the Germans, such as the list I have cited above of transport lists of works of looted art and the records of sales by auction houses.
The Allies tried to find as many works of art in Germany as possible, and one of my colleagues has been talking about the collecting point in Munich where much Dutch art was collected.
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Efforts to find back works of art were much hampered and still are today by the fact that only well-known works of art have descriptions detailed enough to recognize them easily or were even photographed. Most works of art had to be recognized and still have to be recognized on the basis of short descriptions, and the attribution to an artist before World War II is much different than we would make today.
As will be clear from what I said before about the looting itself, identification of a work of art listed, for example, as ''Farmers Making Merry at a Tavern'' by the workshop of van Ostade, without any measurements of further description, is difficult. Hundreds of paintings must exist answering this kind of caption. Thus mistakes in identification of objects were made and not always corrected afterwards.
Also, from the collecting points in Germany, works of art that were difficult to identify, mostly furniture and decorative art, porcelain, were shipped back to the country that seemed to be the most likely country of origin. In this way, most blue and white tiles were sent back to Holland though they might just as well have come from a French collection.
All the same, if you look at how people in the office of the Netherlands Art Property Foundation worked during those years, at a time when Holland was recovering from great War losses, and money and means to run an adequate administration were scarce, one is filled with admiration. Without a computer, but using an endless amount of paper files and lists ordered according to artist names, original owners, art dealers or auction houses, they reconstructed the provenance of many works of art.
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The administration was extremely complex as it had to be ordered to these different kinds of artists. Of the 10,000 items which came back from Germany, more than half were works voluntarily sold during the German occupation of the Netherlands by the art trade, thus violating Dutch War laws. These became the property of the Dutch state. The other works which might have been looted or stolen were given as soon as possible back to their original owners.
Because this administration, which we tried to decipher, is very complicated, we don't know exactly how many of these recovered items were given back to their owners, but from an inventory of 1,804 paintings, which we have researched closely, we know that 69 were given back to their owners, 13 were sent back to Germany, because they did not originally come from Holland, two were sent to Belgium and one to Geneva.
After the foundation finished researching these paintings, 469 paintings were sold at public auction. In all, in the 1950's, after the completion of these investigations, about 2,000 paintings were sold and a large number of furniture. These were the works of art where the Dutch state felt that they had researched provenance sufficiently and that they could not be traced back to any Jewish owner.
The details about the work are in several leaflets which I have brought with me and which are available in the press room, and in the first report we published, giving the details of the history of this organization.
Recently, questions concerning the remaining works of art have been asked. The use of databases has recently enabled us to find more information about original owners than was previously possible. A pilot study was done for a hundred works of art, both paintings and decorative art. The results of the pilot study were published in Dutch and English. Because sufficient new details concerning the provenance of these objects were found, the Dutch government decided to enlarge the study to comprise all items which in the state collection were recuperated after the War from Germany.
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Four researchers—and I envy my colleagues with 40 curators—but four researchers paid by the state under the direction of the Inspectorate of Cultural Heritage, of which I am the Director, are reconstructing the provenance of all recuperated works in the state collections, using all the means which we have today.
I must say that we are very glad that art dealers in Holland have opened art archives to us, and we have found lost items from archives and German sources. The research is supervised by the independent Ekkart Committee, named after Chairman Ekkart, who is the Director of the Netherlands Institute of Art History. In cases where new facts about owners arise, works can be returned to these owners or their heirs.
Of course, after all of these years much of the documentation which might have helped is lost or destroyed, but by gathering as much circumstantial evidence from catalogs of pre-War exhibitions, of private collections, art dealers, insurance lists, and so forth, links can be found which were lost before.
We discovered, going along, that the most efficient method of reconstructing a provenance is not by going backward from the present, which most museums do, because in doing this one always encounters the black hole formed by the nearly complete lack of documentation during the years of World War II. We try to discover the location of the object in question somewhere during the 1920's and 1930's and work forward in time. By doing this, we are able to narrow the gap of World War II and make a kind of educated guess of what happened then.
Up till now we have researched some 800 items. Though the provenance of many has become much clearer, we will have to countenance eventually that for more than half of the objects all will contain blank spots. Because a work of art can mean an extremely personal tie with the past, as the little example at the beginning of my talk illustrates, and have great emotional value for a family, the Dutch government plans to continue to proceed on a case-by-case basis regarding restitution of works of art.
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No general measures are considered, because we believe our method to be a viable one. In each case where new facts come to light, a decision about restitution of these works will be made by the Secretary for Culture. Thus, the works of art about which nothing is found will stay available in the future if new facts come to light regarding their origins.
According to Dutch law, theft and looting committed during the Second World War now fall under the statute of limitations. The Secretary of State can waive the right to the statute of limitations and will do so in those cases where works of art are claimed which were not previously claimed and for which sufficient proof of their original ownership can be found by us.
In cases where new facts come to light which were not known by the parties concerned after World War II and which will alter substantially the evidence on which an earlier decision was based, only if a written settlement of rights was reached between parties after the War, the state will abide by this.
In the same way that a state government is researching its collections, the Dutch museums under the aegis of the Dutch Museum Association are researching the acquisitions made during the War and in the after-War years to investigate whether they acquired knowingly or unknowingly objects which were looted or confiscated from Jewish owners.
Let me say that in contrast to our American colleagues, we do not only research art; one of our most interesting cases concerned a collection of butterflies, so I am very much in favor of doing this kind of research for all museums and not only art museums. The museums are conducting their own research aided by the Inspectorate for Cultural Heritage which checks the museum data and matters of research and add facts which they have found.
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Their first report on the 400 museums has just been published. If works of art found in these museums have been stolen from Jewish owners, it is suspected that the governing bodies of the museums which may be local or provincial or private foundations will act in the same way as the Dutch state and return these objects to their owners.
It serves absolutely no purpose to make an unsubstantiated guess about a number of works of art or objects with a dubious past which have been acquired by museums. Circumstances and especially behavior of museum directors have varied widely. Only through research in specific circumstances of an acquisition can a dubious origin be proved. The museum research has already resulted in several paintings and other objects being given back to the original owners and their families, the most recent of which I have just told you about.
On the other hand, in the same report a nearly unknown part of War history has come to light in the stories about how many museums hid works of art for Jewish owners during the War. In this regard, the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam deserves special mention as they found room to house about a hundred Jewish collections. The first report has just been published and the research will be finished in this year.
The state investigation will be finished in three years, and its results will be published during those years in regular reports. We hope in this way to solve most outstanding questions, though truth commands us to say that some of these will probably never be answered. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you very much, and thank you for coming from such a great distance as well.
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Mr. Lauder.
STATEMENT OF RONALD S. LAUDER, CHAIRMAN, COMMISSION FOR ART RECOVERY, WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS
Mr. LAUDER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. As the hour is a little late, I will go through my report more in outline form.
Chairman LEACH. Without objection, your full report will be placed in the record.
Mr. LAUDER. I am speaking as Chairman of the World Jewish Congress Commission for Art Recovery.
First, I would like to thank this committee because, frankly, when you held hearings two years ago, it was a signal to countries throughout the world, as well as museums throughout the world, that the U.S. Congress was indeed interested in this. And I can say that it had a marked effect on them, taking this more seriously, and you made all of our jobs much easier because of this; and we all—and for the tens of thousands of Jewish people out there trying to get claims, we thank you very much.
I myself first came upon the question of stolen art when I was Ambassador in Austria, and in 1986 I went to the Monastery of Mauerbach. There I saw in a room probably twice the size of this room hundreds if not thousands of works of art lying against the wall all covered with dirt. I was told that these were left over and these were basically worthless.
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From 1986 until the auction took place in the 1990's, we put a great deal of pressure on the Austrian government until they finally agreed to auction them off. These ''worthless'' works of art were sold for $13 million.
I have also been involved in activities with many different Jewish organizations including the World Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Restitution Organization. I am also an active member of the Volcker Commission that oversees the Swiss bank settlement.
Restitution from governments is a simple concept. Return property. No penalties, no interest. Just undo the grievous wrong that was done decades ago. However, among the heinous crimes of the Nazis, art theft is not the worst. No return of art, no material restitution can make the Jewish people whole, make up for the loss of lives, the destruction of family bonds, the death of the vital culture of Europe's Jews.
I took up the art restitution cause over two years ago, and we decided to concentrate on families here and abroad, and working also with the German government. We now have 160 active cases on behalf of families, families who have been looking for their art for as much as sixty years and have gotten nowhere.
Last week, as you heard before, the North Carolina Museum of Art agreed to return ''The Madonna and Child,'' by Lucas Cranach the Elder, to two elderly sisters in Vienna. The museum received it as a gift sixteen years ago. Until the sisters told the Commission for Art Recovery about the theft, they had been unable to find this painting for sixty years. We found it. We gave the family good documentation, and when the museum in Raleigh saw the information, they did the right thing; they returned it. It took a total of ten months from start to finish. If it was not for the Commission for Art Recovery, these two sisters would still be looking.
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Raleigh is a long way away from Vienna. In the 1960's, when this gift was promised to the Raleigh museum, they did not do the necessary research, and maybe if they had, they would not have found the necessary information. This art often has been stolen has been sold and resold again. Again, cases are turning up everywhere—in Leipzig, Berlin, and Chicago. Although Jews who owned art were a minority, they, in fact, put many of their holdings into art and it has been very, very obvious that these works of art were the prized possessions of many, many collections, of many museums throughout the world.
We all read the book by Lynn Nicholas, who is here today, ''The Rape of Europa, Giant in Metropolis,'' about what happened. Before World War II there were Jewish auctions. At these auctions various Jewish property was sold. Although there were some items that were non-Jewish assets, the majority were. One claim, a perfect example that came to the Commission for Art Recovery, was in the heirs of Gustav and Clare Kirstein, prominent citizens of Leipzig.
Gustav was a principal in an art printing firm. He was forced out of his business by the Nuremberg laws and died in the 1930's. His widow stored everything with art dealers in preparation for shipment in the United States. She hoped to join her daughters there, but when the Gestapo took her passport away in 1939, Clare Kirstein committed suicide. The family lawyer, a Jew who was reduced to functioning as a notary and serving a greatly diminished population of Jews, authorized the 1942 auction of the Kirstein collection in Leipzig.
The auction house, still active in Germany, answered the Commission's inquiry and confirmed that the proceeds of the sale went to the Reich. We found more than fifty works from the Kirstein sale in the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, and we have reason to be optimistic about their return. We found another in a museum in Hannover, and because of our efforts, its return to the family is expected shortly.
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Ten years ago we also learned that thousands of works of art, missing for fifty years, had survived behind the Iron Curtain. As Art News magazine revealed, the Red Army Trophy Brigades took these home in 1945. They include masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as Old Master drawings and Asian art and the Gold of Troy.
This art is still being held hostage by the Russia Federation. It is caught up in politics. They claim that this is War booty from Germany and they should keep it, but many of these works the Soviets took home did not belong to Germany or even to Germans. Instead, the Nazis had taken them from Hungarian Jews, from Adolf Eichmann's heartless regime, or may have sold the Old Master drawings from Rotterdam claimed by the Netherlands.
And also you have heard from Martha Nierenberg; many of the paintings from her family's collection are in Russia now.
Let me turn back to Austria. As I mentioned in 1998, Austria was doing the right thing under Elisabeth Gehrer, Minister of Culture. However, things have changed since then, and I am not referring to the recent elections. What has changed is that Austria has started to go back, after they returned the 1,000 pieces to the Rothschild family. After the Rothschild family received its paintings and decorative arts, they made the decision to sell them at auction at Christie's. What happened in Austria is they saw how much money these objects brought and they started to change the law.
I think the most flagrant change has been the change about the Bloch-Bauer case. This is the property now of Mrs. Altmann, and she is trying to sue the Austrian courts. It is interesting that for the Bloch-Bauer family the state returned porcelain sets and pencil drawings by Gustav Klimt, but they would not return the major paintings. We have here a collection worth tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars; and all of a sudden, Austria changes its laws because of the value.
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Maria Altmann's story has been submitted to the committee and it is included in the record. What is interesting is that they have asked for, if she is to proceed with her case, a half-a-million dollars just to get started; again, this half-a-million dollars is used to try to discourage her from getting what is legally hers. The question is what should be done. In this case, there is no question that if Maria Altmann was able to present her case to the Austrian government in a court of law, she would win. They are hoping that the half-a-million dollars will discourage her.
I would now like to turn for a moment to the question of Germany. The Commission for Art Recovery has been in discussion with the German ministry and the Minister of Culture for eight months. Germany also has a group of unclaimed works of art that it calls the ''Linz List'' in the belief that the works were acquired for the world-class museum that Hitler planned for his boyhood town of Linz.
When Germany's unilaterally determined period of restitution ended in 1962, the art was put on display for museum directors. Over the next twenty years, the art was dispersed, lent to 102 museums and more than 50 government offices. No list was available. And for those of us who know German efficiency, that is impossible. If a claimant imagined that their art survived the War and might be in Germany, it was virtually impossible to determine if it was there.
The art is administered by the Finance Ministry; upon request, they provided the Commission for Art Recovery with a computerized list of 2,200 works of art. This was after a list did not exist. However, the government's press release in November referred to 13,000 works of art, and nobody has been able to explain the huge gap in the numbers. The Commission presented an action plan, as I mentioned before, to create a clear and simple procedure.
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We have done the following. We have urged the publication of the Linz list on the Internet. In March, Germany will put this list on the Internet with English translation and titles. At last, claimants whose art is missing may be able to identify it.
We also asked for and got a central office with substantial funding from the Federal government that will be set up with an oversight committee; and the Minister of Culture, Michael Naumann, has written to me. And his associate has written in detail to the commission's director. I believe he will continue to use his influence to bring about major changes in Germany and clear up this unfinished business.
German museums, usually run by municipalities or private foundations, also have many works of art taken from Jews in their inventories. Some are open about it and most have been responsive to our letters on behalf of claimants. The Museum of Mainz published over thirty paintings in one of its catalogs stating that they were ''taken from Jewish possession between 1933 and 1945.'' recently, the Berlin Museum returned art to the heir of Max Silberberg. Others have returned art in the Littman collection to the heirs. A museum in former East Berlin has published a booklet with paintings of doubtful provenance in its collection.
What has happened is that we are starting to see a change, a major change. Our months of negotiations with the Minister of Culture hastened the release in December of a statement issued by all German museums on the tracing and return of Nazi-confiscated art, especially from Jewish property. This is also in the record with my prepared remarks. We were disappointed with the statement's tone, but I believe a new generation dominates Germany's future. This generation also listens, and it understands when government statements sound unfriendly and bureaucratic to a family shut out of the process for fifty years and still haunted by the Nazi past.
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This Commission, which we started two years ago, just about the time that I testified here, has been, I believe, extremely successful in helping claimants and extremely successful in working with the German government. One of the things that has been also our policy is that when we do work with claimants—and we do work at times with the German government—we do not do it in public.
One of the things we have found is that more publicity has an adverse effect on the process in the beginning; at the end it has a positive effect. In the beginning, it has a negative effect, and one of the things that we have been very, very careful to do is not to talk about all of the cases except those that are already in the press, moving ahead.
I perceive during the next year there will be many, many more cases like we have seen in Raleigh or in different places, or Berlin or Leipzig or Vienna, and I am extremely encouraged by what I see in the future.
Again, I thank this committee for being among the first people to bring it to the attention of not only the American people, but bring it to the attention of various governments and museums throughout the world that we, as a people, the American people, are vitally interested.
Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Well, thank you, Ambassador Lauder.
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Yesterday, Secretary Eizenstat told the committee that the new Austrian government made certain overtures to negotiate restitution issues. As a former American ambassador to Austria, do you view this as forthcoming and as something that is adequate and concrete or do you have doubts?
Mr. LAUDER. There is no question that it is concrete. I spoke two days ago with the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, who I have contact with almost daily now; and his question to me was that he just got a note from the new government that they would like to give some money in reparations to the Jewish committee, and the question was ''Should we take it?'' and they would say, ''See, we are not the government that you thought we are, this is our first act.''
It is my feeling that this is a very, very large, complex problem. For example, I believe there are 75,000 apartments today in Vienna that were owned by Jews that are now not owned by Jews. And there are many, many more questions. One of the things that I feel, before any agreement is made, we have to look at the entire picture and come to a solution.
I think a second point I should mention, which has nothing to do with art and has a lot to do with the future of the Jewish community in this country, is that Austria used to have its borders open, and it used to be a place that Jews coming from Russia would come through Vienna and go on their way to Israel or Europe or the United States. A couple of years ago, Austria closed its borders; and it is no longer the haven it was.
What this has also done is that part of the growth and the survival of the Jewish community in Austria was this immigrant population. Today, about 70 percent of the Jews in Austria, particularly in Vienna, are of Russian origin. Without people coming through, it will have a detrimental effect to the Jewish community there; and in many ways I believe the decision to stop immigration into Austria was particularly geared to having Jewish people come there. That has nothing to do with our art restitution, but I think it is important.
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Chairman LEACH. Yes, it is very important.
You have indicated that you believe that the State Department can do more in art recovery. Do you have any specific suggestions?
Mr. LAUDER. Yes, the State Department can play a very, very vital role. In general, in the past it has been the claimants, for example, here in the United States trying to get a decision against a European government. It is a very daunting case if you are an individual going against a European government. I believe there should be a person in each country in the State Department whose specific role is to help these claimants in their case.
I think that when a claimant came to the government—for example, if Martha Nierenberg was able to come, and I don't know if she was—to the Hungarian government with someone from the State Department with her, I think her case would have been a much stronger case. I believe there is a role and a major role that the State Department can play, and it is not always the most popular role that helps relations, but it is something that guards the properties of those people in the United States.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you.
Let me just say, with regard to Ms. Nierenberg, in our country we obviously have a division between the courts, the Legislative and the Executive Branches, and so it is always awkward to opine, from a legislative perspective, on judicial functions, but you would not have been invited here if there was not a very strong belief that you had a very legitimate claim, and so we are very respectfully listening to your concerns and would express great hope that the government of Hungary listens carefully as well.
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Ms. Van Rappard-Boon, let me just say that we in the year 2000 are looking at certain issues, and we are not the first country to review these issues, and of all of the countries on the continent the Netherlands may have led the way on many of these issues. In the early 1950's, your government did more than any other government in certain areas, and we have asked you to come representing a government which has been on the progressive side of these issues when many from America were not looking to them, and so your testimony is very much appreciated.
Ms. VAN RAPPARD-BOON. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Mr. Forbes.
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, and I would like to echo those comments as well, Mr. Chairman.
Ambassador, thank you for what you have done on this cause. There are few who have been as involved as you. Frankly, we would not be sitting here today discussing this topic if it were not for the personal time and resources that you have brought to this cause; and I want to thank you on behalf of my constituents in New York and many people around the world for your leadership on this question.
Mr. LAUDER. Thank you.
Mr. FORBES. One wonders whether you can ever, ever get past the tragic events of World War II and the Holocaust. And today, for those generations who follow, to relive part of this heartache, certainly not in the same—diminishes, but reliving part of this heartache by the lost assets of their family, the memories and the personal connections to their loved ones that these works of art and even the bank accounts themselves represent is unbelievable, and I do thank you, and I thank Mr. Rothman and others who joined you in this effort.
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If I might, I think we have kind of highlighted throughout the day and certainly the committee did yesterday in some of the discussions the frustrations that all of you have been enduring in trying to work through this process and getting uncooperative nations and uncooperative entities, whether they be other museums around the world or private collectors. The difficulties in trying to get these works back clearly is understood, and I know that the last panel there was mention that a dispute resolution process would be an important development. I was wondering, Mr. Ambassador, if you might comment a little bit from your vast experience in this effort—and it is vast. I know that you talked in the past about international guidelines and international standards, and maybe if you could comment about where we might be on that effort as well as some kind of dispute resolution so that we can move this process forward?
Mr. LAUDER. This is a legal case, but let us take Austria, for example. Austria also is in the process—I don't know if they have done it or not—of passing an interesting law which says that all unclaimed art, be it Jewish or not Jewish, will be put into a fund called the Austrian Fund which will be able to be used for those Austrian projects.
Now, this is a law that is basically being put on the books that says, ''We don't care if it is—we know it is Jewish; we are using it for the Austrian citizens.'' The question is, what should be the international law? What should be the international law when Russia says, ''Even though we stole this not only from Germany, but from Rotterdam or from France or wherever, this is going to be our property because we passed a law.'' That is the question. And the second question is, what role does the State Department play in these types of situations? Do they come arm-in-arm with us, or where do they stand?
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In the case of the Schiele case, which I know you heard about earlier today, I have seen it from different ways. The thing that was the most harmful in the Schiele case may not have been—I am talking now from my vantagepoint from my art recovery, from my viewpoint. What the Austrians are saying is, ''Look,'' and they are finding the information out about the two claimants being not exactly correct, and they are using that as a weapon against us for future claimants.
It is very difficult for me, and I would ask to go on Austrian television, which is something that I don't relish, to explain why these people are making false claims, how that relates to other people making false claims and how do they know. It is a very, very difficult question. That is the danger in the Schiele case.
The other thing is what countries do, be it Austria or Germany or other countries, they will use the one case that may not be a strong case to use it against us in the future.
What we do is we keep coming back and back and back again. What is interesting in many cases is that the press is very, very much for this; and the press has been a great help to us, even the right wing press, which is amazing.
Mr. FORBES. You referenced the Altmann situation. Do you think that the United States Justice Department should possibly be encouraged to take some kind of role in these kinds of cases?
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Mr. LAUDER. My opinion would be, if the Justice Department simply says we are interested in it, that is enough to get the piece—what it is now is that—as I mentioned before, they now know that the U.S. Congress is looking at this. That is a major step. If they feel also that the Justice Department looks at this thing, not in the case of seizing art, but the case of questioning what is going on there, I think it plays an even stronger role.
Mr. FORBES. A number of years ago there was talk of legislation to create a pool of money to assist private citizens in recovering some of their assets as well as I think part of that money would also be used to help museums, art galleries and the like to do the kind of research that is oftentimes costly and burdensome on their budgets. Do you think that the Congress ought to be thinking about legislation that does provide that assistance?
Mr. LAUDER. I think it would be very helpful. Because most of these people cannot afford the lawyers and cannot afford certain costs involved. I don't think that it should be a large amount of money. And I think some of these cases, like the Altmann case where they ask a half-a-million dollars, it is nothing more than to say ''just keep away.''
The other aspect is that, very often, you have two parts of a family. One part lives in the United States; one part lives in Europe. In the case of the Altmann family, you had that also. The result is that it gets very difficult if you have to have both parts of the family to be in agreement, because one part of the family who is living with all of the neighbors around them causes great difficulty.
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And another case I mentioned, a case in Leipzig, one of the people who is going to help us had, I believe, brothers in the Waffen SS. It is very difficult for that person to make a decision to help recover Jewish property. That person, believe it or not, agreed to help us; and that is the thing that started the case. But it is a major question, and the real answer is that we are only strong if we have the U.S. Government behind us, plain and simple.
Mr. FORBES. Ambassador, I apologize if this sounds somewhat ignorant, but at the conclusion of World War II when they were trying to document at the Munich collecting point and other efforts to document unclaimed works of art and the like, were procedures set up then to try to get these works of art returned?
Mr. LAUDER. Yes, they were. You have to understand that at the time you had enormous human suffering. You had hundreds of thousands, if not more, of Jewish people who were in concentration camps. You had DP camps all over. You had problems of major starvation within Germany and Austria and different places. Although art was extremely important, it was much less; and there was a feeling of getting it done as quickly as possible.
In the case, for example, of France, they sent back something like 15,000-16,000 works of art at one time. The French government, receiving 16,000 works of art whose owners were unknown, made the decision in 1947-1948 to sell 13,000 of them at auction without having to go through the effort, because there was just so much going on. Yes, procedures were set up, but nobody had the manpower to go in and look at things. The obvious ones were returned, but an enormous amount they didn't know what to do with. Plus the fact that most of the owners were dead. So the result is that there were no records. It has only been in the last few years that we have the type of records that we have.
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The thing that I don't understand and I will never understand is what happened to our parents' generation? How come it is only happening fifty or sixty years later? That is the thing that I find the most amazing.
What happened in the 1950's and 1960's and 1970's to all of the different claims? What happened? I look back in our records, and I don't see anything. I see it is like a huge hole from 1948 to almost 1995. It is absolutely incredible.
When I am sitting on the Volcker Commission and I look at the records, I see hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of people asking for money back and being told, ''thank you, good-bye. If your father died, we need a death certificate.''
The question is, what happened to these people? Where were all of us? And we are putting together pieces, but most of the people we are working with are in their seventies and eighties, and every day people are dying.
I go to the gathering of Holocaust survivors, and I have been doing it now for six years, and you can see the difference over the years. Obviously, it gets smaller and smaller each year.
I wonder what happened. The governments know we are running against time, too; and they know the longer they wait the better chance that they have a person will go away.
You heard in Martha Nierenberg's case what is going to happen. They would love to wait another ten or fifteen years. They don't know that she is going to live another twenty-five years.
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Ms. NIERENBERG. I intend to.
Mr. FORBES. Thank you, Ambassador and Mr. Chairman. I appreciate very much the subject matter that we are talking about today, and I want to thank the Ambassador for offering such tremendous hope to so many people. Thank you.
Mr. LAUDER. Thank you.
Chairman LEACH. Thank you, Mr. Forbes.
By way of closing, let me stress that, although they covered different economic sectors and different countries, all of our hearings over the past three years have shared a common theme. Because the crimes were unspeakably heinous and took place in such an incomprehensible scale, the brutality of the Nazi era has obscured for fifty years the degree to which the Holocaust was not just murderous, but also constituted the largest and most unjust theft of wealth and labor in history, grand larceny on a continental scale.
During the decade we have just completed, a convergence of historical forces removed some of the obstacles that have kept the world community from confronting the economic implications of Nazi genocide: the end of the Cold War; the economic reconstruction of Europe, including the reunification of Germany; and a new wave of historical research based on hitherto unexplored documents into the complicity of private citizens and institutions in Nazi crimes. Most importantly, however, it was the effort on the part of the survivors' advocates who refused to let the nations involved, including the United States, shy away from their responsibility to provide belated help.
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Taken together, our hearings over the past three years have shown how the economic component of Nazi rule continued Hitler's legacy long after his regime was defeated. It kept survivors impoverished, unable to rebuild their lives, and ensured that their suffering and that of their families would continue. It allowed both complicit and unwitting beneficiaries of the theft to enjoy unfair economic advantages derived from stolen riches and inhuman treatment of workers.
Although justice can never be adequately attained for crimes of genocidal magnitude, it is important that symbolic efforts at least be undertaken and that a measure of accountability for economic crimes be established. In this context, Deputy Secretary Eizenstat and Dr. Lambsdorff outlined a plan of redress that is more extensive in scope than any other compensation for human rights violations the world has known. While the individual amounts will be modest, the plan envisions compensating a million workers, even in cases where the institution that exploited them may no longer exist.
Deputy Secretary Eizenstat is to be commended not only for shedding light on Holocaust issues, but previously overlooked Nazi crimes against non-Jewish Europeans, many of whom are double victims, first of the Nazis and then the Communists. The relentless integrity the Secretary has exhibited provides a model of public service.
Likewise, the public owes a debt of gratitude to two other distinguished citizens, a former Federal Reserve Board Chairman and a former Secretary of State, who have been called to head banking and insurance panels respectively.
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Paul Volcker, the Chairman of the commission that audited Swiss banks, reports that 54,000 names have been found that were likely owners of bank accounts which were improperly closed. Sadly, he concluded that there were surely many others, but the passage of time and the disappearance of records have made it impossible to provide a fuller accounting. A humanitarian fund endowed at $1.25 billion has been formed as a token of compensation.
Lawrence Eagleburger reported that the consensus has developed that insurance companies need fairly and generously to settle unpaid Holocaust era policies. The international commission he chairs is about to begin processing claims, although considerable work still remains to be done identifying potential claimants.
In the art world, there is a new, rigorous attitude toward provenance and a solemn determination on the part of directors here and abroad to scour their collections and return any tainted pieces to the rightful owner.
What is astounding in all of this is how much progress has recently been made, how many parties have transcended their initial impulse to hide from uncomfortable legacies behind walls of legalistic denial, sophistry and obfuscation. Historical scrutiny and individual conscience have moved us to a new stage in the evolution of this horrible issue, a stage in which key public and private leaders in each country involved now acknowledge that moral responsibility for economic crimes implicit in the Holocaust cannot continue to be ignored.
We must, however, not delude ourselves. Any notion of justice—with crimes so heinous, with so many millions of victims, with redress so long overdue, with so many records destroyed by the ravages of time, with so many stories of inhumanity that will never be told—is elusive at best. The sad truth is that the deepest wrongs cannot be redressed and that hatred's bounty will never be fully disgorged.
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Nevertheless, although unconscionably delayed and inadequate to right the wrongs committed, the largely symbolic restitution efforts underway are the only way at hand to bring accountability to bear on the Nazi economic legacy, the only way to give meaning to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assertion that, ''The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.''
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:55 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]