Holocaust heirs want Netherlands to return art

June 7, 2000
Web posted at: 10:24 AM EDT (1424 GMT)

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Three heirs of Holocaust victims on Tuesday asked an influential Jewish group to pressure the Netherlands to return art they say the Nazis stole from their families.

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The three families, led by Nick Goodman Gutmann, Marei von Saher and Christine Koenigs, told Reuters they hoped that the World Jewish Congress, which is pushing Dutch banks and the Amsterdam bourse to make restitution for bank accounts and securities looted from Jews, will take on their cause.

In a letter to the WJC obtained by Reuters, the three individuals wrote: "They (government officials) totally reject and ignore the context and circumstances of 1939 and the period before and during the German invasion and hide under the pretext that all was normal and what happened to Gutmann, Jacques Goudstikker and Koenigs was perfectly legal and the Dutch Museums should not be disturbed."

A spokesman for the Netherlands government was not immediately available to comment.

After the war, the Allies returned art looted by the Nazis to the nations from which it was taken; it was left to those governments to give the works back to the individual Holocaust heirs who were robbed.

Elan Steinberg, WJC executive director, said the advocacy group planned to meet with the three families so that it can decide what it might do.

Goudstikker, an art dealer who fled Amsterdam ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940 -- leaving more than 1,200 paintings behind, died en route to England. A post-war, declassified report by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) said Alois Miedl, whom it called a Bavarian financier, bought the Goudstikker collection.

Miedl, a friend of Hermann Goering, Hitler's air minister, negotiated the sale of the Goudstikker art for Goering, according to a September 1946 Atlantic Monthly article by James Plaut, who had served as the Director of Art for the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit.

Von Saher of Greenwich, Connecticut, said: "Goering picked the best ones." She explained Miedl took the rest, which now are scattered in public and private collections from Russia to the United States.

Goudstikker's widow, Desi, in 1952 reached a settlement with the Netherlands government but the family argues its claims for some 235 works remain open. A court in The Hague late last year held that a suit the family filed was inadmissible, saying the earlier settlement closed the case.

Christine Koenigs of Amsterdam said that her grandfather, Franz Koenigs, owned more than 2,100 old master drawings, four paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, and works by Rubens, van Gogh and Cezanne. The banker died in mysterious circumstances on May 1941 in Cologne, his granddaughter said. The drawings were claimed as collateral against an outstanding loan -- and the bank was said to have changed the security to include all drawings of the French group and all the works on loan to the Dutch Boymans museum.

After the war, Franz Koenigs' widow claimed 47 paintings from the Netherlands, a claim she said was ignored.

Nick Goodman Gutmann of California said that research done by Dutch officials turned up 9 to 12 paintings that belonged to his grandfather, who perished, along with his wife, in Nazi death camps. The grandfather, whose father converted to Protestantism from Judaism, was forced to sell the contents of his home to Karl Haberstock - perhaps the most notorious Nazi art dealer.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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