U.S. agency lists 2,000 artworks looted by Nazis

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Justice Department researchers have put together a list of 2,000 artworks seized by the Nazis, a list that includes works by Rembrandt and Monet and that will help Holocaust families track down missing heirlooms.

It was called a starting point by the World Jewish Congress, because no one knows how many of the paintings have been returned to their owners. The organization provided Reuters with an advance copy of the list, which will be released next week.

U.S. museums, a handful of which have had to return artworks to Holocaust heirs from whose families they were stolen, could find the list an invaluable tool, according to Elan Steinberg, the congress's executive director.

The museums have agreed with the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States to carry out and disclose full research into the Holocaust-era provenance, or chain of ownership, of their works. They also promised to apply uniform standards to their research.

Previously, the museums only agreed to research works with gaps in their history between 1933 and 1945, and it was up to each museum to define what sort of gap to reveal.

"They had not committed themselves to full disclosure nor to making all the information publicly available," Steinberg said.

"There have been no standardized rules about what to disclose and what constitutes a gap. The aim under the new agreement is to standardize the procedure and apply a uniform set of guidelines and standards."

The quality of many of the paintings on the Justice Department list is extraordinarily high, because most of the items were stolen for Adolf Hitler and his Air Minister Hermann Goering, and they demanded masterpieces.

Until now, museums have varied widely in the number of artworks they have categorized as possibly being among the estimated 600,000 stolen by the Nazis.

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts listed on its Web site in April seven European paintings that it said it was concerned about. In contrast, the Art Institute of Chicago cited 548 works -- 109 sculptures and 439 paintings -- for which links in the chain of ownership were unclear or not yet fully documented.

A gap in a work's provenance is only a sign that more research is needed, not proof it was stolen.

The Justice Department researchers spent countless hours in the National Archives going over reports written by the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services shortly after the world's bloodiest war ended. The OSS was the predecessor of the CIA.

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

See related sites about STYLE

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.