Researching Judaica Looted in the Netherlands during the Second World War:
Methods, Results and Needs
Julie-Marthe Cohen, Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam
In 1997, the year preceding the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, the Dutch
government started a trial investigation into the restitution of works of art that had been
returned from Germany to the Netherlands after the Second World War and still remained in
the custody of the Dutch authorities. In April 1998, the committee concluded that in general
the approach had been formal, bureaucratic, cold and often heartless. Later, a more detailed
research into the provenance of over 4,000 works was carried out, scrutinising thousands of
files in the Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit archive. The Netherlands Dutch Art Property
Foundation or SNK, had been responsible for tracing and restoring art to its rightful owners.
This Nederlands Kunstbezit or Netherlands Art Property collection of 4,000 objects included
very few Judaica objects. In the course of the last decade, where possible, objects were
restored to their legal owner based on a lenient and flexible approach.
Although it was through the intercession of the Dutch government that archives of the
country’s prewar Jewish communities were returned from Russia in 2002, Judaica as such has
not received serious attention from the Dutch government. Research into the impact of the
theft and subsequent restitution of Jewish books, manuscripts, archives and ritual objects has
only been carried out by three Jewish institutions. A general overview of Judaica looted in the
Netherlands during the Second World War has yet to be compiled.
Among the aspects that require further examination is the fate of Judaica that
remained in the country after it was stolen. We know for a fact that ceremonial objects were
stolen from synagogues on a massive scale by German officials and Dutch collaborators, as
well as ordinary thieves. While repatriation of looted objects from Germany was handled by
SNK’s foreign department, it was SNK’s domestic department that was responsible for
tracing, registering and administering items found in the possession of enemy personnel or
traitors in the Netherlands. How successful was this domestic department? Clearly not very.
In fact, the department’s failure to achieve results is well-known. No Judaica items seem to
have been discovered and restored. In view of the detailed study of SNK’s foreign
department, it is appropriate that SNK’s domestic department files also come under scrutiny.
This is essential if the state is to evaluate its role in the discovery, administration and
restitution of looted Judaica that remained in the Netherlands.
The Jewish Historical Museum is one of the few institutions to have undertaken
extensive research on looted Judaica in the context of an investigation into the fate of its
collection during and after the Second World War. As a result of this investigation we have
been able to reconstruct exactly what happened to the collection after it was confiscated by
Einsatzstab Alfred Rosenberg in 1943 and to establish how many objects were restored and
how many remain missing. In 1946, only a fraction of the looted collection was returned from
the US Army’s Offenbach Archival Depot through SNK’s foreign department.
I would like here to discuss the method I used to research the history of the Jewish Historical
Museum collection, showing the kind of sources I used and how the information was
processed. I am not concerned here about the fate of the collection as a whole, rather about
the reconstruction of what happened to individual objects. Of the 610 looted items, 180 were
returned, while 430 remain missing. In conclusion, I hope to show that the same methods can
be applied to an investigation that is due to start soon on Judaica that disappeared from
synagogues during the war and remained in the Netherlands.
The aim of my research into the history of the museum collection was to determine which
objects from the prewar collection were returned, which remain missing and which objects of
unknown provenance entered the collection after the war. All this information is to be made
available in a database on our website.
In my investigation I explored the full range of documents that a reconstruction of the
history of a museum collection can access. A key source was a prewar inventory of the
museum, which included descriptions of a total of 940 pieces. I copied these into a table,
adding considerable further information during the course of my research. For example, a list
found in the Stedelijk Museum archive provides information about which objects had been
entrusted for safekeeping to the Stedelijk and were later confiscated by Rosenberg. Bills of
lading listing items returned to the Netherlands in 1946 found in the US Military Government
archives, and a list of objects that were handed over to the museum by SNK in January 1947
show which objects were returned. However, the descriptions are often poor, making
identification difficult. I therefore searched through exhibition catalogues, Jewish and nonJewish newspaper and photo archives for objects in the museum inventory, looking for
additional details not given in the inventory. This enabled me to match an object, simply
described as Chanukah lamp in the inventory, to a lamp with a vase with flowers in the
middle, which is part of our present collection.
To show which objects were recovered and which were still missing, the collated data
was compared to the present collection. The result was around 180 matches. My research also
showed that a number of objects sent from Germany entered the collection erroneously. They
were not part of the prewar collection and their provenance remains unknown. We are
currently putting all the data relating to missing and misplaced objects in a database to be
posted on our website. We hope that our database will set a standard for other museums.
In the search for missing objects, databases of Judaica have become indispensable, as the
following example shows. While searching for details of a missing object simply described as
a Torah mantle, I found out that it was in fact a valuable eighteenth-century Dutch Ashkenazi
Torah mantle, lent to the museum in 1936. I subsequently made an important discovery: I
was able to match it with a Torah mantle in the Israel Museum Second World War
Provenance Research Online database, launched in 2007. The mantle had arrived in
Jerusalem through the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organisation, which had distributed
unidentified and heirless objects to Jewish institutions after the war, mostly in Israel and the
United States. Similar discoveries may be expected, especially since a committee was formed
at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of European Jewish Museums in Amsterdam to
explore the establishment of a specialised database of Judaica objects. This would be a major
advance, since Judaica is poorly represented in existing art databases.
Turning now to the planned research into ritual objects that were looted from Jewish
communities or disappeared in other ways during the war. Our research aims to achieve the
following. First, to learn about the fate of these objects. Second, to determine the number of
lost objects and to identify or locate as many of these objects as possible. And finally, to
examine the role of the Dutch government in the tracing of hidden or lost objects and how
items that were declared were dealt with.
The key source in this study is a survey involving 158 Jewish communities in the
Netherlands of moveable property and real estate reported missing or damaged. Each dossier
documents a claim for compensation for losses suffered due to destruction and theft, which
was submitted to the state. A structural study of these dossiers will indicate the extent of the
property that was lost and stolen during the war. The files also include correspondence full of
all kinds of information. For example, letters explicitly mention Germans and collaborators as
the thieves. For instance, in the village of Hardenberg, where the brass synagogue chandelier
was confiscated and acquired for the collection of Anton Mussert, the head of the Dutch
Fascist Party or NSB. Other files report Holy Ark curtains that were peppered with bullet
holes or a handful of Torah mantles and fragments of brass candlesticks which were all that
remained and which were kept in the local museum. In addition, the dossiers reveal how
ceremonial objects of liquidated communities were redistributed to communities that no
longer had such items. Other sources that have yet to be explored will hopefully provide
information about the fate of missing items or items presumed to be missing.
The archive of SNK’s domestic department may include material about collaborators
who looted Jewish objects. Catalogues of auctions held during the war will probably also
include looted Judaica, as will catalogues of postwar auctions of impounded objects that were
sold by the state. This includes objects that were deposited by Jews with Liro Bank, the bank
that the Nazi authorities created to rob Jews, which subsequently came into possession of the
state. Some Judaica objects may already have been returned to their former owners, as a letter
in our museum archive about the return of two charity boxes to the Jewish community of
Middelburg shows. As in the earlier Jewish Historical Museum research, we will look for
details to augment the cursory descriptions of objects in the dossiers of the 158 Jewish
communities. For example, prewar Jewish journals often report occasions when ceremonial
objects were donated, frequently describing the item in detail. The collated information will
also be tested against a unique inventory of ceremonial objects in 23 Jewish communities in
the Netherlands recently completed by museum staff. A comparison of these two sources will
lead to further identifications of missing or apparently missing objects and will tell us more
about their fate.
This year the Netherlands Museum Association will launch a follow-up study of a voluntary
investigation implemented ten years ago by a large number of museums into art acquired
between 1940 and 1948. In the new study, to be subsidised by the ministry of education,
culture and science, museums will examine the provenance of their collection acquired in the
period from 1933 to date according to specific criteria set by the government. The Jewish
Historical Museum has contacted the museum association to ensure that Judaica will not be
forgotten. In addition, it will provide instructions on how to recognise Judaica. The museum
has also pointed out that countless ceremonial objects were stolen from Jewish communities
and that many of those that remain may still be found in small local museums, town halls and
similar places. The following examples illustrate the point. In its response to the 1999
museum inquiry, the Historical Museum at Oldenzaal wrote that it has a portrait of a
nineteenth-century local rabbi and that the chairman of the Jewish community had given it on
loan to the local museum in 1941. It had until then hung in the synagogue, which was never
used again after the war. The museum also reported that no discussion had taken place after
the war regarding the return of the painting. Another example, at Culemborg, where in 1943
the mayor had ordered the commissioner of police to impound the Jewish community’s
religious objects and archive, which were subsequently kept at the town hall. They had been
forgotten about entirely until a regional archivist discovered the archive in 1963. The ritual
objects had by then been transferred to the local museum.
I have presented the Jewish Historical Museum as a case study. Naturally every museum has
its own particularities, while research results depend on the kind of sources available and
their number. Clearly, as many archives as possible should be consulted and information can
be retrieved from different visual sources and databases: a key aspect of our research. I have
proposed elsewhere that a digital museum manual be compiled to include information about
experts, research results and research methods. This should incorporate a list of sources
available for consultation: archives of the Nazi period, of the Allied forces, of national
governments and Jewish organisations, as well as sources such as general and Jewish
newspapers, photos, inventories, correspondence and auction and museum catalogues. To
succeed in this research we need to share our expertise and knowledge, to collaborate on a
national and international level and, last but not least, obtain financial support from the
international community. All governments, the Dutch government included, should recognise
the importance of our research into the fate of Judaica during and after the Second World
War, a subject that has been neglected for too long and which deserves to be treated as all
other kinds of assets, both from a moral and legal standpoint.