The Times of London of January 9, 2000 ran an article titled "Russia may return £45bn Nazi booty" - a deceptive title, by the way - which triggers ZGram comments. For once, the shoe is on the other foot, which is unusual, you must admit.
Read up:
Times:
PRESIDENT PUTIN has raised hopes that much of the world's biggest collection of looted art, seized from Germany by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War, could be returned in a grand gesture of reconciliation.
Zundelsite:
For 55 years, one only heard of "Nazis" having stolen art. We are pleased to see that Russia has made a revisionist start at least with good intentions. When will America return aircraft hangars full of stolen Nazi art - stored in Denver and other places?
Times:
A vast trove of paintings, books and jewellery, including Heinrich Schliemann's fabled gold treasure from the site of ancient Troy, has languished in the vaults of Russian museums for the past half-century. Hauled there by the trainload at Stalin's instructions, it has been a major sticking point in Moscow's relations with Germany ever since.
Zundelsite:
It would take a lot of train loads to carry 100 billion dollars worth of art treasures, counted in USA money. Talk about the "liberation" of Germany by the Allies! Robbery was more the norm!
Times:
Mr Putin said that Russia would work "insistently and patiently" to resolve the issue, which is complicated by the Soviet Union's huge losses at the hands of the Germans in the war, including the deaths of 26 million soldiers and civilians and the plundering of its own cultural treasures, among them the legendary Amber Room in the tsars' summer palace in St Petersburg.
Zundelsite:
The 26 million figure is an inflated one - just like the 6 million figure. As to the Amber Room - who took it and its whereabouts are still a deep dark secret.
Times:
Speaking after a weekend visit to Moscow by Gerhard Schröder, Germany's Chancellor, Mr Putin said that he wanted to remove all obstacles to stronger ties with Berlin. He said the goodwill that was essential for progress on the issue of the plundered art, which has been valued at £45 billion, "is present on either side".
Zundelsite:
That's nice! Will the art be returned to their rightful owners? Madeleine Albright is keeping hers, stolen from Sudeten Germans when her father was a Czech diplomat in 1945.
Times:
Former President Yeltsin made repeated efforts to return the so-called trophy art, on one occasion writing a secret decree declaring his intention to repatriate it. But he was hindered every time by communists and nationalists in parliament who consider the treasures to be Russian federal property. Only last year, the Duma passed a law declaring unconstitutional any attempt to return it.
Zundelsite:
"Unconstitutional"? One wonders after how many vodkas this idea came up!
Times:
If anyone is in a position to break the deadlock, it is Mr Putin. In contrast to his predecessor, he won the Duma's co-operation on every major issue put before it during his first year in power, and he has made no secret of his "lively wish" to end Moscow's longest-running quarrel with Germany - partly for personal reasons, as he speaks fluent German and has fond memories of his stint as a spy in Dresden.
Zundelsite:
Really! Give us a break! Because he speaks German? What kind of shallow, silly argument is that?
Russia ***needs*** Germany after the Soviets have wrecked it - that's why the generous gesture!
Times:
The stakes could scarcely be higher, politically and also for Germany's museums and the international art market. Russia holds up to 300,000 paintings taken from Germany, including masterpieces by Monet and Manet, seldom-seen canvases by Picasso and Van Gogh, and works by Degas, Renoir, El Greco, Goya, Rembrandt and Rubens.
Zundelsite:
Some robberies, those! 300,000 paintings! How about all the libraries, machinery etc. that were stolen also? Germany was robbed blind after it lost the war and could not defend itself against the wholesale looting. Let's call a spade a spade.
Times:
The Schliemann treasure, discovered in the 1870s and stored secretly under Moscow's Pushkin Museum for 50 years, consists of more than 250 priceless artifacts, including ornamental axe-heads, vases, goblets, crystal magnifying glasses and a gold diadem that Schliemann claimed was once worn by Helen of Troy. He famously persuaded his wife, Sophia, to model it. Originally proclaimed as the lost gold of Troy, most of it, in fact, predates the city of Homer's Iliad by more than 1,000 years. Nonetheless, Schliemann, an amateur archaeologist and accomplished self-publicist, never admitted as much and always claimed to have located it with the help of clues from the Iliad. He donated it to Berlin's Museum of Prehistory, where it stayed until it was packed into crates for storage in a Berlin zoo in the Second World War.
Zundelsite:
The Soviets stole it and hid it, and for 50-plus years no one could enjoy it. Serves them right, I say.
Times:
It is now in the care of the Pushkin Museum's director, Irina Antonova, who took delivery of the crates as a 23-year-old curator in 1945 and displayed them to the public for the first time 51 years later. An unrepentant communist, Ms Antonova insisted that the Soviet Union had saved the treasures from barbarians and had no duty to return them.
Zundelsite:
Name-calling is the specialty of certain folks we know who are also fond of being communists.
Times:
Whether Russia will consider returning the Schliemann gold remains unclear, and if it did the Turkish Government has made clear it would claim it from Germany, as the legitimate authority in present-day Troy. A spokesman for Mr Schröder's cultural affairs adviser said yesterday that negotiations are at too delicate a stage for detailed comment, but experts on both sides have been drawing up shopping lists for several months.
Zundelsite:
If the Turks get away with that, the museums the world over would be empty in a few years. Most everything was "taken" from Greece, Egypt, Rome etc. Looting art is nothing new and was not invented by the "Nazis".
Times:
A priceless stained-glass window from the church of St Marien in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in former East Germany is said to be high on the German list, and a reciprocal return of any surviving panels of the Amber Room - sometimes called the world's largest piece of jewellery - would go a long way towards satisfying Russian pride. But Germany has a problem with the Amber Room. Most of it was almost certainly destroyed in the Wehrmacht's flight from Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Two years ago a painting by Joachim Wtewael, The Holy Family with Saints John and Elizabeth and Angels, was handed back to the German city of Gotha by the High Court in London after the German Government protested over its proposed sale at Sotheby's.
Zundelsite:
We note with newfound pride that finally the Germans are asserting themselves - at least in individual cases. That is encouraging.
Times:
It was taken to Latvia at the end of the war, and then to Moscow, from where it was smuggled to the West. The ruling is thought to have kept thousands of paintings off the market for fear that they would be identified as trophy art.
Zundelsite:
Good. Let them not profit from their robbery spree!
They and their heirs should all be charged with grand larceny! The day may not be far.
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Thought for the Day:
"The dead ride swiftly."
(Gottfried August Bürger)
Back to Table of Contents of the Jan. 2001 ZGrams