ZGram - 6/7/2002 - "Double Standard? Naw!"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram  - Where Truth is Destiny

June 7, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Here is an item from The Independent, London, Wednesday, June 5, 
2002, followed by a Zundelsite comment:

[START]

Nazi's heirs lose legal battle over Hitler watercolours

By Rupert Cornwell

THE fate of four watercolour paintings by Adolf Hitler has been 
decided by the United States Supreme Court 57 years after the founder 
of the Third Reich met his death. The court decided the American army 
should be allowed to keep them.

The paintings were brought to America as war booty and have mouldered 
almost ever since in a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia. For the 
past two decades they have been the object of a legal battle, pitting 
the heirs of the family of Heinrich Hoffmann -- a leading Nazi court 
photographer who was given the paintings as a present by Hitler in 
1936 -- against the Washington government.

Hitler and Hoffmann were good friends -- indeed the F=FChrer is said to 
have met his mistress, Eva Braun, at Hoffmann's Berlin studio. During 
the war, Hoffmann stored the pictures with his collection of 2.5 
million photographs in a German castle, where they were discovered by 
victorious US troops in 1945. The photographs went as evidence to the 
Nuremberg trials, where Hoffmann was convicted of wartime 
profiteering. The paintings were then quietly dispatched to the 
Pentagon vaults near Washington. Artistically they are of scant 
merit, said by those who have seen them to depict street scenes and 
war landscapes. But as the hilarious 1983 saga of the fake Hitler 
diaries shows, any artefact carrying the signature "A. Hitler" has a 
curiosity value beyond price.

Hoffmann died in 1957, and his son sought the return of both the 
paintings and the photographs. He was told to do so through 
"diplomatic channels", but failed to make much progress. In the 
meantime, a Texas collector called Billy F Price had bought part of 
the rights to the paintings, and in 1983 filed the first of several 
claims on behalf of himself and Hoffmann's heirs. As the case worked 
its way through the courts, a federal judge in Texas in 1993 ordered 
the government to pay $10m in damages for refusing to give the 
objects back. That verdict was overturned by a federal appeals court, 
which ruled that the paintings belonged to the US army under a 
post-war treaty. Robert White, Hoffmann's attorney, told the Supreme 
Court this week: "The unique aspect of this theft is that the culprit 
is the US government." But Theodore Olson, the solicitor general, 
insisted that the seizure of the art work was "a quintessential 
public policy decision", and part of the de-Nazification of Germany.

The nine high court justices agreed with Mr Olson -- and in doing so 
enriched America's public collections with four watercolours by the 
20th century's most infamous artist.

[END]

Zundelsite comment:

What is a decent, law-abiding, moral person to think about such a case?

=46rom the lofty Presidents on down the line to the poison pen 
columnist and even further down to the gutter press, America never 
tired for the last 57 years screeching about "Nazi art thefts", 
demanding the return of the allegedly stolen pieces, huge 
compensation and abject apologies from the defeated Germans.

When the shoe is on the other foot, however, the double standard 
kicks in - and the highest court unanymously agrees with the 
government of today that America's stealing of Nazi art - in other 
words, art theft - was a "quintessential public policy."

No wonder many Americans distrust the government and have little 
respect for, or faith in, the courts.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D