Christopher F. Schuetze

In signing the eight-page agreement Wednesday, Germany’s 16 state cultural ministries, the foreign office, and associations representing cities and municipalities agreed to work with museums to make sure that wrongfully obtained artifacts are given back to their rightful owners.

Museums with ethnological collections should produce inventories of those objects and make them publicly available to facilitate any claims, the guidelines say.

Germany’s public museums are mostly funded by and answerable to German states rather than the federal government. The agreement puts museums — and claimants seeking the return of objects from collections — on the same footing across the country.

"All people should have the opportunity to meet their rich material cultural heritage in their countries and communities of origin, to interact with it and pass it on to future generations,” the agreement said.

Former colonial powers in Europe are slowly coming to a view that they have no legal or moral right to own many objects displayed in the Continent’s archaeological or ethnological museums.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, which was one of the major colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, recently commissioned a report that noted that 90 percent to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is currently held by museums outside the continent. The report recommended steps for returning artifacts that were taken to France without the consent of their countries of origin.

Last week, the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands presented new rules for reclaiming artifacts looted under Dutch colonial rule and promised that it would investigate its own collection, rather than waiting for claims.

But many critics say that German museums still have much work to do.

Hannes Hartung, a lawyer specializing in art and artifacts who is also a lecturer at the University of Munich, said that the newly signed agreement was “soft law.” The pact is not legally binding and does not create any reliable legal framework, he added.

"These basic points will not make any legal claims in Germany easier,” he said in an interview.

A major hurdle for legal claims is the question of who can represent groups of peoples, tribes or families who owned the artifacts more than a century ago.

But Klaus Lederer, the Berlin senator responsible for culture, wrote in an email exchange that the agreement was an important first step in a “process of discussion,” which German states need to follow up. "It was important to me that colonial injustice is clearly named as such,” he said.

In agreeing to a common set of principles, the authorities also vowed to distinguish between art looted during the Nazi era — on which the country has made some progress since signing the Washington Principles two decades ago — and artifacts taken during colonial times — which until recently were mostly ignored.

Last year, Berlin’s state museums returned nine artifacts to indigenous groups in Alaska. The artifacts, which came from a burial site, were not taken from a German colony, but the return of the items signaled a shift in how museums were dealing with objects that were collected by European explorers at a time when it was common to take foreign artifacts without regard for their ownership.

The Humboldt Forum, a state-funded museum that is set to open this fall with large archaeological and ethnological collections, is at the center of the debate about restitution in Germany. It has drawn protests from activists who say the museum has not done enough to research the provenance of objects in its collection.

Berner Wolter, a spokesman for the museum, said the new guidelines would “change very little for us.”

"The Humboldt Forum has already followed these principles in its plans in recent years,” he said, adding that the agreement “represents a renewed call to pursue this topic even more intensively."

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/arts/design/germany-museums-restitution.html" id="927030bc-b795-3277-a2db-923edc4ecba6">The New York Times</a>.

BERLIN — The cultural authorities in Germany have agreed on a set of guidelines for the return of artifacts taken from the country’s former colonies.

Germany Sets Guidelines for Repatriating Colonial-Era Artifacts

<h1>NUREMBERG, Germany — After the last of the regular artworks, furniture and stamps were sold on a recent Saturday, Kathrin Weidler read a short statement absolving Weidler’s auction house of any moral responsibility for what came next.</h1>

Weidler, who is a director of the family-run business, then began the bidding for “Village on a Mountain Lake,” a run-of-the-mill watercolor, at 45,000 euros ($51,000). The picture seemed indistinguishable from thousands of watercolors sold at flea markets across Europe every week, except for the signature in the bottom right corner: “A. Hitler.”

In the last 10 years, the niche market for art by Hitler has grown, experts say, and this has led to an increase in the value of the paintings, drawings and watercolors supposedly created by the future dictator over a century ago. But many, if not most, of these works are likely not by Hitler. After years of letting such public auctions go unchecked, German prosecutors are starting to take notice.

Days before the auction in February, the district attorney’s office searched Weidler’s and confiscated 63 paintings: 26 scheduled for the sale, and another 37 apparently destined for future auctions. Antje Gabriels-Gorsolke, one of the prosecutors, said the art works were seized as part of an investigation into forgery and fraud.

And weeks before that, police interrupted a sale at the Kloss auction house in Berlin, where three paintings, also supposedly by Hitler, were on the block.

At Weidler’s in February, no one raised a paddle. Perhaps it was it was the presence of reporters in the room, the painting’s steep valuation, or the questions about authenticity that the raids had brought to the fore. The auctioneer demurely moved on to the next painting: “Mountain Landscape With Mountain Church and Haystacks,” also signed “A. Hitler.”

Hitler did most of his painting before World War I, after he was rejected from art school and before he volunteered for the German army. Once in power, he ordered the works to be collected, and he may have destroyed some of the more embarrassingly bad ones.

Beyond the moral question of buying poor art just because it was painted by a genocidal dictator, there is the problem of verifying whether Hitler actually made the works. So many fakes have been created and certified as real that no knows what the real Hitler paintings look like. And since they have no artistic value to speak of, there are few professional examiners willing to study them.

“It’s all part of a grubby gray-zone,” said Christian Fuhrmeister, an art historian at the Central Insitute for Art History, a state-funded research body.

“But I will say we get asked about it more frequently than in the past,” he said in an interview. Fuhrmeister said that all he and his colleagues can do is compare works with the few known Hitler paintings in the state archive of Bavaria to rule out the obvious forgeries.

The business of faking Hitler’s paintings dates back nearly to the first time he picked up a brush, said Bart Droog, a Dutch journalist who specializes in Hitler forgeries. By the time Hitler came into power in 1933, many fakes existed already, and both demand and supply grew over the years until, in 2014, a view of city hall in Munich, said to be painted by the dictator, was sold for $161,000, at Weidler’s auction house.

Gabriels-Gorsolke from the district attorney’s office said that prosecutors would investigate previous owners and sellers to see if fraud was committed. If fake, the pieces would then be permanently confiscated, but for now they sit in the police evidence locker.

With 63 works impounded and an estimated 100 already sold, Weidler’s has handled an eyebrow-raising number of them, especially given how few are likely to exist, said Sven Felix Kellerhoff, a historian and journalist for the newspaper Die Welt.

One of the confiscated works is a nude watercolor of Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, dated 1929, one of two versions of the same painting supposedly by Hitler. But both versions are almost certainly phonies.

And the other version illustrates how decades of imprecision and swindling have made it very difficult to sort out real Hitler paintings from knockoffs.

Marc-Oliver Boger, an expert in art forgery and collector of known fakes, said that version was made by Konrad Kujau, a convicted German forger who became famous in the 1980s after he admitted to falsifying diaries by Hitler that were published in the magazine Stern.

But the Kujau watercolor fooled people long enough that it made it into a 1983 catalog of Hitler’s works created by the American Billy F. Price. As well as faking the diaries, Kujau, who died in 2000, also faked art works in Hitler’s name, many of which made their way into the Price catalog, according to Boger.

To authenticate works in his catalog, Price had relied on the judgment of August Priesack, an art expert who was later discredited. Priesack had also authenticated the diaries (and “Village on a Mountain Lake,” the painting that went unsold at the Weidler’s auction, though that painting had not been confiscated by the authorities).

Unreliable as it is, the Price book is still used by many as the definitive catalog of Hitler’s art.

Weidler’s auction house did not respond to requests to comment for this article. But in 2016, Weidler, told a German radio station that the buyers of the works are not necessarily sympathetic to the Nazis. “There are many people who want to make an investment, and just want to own a part of history that’s really different,” she said.

Most buyers keep a low profile and many come from outside Germany, she added.

Tom Schimmeck, the radio program’s producer, said that interest in Hitler’s art likely has nothing to do with a societal shift to the right, or a rethinking of Hitler’s crimes. “My impression is it is people who have too much money and want something crazy from Europe,” he said in an interview.

Unlike the buyers, who crave privacy, Weidler’s and other auction houses need to advertise their wares in advance to attract bidders. This can lead to a bizarre relationship with the press, which can be a way to get the word out, but also brings unwelcome questions.

Both Nuremberg and Berlin police were alerted by Droog and his partner Jaap van den Born, both investigative journalists who have made it their mission to stop auctions of Hitler fakes by scouring auction catalogs and alerting local authorities before the sales. They provide police with detailed reports on the paintings, sometimes giving German authorities the crucial information to begin their own investigations.

The comment in the report by Droog and van den Born on “Village on a Mountain Lake” reads: “Yet again a stupid forgery; Hitler didn’t paint lake or mountainscapes.”

By the time the watercolor came up at Weidler’s, most of the audience of 25 or so seemed to be there to watch the spectacle, rather than to bid. Several members of the audience declined to answer when asked why they were there.

None of the five pieces on display that day were sold, but after the auction, a middle-aged man wearing a tailored suit and a hat entered the room and asked discreetly whether the bidding for the Hitler paintings was still going on.

Staff informed him that the auction was over, but that he could make arrangements to see the works in private on Monday.

A week later, the auction house confirmed that it had sold “Village on a Mountain Lake” for 30,000 euros in a private sale.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8a0aeb9a-5490-4bce-9204-68141f289bfe" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/arts/design/hitler-paintings-fake.html">The New York Times</a>.

Are these paintings really by Hitler? German authorities are investigating

Weidler, who is a director of the family-run business, then began the bidding for “Village on a Mountain Lake,” a run-of-the-mill watercolor, at 45,000 euros ($51,000).

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Christopher F. Schuetze

Articles written by the author

Germany Sets Guidelines for Repatriating Colonial-Era Artifacts

Are these paintings really by Hitler? German authorities are investigating