Press
Feb 2, 2012Netherlands Returns Two Paintings Looted by Hermann Goering to Jewish HeirBloomberg
Aug 31, 2009Sleuthing for Looted PaintingsThe Washington Times
Aug 3, 2009Goering Hoards Nudes, Jingles Emeralds in Catalog of Looted Art Bloomberg.com
Apr 14, 2009Goering's ArtNew Haven Advocate
Mar 23, 2009Goering's preyFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Mar 23, 2009A conversation with Nancy YeideFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Feb 1, 2009Goering's lost artThe Independent
Jan 1, 2009A Legacy of PlunderARTnews

February 2, 2012

Netherlands Returns Two Paintings Looted by Hermann Goering to Jewish Heir

The Dutch government said today it will return two paintings that were looted more than 70 years ago by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering for his country estate to the descendants of a Jewish antiques dealer in Paris.

Edouard Leon Jonas shipped the contents of his Paris antiques store to Bordeaux for safekeeping after the 1940 Nazi invasion. One of Goering’s art advisers seized them and sent them to Germany. Among them were an anonymous 16th-century oil- on-wood “Portrait of a Man With a Dog,” and Theobald Michau’s 18th-century “Landscape With Cattle in a Shallow River.”

The Dutch Restitutions Committee, which advises the government on Nazi-era art claims, recommended the paintings be returned to Jonas’s heirs, whom it didn’t name. It said the heirs’ title to the paintings is “proved with a high degree of probability” and “possession of them was lost involuntarily due to circumstances directly related to the Nazi regime.”

Goering stashed as many as 1,800 artworks at Carinhall, his country home outside Berlin, many of them stolen from French Jewish families. About 80 percent of his loot — most of which was safely evacuated before his home was bombed — has since been traced and returned to the rightful owners, according to Nancy Yeide, author of a comprehensive catalog of Goering’s art.

He deluded himself that he wasn’t stealing. “During a war, everybody loots a little bit,” he said in an interview with a psychiatrist in Nuremberg, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity after the war and committed suicide before he was to be executed. “None of my so-called looting was illegal.”

Bloomberg - Netherlands Returns Two Paintings Looted by Hermann Goering to Jewish Heir

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