Google – AFP, Deborah Cole (AFP), 13 November 2013
 |
Handout
photos made available on November 12, 2013 on the German
Federal official
website www.lostart.de shows 25 paintings believed looted
during the Nazi era
(Lostart.de/Staatsanwaltschaft Au/AFP, Melder)
|
Berlin —
Germany moved Wednesday to answer further criticism of its handling of a vast
trove of Nazi-looted art by pledging to include Jewish advocates in a search
for rightful owners and fix a website cataloguing the works.
Chancellor
Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said the German government was in
talks with the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) to link up their art provenance
experts with a task force appointed Monday to comb through the more than 1,400
works discovered in a Munich flat.
He also
announced improvements to an official government website www.lostart.de which
this week posted details on an initial lot of 25 works in the stash by the
likes of Matisse, Delacroix and Rodin after it crashed repeatedly.
"We
have brought great momentum to this process by forming the task force,"
Seibert insisted when asked by reporters about complaints Germany had been too
slow and secretive in its handling of the spectacular case.
 |
The block
of flats in Munich's Schwabing
district, where art masterpieces believed
\stolen
by the Nazis were discovered,
pictured on November 4, 2013 (AFP/File,
Christof
Stache)
|
Seibert
added that beyond the "at least six" art historians appointed to the
new task force, Germany would turn to experts abroad to make the hunt for the
works' true owners more efficient and fair.
"We
are for example in very close consultations with the Jewish Claims Conference.
They also have expertise in this area," he said, adding that the
parameters of the cooperation were still being hammered out.
"We
are working, fully aware of the responsibility that Germany has, also in the
context of art looted in connection with National Socialist (Nazi)
crimes."
'I'll be
back'
After a
week of uproar over the revelation that German customs police had nearly two
years ago seized hundreds of long-lost works stashed for decades in the home of
elderly recluse Cornelius Gurlitt, the government took a few steps toward
transparency.
Jewish
groups welcomed the measures but urged more decisive action.
The JCC, a
US-based Holocaust restitution organisation, called Tuesday for seats on the
task force and for all the works found in the Munich flat to be placed on the
government website by the year's end.
Investigators
believe that of the entire collection found professionally stored in Gurlitt's
trash-strewn flat, around 590 works may have been stolen from Jewish owners or
bought from them under duress.
About 380
pieces are believed to have been seized from museums amid a crackdown under
Adolf Hitler on avant-garde, or so-called "degenerate", art.
Gurlitt is
the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a powerful art dealer commissioned by the Nazis
with selling confiscated, looted and extorted works in exchange for hard
currency.
Hildebrand
Gurlitt was also part of a team collecting works for a Fuehrermuseum planned by
Hitler in the Austrian city of Linz that never was built.
His son,
depicted in media reports as an eccentric loner, is officially under
investigation for tax evasion and misappropriation of assets.
However he
is not in custody and prosecutors last week admitted they were unsure of his
whereabouts.
French
magazine Paris Match spotted him in Munich last week and published a series of
photos of an elegantly dressed, white-haired man doing his grocery shopping.
A reporter
for Munich daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung approached him Tuesday outside the
apartment where the priceless hoard was found and saw him getting into a taxi
with a large suitcase on wheels.
"Don't
worry, I'll be back," he said.
Meanwhile
police in the southwestern city of Munich, along with a team of art experts,
have been examining another 22 paintings handed over to them by the
brother-in-law of Cornelius Gurlitt, to determine whether there is a link with
the Munich stash.
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