The Lost Masters

"Absolutely, and that is dealt with in the next book I have selected, The Lost Masters by Peter Harclerode. It tells the story of art looting in the 20th century during war. Although it happened during World War I, it really became systematic in World War II. The Nazis had the ERR [ Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete – the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories], a unit dedicated solely to the theft of art works. And in the years following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the Red Army was responsible for looting on a scale at least equal to that of the Germans. But we tend to skim over that because ostensibly the Russians were on our side. The Red Army considered art theft a form of reparation and stole on an absolutely tremendous scale. From Berlin through the eastern part of the former Nazi-occupied territories they stole everything they could get their hands on. But even American and British soldiers were looting, although at no point on such a systematic basis. The Lost Masters talks about what was taken, how the thefts were rationalised on the part of the perpetrators, which is very interesting, and what the repercussions were. It’s really the best book on the subject in terms of its combination of in-depth scholarship and dramatic narrative. Yes. This is a process that begins a long way back. Napoleon, for instance, said that if ancient Rome – the glorious civilisation of Rome – found it OK to steal art from its conquered peoples, then he could do it. And Hitler said, “Well if Rome and Napoleon did it, then I can do it too.” So there’s this historical rationalisation process. The Red Army believed that the objects it was taking were compensation for the millions of deaths it had suffered. Most of those objects were absorbed into museums in what became the Soviet Union. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter However, in recent years there have been some very high-profile repatriations. This is really thanks to the Internet age. The Internet now tells us which art works are where at any given moment. Before that you might have had to travel to a museum to find out what was in their collection – and it might not even be on display – but now it’s often online. As a result, a number of lawsuits have been brought, particularly by the descendants of Jewish art collectors, to recover works taken by the Nazis and the Russians. For instance, the descendants of Kasimir Malevich brought a lawsuit against the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to recover literally dozens of Malevich paintings that had been appropriated by Russia when Malevich was exiled. Literally scores of these sorts of cases are cropping up, thanks to the fact that people can actually locate the art. But there still isn’t a sense that there is a moral obligation to return objects, as, for example, with Italy returning to Ethiopia an obelisk that Mussolini looted. I think the Russians would still say that the millions of lives they lost entitle them to keep the spoils of the defeated party, although they don’t split hairs when the objects they stole were, in fact, first stolen by the Nazis."