Goals

The main goal of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project is to construct a comprehensive object-level database of Jewish-owned cultural assets plundered by the Nazis and their allies and collaborators from 1933 to 1945. The project will contribute to a better understanding of the history of looting agencies, the fate of individual objects, who the owners were and the commemoration of persecuted Jewish artists and their creative output. It will provide assistance to the families and heirs of art collectors, to museums, and to the art market, as well as offer best practices and provide educational material for the study of European Jewish life in the 20th century, the Holocaust, art history and provenance research on looted art. The project will also commemorate persecuted Jewish artists and explore their creative legacies.

The impetus for the JDCRP ultimately comes from the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets held in 1998 and the continuing desirability of such a comprehensive object-level registry or database. Only now as a result of the many projects that have been done or are currently under way in the field of provenance research plus the recent opening of relevant archives such as the records of postwar claims for cultural property has such an effort been made possible. The idea is not to replace or centralize the many good projects accomplished or currently under way by archives, museums, art history institutions, and others, but rather to compile the results of projects and make them accessible on the object level.

History

At a meeting held on May 4, 2016 under the auspices of La Direction des archives du Ministère des affaires étrangères et du développement international of France in cooperation with the Claims Conference and with the assistance of La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the participants agreed in principle on the desirability of working cooperatively towards such an object-level registry using the experience to date of the Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume. Created by the Claims Conference in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Bundesarchiv (The German Federal Archives), the Archives Diplomatiques/France Diplomatie (The Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development of the Republic of France), the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the Commission for Art Recovery (CAR) under the direction of Marc Masurovsky, the Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume demonstrates what can be accomplished by a network of institutions and experts to bring together scattered archival information to show what was plundered, from whom, by whom, and the fate of the objects.

Outcomes

  1. A web portal consisting of a database that permits through the use of various archival sources the comprehensive and precise documentation of cultural objects forcibly displaced and plundered during the Nazi era from the time of their spoliation to the present; and visual, narrative and educational components helping to disseminate the content of the database to academic and lay audiences.
  2. A network of governmental and heritage institutions: archives, museums, libraries, art history institutes that collect European documents closely cooperating on developing the database, disseminating best practices and promoting further research on the topic.

Sources

The database will be centered on looted objects. Core data is extracted from (but not limited to) the following types of documents:

  • inventories of seizures/confiscations
  • documents describing transfers of looted objects
  • inventories of looted objects at transfer points
  • inventories of looted objects discovered by Allied forces
  • inventories of objects catalogued at Allied deposits
  • inventories of objects repatriated to source countries
  • lists of objects restituted to victims
  • lists of objects submitted by victims for purposes of location, identification, recovery, and restitution
  • lists of looted and restituted objects compiled by governments
  • correspondence about all of the above
  • relevant secondary sources

Datasets

The datasets will highlight the following:

  • objects: what they were, who made/created them, where they were confiscated, from whom, by whom, where they went, their fate, whether they were restituted
  • victims: who they were, where they lived, their fate
  • perpetrators: who was responsible for the thefts, where they worked, their fate
  • recyclers: who profited from the thefts, who was involved in the sales/resales/exchanges of looted objects, their specific involvement in the mishandling of objects mentioned in the database
  • depots: locations where objects were stored in German-occupied territories of Western Europe, in Germany, in Austria, in the former Protectorate [Czech Republic]: what they were, when they opened, what objects went there, when they were closed/liberated by Allied and resistance forces.

Thematic and Geographic Scope

Although the primary focus of the database will be objects plundered from Jews, items plundered from other racial, religious, and political victims of the Nazis and their allies will be included. Plundered state owned collections are not the focus of the project at the moment.

The initial geographic focus of the project will be France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. To enable easier access to historical documents, the database itself will for the foreseeable future be located in the United States.