[MSN] Descendants of Nazi doctor lose fight over compensation for looted art.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Descendants of Nazi doctor lose fight over compensation for looted art
Roger Boyes in Berlin
December 19, 2006

Relatives of a gynaecologist who was committed to Hitler’s Master Race have been refused compensation for valuable artworks confiscated by Soviet soldiers after the war. 
The ruling, by a top administrative court in Leipzig, deals a blow to the offspring of thousands of Nazis who believe the time has come to reclaim some of the property taken by the Soviets. It has raised the question: what rights are enjoyed by the children of Nazis? 

Lawyers representing the family of Gustav Schuster — whose treasures included paintings by Max Liebermann, the Impressionist, Adrian Ludwig Richter, the Romantic and Max Klinger, the Symbolist — had advanced a bizarre argument in court. Dr Schuster was head of the Chemnitz women’s clinic during the war and a senior member of the National Socialist Doctors’ Association. But, said the legal team, he was only one of 14,427 Germans in leading Nazi posts at the local level; he could, therefore, be held responsible for only 0.006 per cent of Nazi crimes. 

Under a 1994 German law property cannot be restored to Nazis who had “extensively” served the regime or who were suspected of committing serious crimes. 
 
The court ruled that Dr Schuster was not an insignificant cog in the Nazi wheel. He had spread National Socialist ideology and so his relatives had no claim on the €500,000 (£335,000) worth of artwork. The German Government was plainly relieved. If the ruling had gone the other way, it would have opened the floodgates for massive compensation claims from Nazi relatives who had had goods confiscated by the Red Army. That would have been costly — some €6 billion has been set aside for possible compensation payments — and profoundly embarrassing. 

More conventional restitution procedures in Germany involve Jewish families reclaiming heirlooms seized by the Nazis. To hand out cash to the Nazis’ relatives, even if they were blameless, would have blurred the difference between victims and criminals and sparked an international outcry. Hermann Josef Rodenbach, of the Finance Ministry, said: “We are aware of a few thousand cases. Each case would require a deep exploration of the individual involvement of the person who claims to have lost his property.” 

Dr Schuster died in a Soviet prison camp in communist East Germany in 1950. His family lawyers had argued that he was never anything but a minor official at a time when Nazi party membership was compulsory for anyone in a senior professional position. But correspondence discovered by the court showed that he had demanded the forced removal of 25 handicapped people from a clinic to make room for German women wanting to give birth. In one letter he described the handicapped as “idiots and burdensome people”. 

Other documents show that he took part in decisions to forcibly sterilise women and that he made speeches on behalf of the Nazis. 

The origin of Dr Schuster’s paintings — many of them by Jewish artists — is unclear. Their present whereabouts is also a mystery. During the war the doctor had most of the paintings packed into wooden crates and hidden in a mineshaft. The assumption is that they fell into Soviet hands and then disappeared into museums or private collections. 

Courts have had to acknowledge that the child of a Nazi should be allowed equal rights to the child of a non-Nazi. In October, the son of a Nazi who had been a senior accountant was allowed to claim compensation for two houses confiscated by the Red Army. The reasoning was that his father had been only an “honorary” member of the Nazi party. 

However, after the ruling it emerged that the apparently blameless accountant had taken part in the hanging of a German Army deserter.

400 The number of works of art Berlin’s state museum lost during Second World War  
 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/