Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow, Verlorene Bilder/Verlorene Leben (Lost Pictures/Lost Lives)
Gunnar Schnabel and Monika Tatzkow, Nazi Looted Art, Handbuch, Kunstrestitution weltweit (Handbook, Worldwide Art Restitution)
Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, Self-financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews
A concise account of the Holocaust in Hungary and the premeditated theft of art and other property of the Jewish community by the Hungarian State with the help of a very small German SS force under Adolf Eichmann appears in Self-Financing Genocide: The Gold Train - The Becher Case and The Wealth of Hungarian Jews, by Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági (Central European University Press, 2004).
The authors state:
“…. [T]here is good reason to believe that while for Nazi Germany the primary objective was the physical extermination of the Jews, the looting of the victims being an organic but only secondary consequence of German policy, in Hungary, the desire to expropriate their wealth had a decisive impact on the fate of the Jews in 1944.”
“[I]n the space of 56 days the Hungarian authorities deported 437,402 Hungarian Jews on 147 trains (with the exception of 15,000 people) all Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
“Like the deportations ... the expropriation of the wealth of Jews was the result of concerted action on the part of a nearly 200,000 strong Hungarian public administration, gendarmerie, police and a German security apparatus under SS leadership.”
“By the spring of 1945 the 250,000 to 300,000 Jewish survivors … lost virtually everything, so in effect, economic annihilation was even more successful than the physical liquidation that accompanied it.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books published about the looting of art in Europe during World War II and the process of recovering those works started as a small number of eyewitness reports in the war’s aftermath. During the 1990s, a resurgence of interest in every aspect of the Holocaust and Nazi looting of assets produced a continuous stream of research and publications about the history of Nazi-looted art.
Arcade, the online catalog of three art libraries in New York City (Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art), contains a WWII provenance bibliography, which lists relevant resources from the collections of the three libraries. Arcade's WWII Provenance Bibliography is regularly updated and immensely useful. At left, we provide a link to the WWII Provenance Bibliography. You will find resources in several languages, and even if you do not have direct access to these three libraries, the precise references will let you know what is available and can help you find what you need.
Nancy H. Yeide, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, The Hermann Goering Collection