Commission for Art recovery
hungary illustration

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Female portrait (Lady with Marguerite)
ca. 1868-70



Gábor Kádár and Zoltán Vági, Self-financing Genocide book cover

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.”

CASES AND RECOVERY EXPERIENCE

Hungary

When Hitler came to power, the community of collectors in Hungary included families that had prospered under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Several had assimilated, converted from Judaism, received noble titles, and considered themselves both loyal subjects of the emperor and cultural cosmopolitans. Their extensive collections of old master paintings and works by the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who were their contemporaries were targets of looting in the last year of the war.

During Hitler’s first year as chancellor, Hungary formed a close alliance with his government. Anti-Jewish policies were followed in Hungary, by Hungarians. In1938, a new law restricted the role played by Jews in the Hungarian economy to 20%. The following year, that number was reduced to 6%, and Hungarian Jewish men from twenty to forty-eight were placed into forced labor. In the summer of 1941, Hungarian officials deported 17,000 Jews who were living in Hungary, and the following winter the Hungarian military and national police murdered 1,000 Hungarian Jews.

Hungary was an Axis power, but as they realized that their side could well lose the war, Hungary began to make approaches to the Allies, and Germany retaliated by invading its less-than-stalwart ally. Jews and those of Jewish ancestry had already been persecuted in Hungary, but now a huge effort to exterminate Hungarian Jewry through mass deportations began under Adolf Eichmann. All Jewish-owned shops were ordered closed, Jewish apartments were turned over to the authorities, Jewish property was appropriated, mass round-ups and deportations to death camps were carried out.

Looting of Jewish property in Hungary near the end of the war was carried out not by any single record-keeping Nazi agency but mostly by officials for personal gain. And when Soviet troops occupied Hungary after the armistice, the looting continued. After the war, Hungary remained under strong Soviet influence, and it was virtually impossible for a claimant who had survived the war and lived abroad to succeed either with the government museums or through the courts. Decades of hopelessness passed.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, some families attempted to negotiate returns. Isolated small successes were dwarfed by the number of frustrated claims caused by the intransigence of Hungarian authorities. Taking a distinctly different position on its own account, the government of Hungary has vigorously tried to negotiate the return of art now in Russia and has successfully pursued the recovery of a painting by Giorgio Vasari from the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal.