Restituting Nazi-looted art

In this event, two international experts trace the history of Nazi looting of art between 1933 and 1945 and the claims brought by Holocaust survivors and their descendants to recover what was taken from them.

The plunder of art in wartime is as old as war itself, from the Vikings and Crusaders to the Romans and the British Empire, and it continues today: dozens of museums and historic buildings have been looted in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion. What set the Nazi campaign apart was its sheer scale. Beginning when Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis seized or coerced the sale of roughly one fifth of all Western art then in existence, an estimated 650,000 works, in what has been called the greatest displacement of art in human history. Crucially, this was not collateral damage but official policy, a deliberate instrument of the regime’s genocidal and racist project, used to dispossess and dehumanise the Jewish people and strip them of their place in society.

The conference will examine the history of this looting, the limited efforts at restitution in the 1950s and 60s, the dramatic revival of interest after the 1998 Washington Principles, the ways works are now being reclaimed from museums and galleries, and the initiatives under way to help claimants.