Crimes against Art: Forgery, Theft & Repatriation Issues: Holocaust-era Theft & Repatriation

Resources for research on art fakes & forgeries, art theft, art provenance, and cultural repatriation.

DVDs & Streaming Videos

To locate DVDs use the Library Catalog or browse the shelves in the library. Use the Guide to Streaming Videos to learn what is available at KU.  

Hitler’s Museum. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2009. This documentary relates the long and eventful journey of an exceptional masterpiece of European art - The Ghent Altar, created by van Eyck, which for the Belgian people represents a national shrine. 103 minutes. DVD

The Rape of Europa. [Venice, CA] : Menemsha Films, [2008], c2006. Interviews with eyewitnesses and historians and newsreel footage show how heroic Europeans, Russians, and Americans worked to save the art of Europe during World War II. 117 minutes. DVD

Man Fights Nazi Plunder, A National Geographic report of the battle between an important museum in Madrid and Claude Cassirer over ownership of a $20 million painting that Nazis seized from his grandmother.

Selected Art Museum Repatriation Projects

Metropolitan Museum of Art's Provenance Research Project has an emphasis on art work looted by Nazi's that may have been acquired by the museum.

National Gallery of Art World War II Provenance Research, Photos and history for eleven paintings in the collection that were looted during the war.

The J. Paul Getty Museum's Research on Museum Collection Provenance, 1933-45,  research on the provenance (history of ownership) of works in its collection during the period 1933 to 1945, that is, from the rise to power of the Nazi party to its defeat.

Books on Holocause-era Theft

Web Information

International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property links researchers to archival materials consisting of descriptions of records and, in many cases, digital images of the records that relate to cultural property that was stolen, looted, seized, forcibly sold, or otherwise lost during the Nazi-era. Cultural property documented in these records covers a broad range from artworks to books and libraries, religious objects, antiquities, archival documents, carvings, silver and more.

Looted Valuables: Holocause Assets Collection, Part of the Holocaust website posted by the National Archives and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal Project provides a searchable registry of objects in U.S. museum collections that changed hands in Continental Europe during the Nazi era (1933-1945).

Lost Art Internet Database The Lost Art Database is run by the Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg, Germany’s central office for the documentation of lost cultural property. It was set up jointly by the Government and the Länder of the Federal Republic of Germany and registers cultural objects which as a result of persecution under the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War were relocated, moved or seized, especially from Jewish owners.