By Carolyn Yeager
The World Jewry network presses on with its goal to get the most recent find of "lost art" into the hands of Jews by playing the holocaust card. They're hitting on all cylinders now: Brute-force Nazi looting from helpless Jewish victims forced to flee for their lives while relatives who didn't get away were "gassed" in Auschwitz. For Jews, the melodrama never goes too far.
One of the most blatant propaganda pieces was, not surprisingly, found in the Daily Mail Online, with the extra long title: "Revealed: The oddball who hid £1 bn of art in his squalid flat ... and the extraordinary story of how his father, who stole paintings for the Nazis, conned Allied investigators" by Guy Walters (right, in 2010), who has written semi-debunking editorials about fraudsters like Simon Wiesenthal and Denis Avey (also in the Daily Mail).
We are expected to believe that Walters researched the Gurlitts' history and is "revealing" important findings, but in actuality Walters is dealing in pure speculation. When it comes to his conclusions, what he and the Daily Mail are putting out is not as clear-cut as they want it to appear. They want "Good Guys vs. Bad Guys" so Gurlitt is presented as a one-quarter Jew gone bad, who betrayed his own "people" by working with "the Nazis."
Quote: "In his interrogation by Dwight McKay, Gurlitt denied he had done any such thing — but there is no doubt he was lying. This was a man who was willing to rip off Jews in his home country, so why such scruples for the Jews of occupied France?"
Several time Walters has used variations of "there is no doubt," which is used when there is no evidence to present. In fact, there is doubt until something is reasonably proven! What we see at work here, though, is the Judaic Rule that a Jew never cheats other Jews. Also, that all art that has been lost somehow belongs only to Jews. It's interesting to consider the great Jewish art collections that were acquired during the last two centuries, and how they came into being. These super-wealthy men are never investigated as to how or why they acquired their vast collections (much superior to that of Gurlitt's), but only praised as great philanthropists and patrons of the arts.
Other examples of "no doubt" used by Walters as a crutch:
" ... there is no doubt he profited from works sold for knock-down prices by Jews hoping to obtain exit visas and flee abroad." (This is not known and he denied it)
"In his interrogation by Dwight McKay, Gurlitt denied he had done any such thing — but there is no doubt he was lying."
"And there can also be no doubt that as well as buying paintings for Linz, Gurlitt was assembling a huge private collection of modern art."
"Many of the works may legally belong to Gurlitt, but morally there can be no doubt they belong to others."
In all these instances, no real evidence is mentioned that supports what Walters is saying - it is merely supposition. That's why he uses the cheap and sleazy "no doubt."
A couple of typical British press put-downs that are included in the article should be mentioned in order to give you more of the flavor of this article:
"After he had seized power, Hitler — perhaps motivated by his own failure as a painter — decided to persecute the world of modern art, which he regarded as being hostile to the nationalist and Aryan goals of Nazism." (Well, the last part is true.)
"(The degenerate art exhibition was) Staged on the authority of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and assembled in just three weeks by one of his flunkeys, Adolf Ziegler ..."
The Melodrama get ramped up
Now being adding to the mix is the cry that the current German governing powers of the puppet Federal Republic has tried to withhold and delay the "restitution" of Jewish property to the heirs of the original owners. A Jewish group accused Germany on Monday of "moral complicity in concealment of stolen paintings," it was reported in the Daily Mail.
The latest report at the Wall Street Journal features the stories of four such Jewish heirs and their supposedly slam-dunk cases that some of the art found belongs to them.
Martha Hinrichsen, retired 65-year old from Southbury, Conn. claims one of the pictures now displayed belonged to her Jewish grandfather. The watercolor is by Otto Dix, titled "Woman in the Theater Box" (above).
Her family successfully reclaimed their ornate, three-story home in Leipzig, along with their music-publishing business, after the war, but so far the art said to belong to Henri Hinrichsen had not been found.
She is also interested in the 19th Century drawing by Carl Spizweg. Note that the size of these works has not been given. It makes a difference - some are quite small, mere sketches.
Michel David-Weill, former chairman of the investment bank Lazar, says the graphic print of Padua by Canaletto (above) belonged to his grandfather, Paris art dealer David David-Weill.
Most of his grandfather's 3,000 works were returned to the family after the war, but does it not seem likely that he actually sold all this art, even if under duress, at a time when nothing was very secure for anyone and the art was worth much less? There is nothing said about his grandfather meeting a bad end.
The grandson survived the entire war living in Paris.
Then there was the "prominent Jewish collector" Ismar Littmann who was ruined financially under the Nazis -- well, I wonder why? He committed suicide in 1934, according to Friederike Schwelle. Most of the artworks he owned were "burned" or seized by banks in what was then Breslau.
Of the 25 artworks made public so far, 13 were traced to Fritz Salo Glaser, a Jewish lawyer from Dresden who "was forced to liquidate his modern art collection and lost other works to Nazi seizures," Ms. Schwelle said.
Glaser was supposedly "saved" from being deported to Theresienstadt after the Allied raids on Dresden in 1945, but didn't reclaim much of his collection after the war. He was probably too glad just to still be alive after Dresden!
But his daughter-in-law is interested and has a lawyer looking into what could potentially be 181 unframed artworks that Glaser "liquidated" (which means he sold them).
The road to restitution will be arduous, say German legal minds
But not if the Americans and Jews get their way!
A day after German officials vowed to determine the provenance of artwork discovered in a Nazi-era trove in Munich, a chorus of art and legal experts cautioned it may be impossible to identify the origins of many of the roughly 1,400 works, says a Nov. 12 report in the Wall Street Journal. This is particularly the case because so many of the artworks are drawings on paper. Paintings, which are easier to identify, are in the minority.
Imke Gielen, a lawyer at Von Trott zu Solz Lammek in Berlin. said: Establishing provenance is essential for any families to have even the slightest chance at having works from the Gurlitt collection returned to them.
First, claimants must prove ownership of the work in January 1933 when the Nazis took power. At the same time, any sale of work by a Jew after 1933 is considered in Germany to be a sale under duress. (I wonder if any other regime in history has inspired such a law?) The only exception for this is if the current owners can prove they paid a fair-market price and the purchase wasn't influenced by the Nazis, Ms. Gielen said. (I doubt that anything after 1933 can be proved to not be influenced by the Nazis! So that's a real loophole.)
But then again, the statute of limitations expired decades ago, so there is no legal basis for returning anything.
"The question now is whether the Gurlitt case will force the German government to change the policy and law on looted art," said Clarence Epstein, the art historian leading the Max Stern Art Restitution Project at Concordia University.
I think we can be sure the German authorities will be willing to do whatever is necessary to satisfy Jewish demands, even changing their laws. Merkel's own government is pledged to give Jews special treatment and consideration in all things.
The term "Jewish Victims" is much in evidence
In an interview published Tuesday on Spiegel Online, the German representative for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (a German against Germany!) said the group was requesting a place on the task force. "It's self-evident that Jewish victims should be represented on such a task force," said Rüdiger Mahlo, the representative, adding that it was "incomprehensible" that all the trove's works hadn't been published.
U.S. officials are also "disappointed that Germany only disclosed the details of a fraction of the works and that some of those listed had already been presented at a news conference last week."
Clearly, the Augsberg prosecutor's office is being deluged with phone calls and pressure from lawyers and estate managers to provide more transparency "right away." Just what Herr Nemetz wanted to avoid has come upon him ... in spades.
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