The Fate of Jewish Art Collections in WWII: 20 Looted Families

The Nazi regime systematically plundered hundreds of Jewish-owned art collections throughout Europe. In the 1940s, members of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Dienststelle Mühlmann, and other Nazi agencies seized thousands of works of art belonging to the most prominent Jewish families in the newly occupied countries. Some paintings, sculptures, and precious objects went to German museums and art dealers. Others were added to the personal collections of Nazi high officials, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. After the war, the Allies recovered a considerable portion of Nazi-looted art. However, thousands of items have never been found.

Here are the stories of 20 families whose art collections were looted during World War II.

In April 1943, a group of three men abducted Henry Schloss and his wife in the small French village of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Henry was one of the sons of Adolphe Schloss, a renowned Jewish art collector. In 1939, the family had hidden their works of art in a bank vault in Laguenne, a village in the Unoccupied Zone.

During his life, Adolph Schloss had amassed a remarkable collection of over 300 paintings, mostly by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, including Brugel, Rembrandt, and Van der Heyden. German art historian Hans Posse, then head of the Sonderauftrag Linz (a never-realized project for the creation of a Führermuseum in Hitler’s Austrian hometown), kept track of the alleged hiding places of the Schloss Collection, hoping to secure it for Adolf Hitler, a known admirer of the old northern masters.

Darquier de Pellepoix, the director of the General Commission of Jewish Affairs of Vichy, was also interested in the collection and ordered his agents to locate its hiding place. When the French finally found Adolphe Schloss’ son in 1943, a fierce competition between the Vichy government and the Nazi authorities ensued over the fate of the works of art. In the end, the Louvre Museum managed to preempt 49 items. The majority of the collection, however, went to the Hitler Museum Project. Stored in the Führerbau in Munich, the objects were stolen by a group of locals in April 1945. After World War II, the Schloss family recovered only a portion of their pre-war collection.

In July 1941, 130 boxes of items from the extensive David-Weill collection arrived at Jeu de Paume, a museum in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris that the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was using to process Nazi-looted art, taken primarily from French families. The ERR men had seized the crates from the Château de Sources, where Jacques Jaujard, the director of the French National Museums, had stored the treasures of the Louvre and other state-owned museums to safeguard them from the German authorities.

Jacques Jaujard’s protests against the looting went unheard. The ERR rejected his claims on the grounds that the owner of the works of art was Jewish. David David-Weill, a French-American Jewish banker, had amassed an impressive collection of paintings, Chinese bronzes, and Islamic ceramics; and the Nazis wanted it for themselves.

In 1945, the Allies found the 130 boxes in a hidden vault at Neuschwanstein Castle, Ludwig II’s Wagnerian-themed castle in the Bavarian Alps, where the Nazi regime relocated many of the Jewish-owned collections plundered during the war. In Autumn 1945, the American Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA, known colloquially as the Monuments Men) organization brought the crates to its depot in Munich, where David-Weill’s curator immediately identified them.

3. The Rothschild Dynasty

Founded by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the Rothschilds became a leading banking family in Europe. After opening branches in various capitals of the continent, the dynasty transformed its business into an influential multinational enterprise. Additionally, the Rotschilds amassed extensive art collections.

When the German forces entered Vienna, the Rothschild family was one of the first targets of the Nazi authorities’ plundering activities. “We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement,” recounted American journalist William L. Shirer, who witnessed the looting at the Rothschild residence in Vienna.

Among the countless works of art, Judaica, books, and furniture found in the family’s numerous properties across German-occupied Europe, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering were especially interested in a particular painting owned by the dynasty: Vermeer’s Astronomer. In blatant disregard of the 1907 Hague Convention, Adolf Hitler instructed his agents to relocate the picture to Germany. After the war, the Allies found it in the salt mine of Altaussee.

In the summer of 1940, German authorities began plundering the collections of the most renowned Jewish art dealers in Paris. Among the first Nazi-looted art was the collection of modern art amassed by Paul Rosenberg, the dealer of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque.

The occupation forces found the location of Rosenberg’s impressive collection with the help of two French informants, a man known as “Count Lestang” and the art dealer Yves Perdoux. After negotiating with the Nazi officials, the two men agreed to receive some paintings as a commission for their role in the transaction. The pictures were eventually brought to Jeu de Paume, where Alfred Rosenberg (the leader of the ERR and no relation to the Jewish family Rosenberg) and his men proceeded to inventory them. The ERR subsequently plundered Paul Rosenberg’s Paris home and office.

In August 1945, a group of Allied soldiers seized a train containing a large portion of the Nazi-looted art from Jeu de Paume, including paintings from the Rosenberg collection. By complete chance, their commanding officer was Alexander Rosenberg, son of Paul Rosenberg. After the war, the family embarked on the arduous task of retrieving their works of art, uncovering a complex web of shady dealings within the European art world during the conflict.

5. The Seligmann Collection

During one of his frequent visits to Jeu de Paume, Hermann Goering chose various paintings and other valuable items to add to his personal collection at Carinhall. Among the objects that piqued the Reichmarshall’s interest were tapestries and stained glass windows from the Seligmann collection.

The Seligmanns made their debut in the art world at the turn of the 20th century when Jacques Seligmann opened his first gallery in central Paris. Over the following years, he became a leading dealer, playing a decisive role in introducing European and American collectors to contemporary art. Among the company’s clients were the French branch of the Rothschild dynasty and American financier J.P. Morgan.

After the occupation of France, the Vichy government confiscated the Seligmanns’ house, gallery, private collections, and holdings. The objects were then sold at a public auction.

While the Nazi regime despised contemporary art, labeling it as “degenerate,” Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking officials developed the habit of exchanging modern paintings for ideologically approved works of art, as they knew modern art sold for high prices on the international market. In 1941, for example, Goering offered German dealer Gustav Rochlitz several “degenerate” paintings as payment for an alleged Titian. Among the items Rochlitz selected were works by Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne plundered from the Adolphe Kann collection.

A childhood friend of Marcel Proust, Alphonse Kann was a prominent member of the Parisian elite. Admired for his refined taste, he collected paintings by Dutch, Italian, and French masters like Cimabue, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, and Pollaiuolo. Kann also admired modern art, amassing more than 200 paintings by Picasso, Paul Klee, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others.

When he fled to London in 1938, he left his art treasures in Paris, where they were looted by the German occupying forces. The Nazi-looted art was then relocated to Jeu de Paume. Other items were sold at auctions. After the war, only a fraction of the collection was restituted to the Kann family.

7. The Rathenau Family

In 1945, thousands of plundered works of art were discovered in the Austrian salt mine of Altaussee. Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1669) was among the masterpieces recovered, a painting previously belonging to Ernst and Ellen Rathenau. In 1925, the Jewish German couple had loaned the picture, alongside the other objects of their collection, to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

As the Nazis advanced through Western Europe, the Rathenaus managed to find refuge in the United States. Their collection, however, remained in the Netherlands. After the German occupation, the Dienststelle Mühlmann, a special agency founded by Austrian art historian Kajetan Mühlmann, confiscated the Jewish couple’s objects.

At the end of the conflict, the Rathenau family recovered the Nazi-looted art and sold it to the Mauritshuis Museum.

Before the war, David Goldmann, who came from a Moravian Jewish family, had amassed miniatures, paintings, porcelains, and valuable furniture. In 1938, Goldmann and his family left Vienna to find refuge in Prague. Then, in 1940, they arrived in New York.

Meanwhile, in December 1938, Heinrich Himmler ordered the confiscation of the Goldmann collection, claiming that “while in the land of Austria the Jew David Goldmann had conducted activities inimical [to] the Volk and the state.” The Dorotheum, Vienna’s largest auction house, evaluated and sold the objects found in the Goldmann house. The most precious items, however, remained in Vienna.

While the family could never recover the possessions auctioned on the open market, they successfully reclaimed the objects stored in Vienna during the war.

9. The Levy-Benzion Collection

Born in Alexandria in 1873, Moïse Levy-Benzion, a department store owner, collected books, oriental art, carpets, and Egyptian antiquities. His most precious items included fragments of the tombs of Nebamun, an ancient Egyptian scribe. Moïse also collected impressionist artworks and medieval sculptures.

During the war, the Levy-Benzion collection was plundered by the ERR, which brought the items found in Moïse’s home to Jeu de Paume. Moïse Levy-Benzion died in 1943 while detained by the Nazi authorities.

10. The Goudstikker Collection

In May 1940, Jacques Goudstikker, a renowned Dutch art dealer, fell to his death while walking at night on the deck of the ship SS Bodengraven. Despite obtaining travel visas to the United States, Goudstikker and his wife had previously opted to remain in the Netherlands. Their visas expired on the same day the German forces invaded their country of residence. While their attempt to renew them failed, the couple boarded a ship sailing to South America.

After the art dealer’s death, a couple of his employees cleverly managed to be appointed as trustees. Soon afterwards, they sold Goudstikker’s gallery, his lavish Castle Nyenrode, and the rest of his estate to German businessman Alois Miedl. About 600 paintings went to Hermann Goering.

After the war, Goudstikker’s widow unsuccessfully tried to recover the Nazi-looted art. In 1990, following a critical overview of the restitution policy of the postwar Dutch government, Goudstikker’s heirs renewed their claims. In 2006, they finally recovered about 200 items.

Before his death in August 1939, Fritz Mannheimer, an art enthusiast and the head of the Dutch office of the Mendelssohn Bank, had amassed an impressive collection of about 300 works of art. Following the invasion of the Netherlands, various Nazi agencies and dealers started a fierce competition to secure the ownership of Mannheimer’s objects. The fact that Mannheimer had collected numerous items of Germanic culture may explain the mad scramble of the Nazi officials. To make matters more complicated, the collection was involved in the bankruptcy of the Mendelssohn Bank.

During the remaining war years, Alois Miedl, Kajetan Mühlmann, and Hans Posse coveted the Mannheimer estate, hoping to add the items to the art collections of their superiors or profit from the sale. In 1944, as the Allies advanced to the Netherlands, Mühlmann managed to board the items he bought through his agency on a train to Germany.

After the war, the Dutch state rejected Mrs. Mannheimer’s claims on the collection, declaring that it was sold to cover the deceased’s debts to Dutch citizens. In the end, the most valuable items went to the Rijksmuseum.

12. The Lindon Collection

Alfred Lindon, an expert in precious stones, filled his Parisian apartment with paintings by Renoir, Degas, Manet, and Alfred Sisley. Born Abner Lindenbaum in Poland, Lindon married Fernande Citroën, sister of the founder of the automaker Citroën.

Upon leaving a German-occupied Paris, the Lindons stored their collection in a vault at the Chase Manhattan Bank. However, the ERR seized the paintings and brought them to Jeu de Paume. One of Alfred’s paintings, La rue Montorgueil, à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878 by Claude Monet, subsequently went to Hermann Goering. The Reichsmarshall also exchanged a picture by Vincent van Gogh from the Lindon Collection with a work by one of his beloved old masters.

In 2005, after a long legal battle, Maria Altmann, heir of Ferdinand Bloch, managed to obtain the restitution of several paintings by Gustav Klimt that the Nazi authorities had plundered from her family. Among the returned pictures was Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also known as the Woman in Gold), one of several portraits of Ferdinand’s wife painted by Klimt.

In 1939, the Nazi authorities raided Jungfern-Breschan Castle, the Bloch-Bauer residence near Prague, seizing all its contents. Later, they also confiscated the Jewish family’s assets in Vienna. Before the outbreak of World War II, Ferdinand and Adele were prominent members of the Austrian capital’s elite. As art enthusiasts, they established close relationships with various artists, especially with painter Gustav Klimt. The couple also collected tapestries and Viennese porcelain.

After the war, Ferdinand Bloch tried to recover his collection. However, he died before settling his restitution claims. After his death, the remaining family members carried out his legal battle with the Austrian state. In 2015, Maria Altmann’s fight for her family’s Nazi-looted art was told in the movie Woman in Gold.

14. The Lederers

Like the Bloch-Bauer family, the Lederers were prominent patrons of the art in prewar Vienna. August Lederer commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint portraits of his wife, Serena, and other family members. The Lederer couple also had a close connection with artist Egon Schiele, who gave their son, Erich, art lessons.

After the Anschluss, the Lederers lost their business empire due to “Aryanization,” a racist process that systematically stripped Jews from their assets. The Nazi authorities also plundered the extensive art collection. Hans Posse earmarked some artworks for Adolf Hitler’s never-realized Linz museum.

After the war, Erich Lederer, the son of August and Serena, obtained the restitution of a portion of his parents’ collection. However, the Austrian government prevented him from relocating the items considered culturally significant for the state to his residence in Geneva.

Cabaret performer and director Franz Friederich “Fritz” Grünbaum shared his father’s passion for art. During his life, he built an ample collection of over 400 items, including several paintings by Australian expressionist artist Egon Schiele. As the National Socialist movement began spreading in Germany and Austria, Grünbaum, who was known for his sharp wit, did not hesitate to ridicule the Nazi supporters from the stage.

After the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, Grünbaum and his wife unsuccessfully tried to seek refuge abroad. In 1938, the comedian was deported to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where he died three years later. When the Nazi authorities forced all Jews to register their assets, his wife Elizabeth, who held power of attorney over her husband’s property, was forced to comply. As a result, Grünbaum’s art collection was seized and inventoried. Elizabeth died in 1942 at Maly Trostenets, a concentration camp in the outskirts of Minsk.

In 2022 and 2023, Grünbaum’s heirs managed to recover a portion of the Nazi-looted art. “We reject the notion that a person who signs a power of attorney in a death camp can be said to have executed the document voluntarily,” declared the New York Court of Appeals, ruling in favor of the Grünbaum family.

16. The Gutmann Collection

After the German invasion of the Netherlands, Friedrich and Louise Gutmann unsuccessfully tried to flee the country. Arrested in 1943, Friedrich died at Theresienstadt concentration camp a year later. His wife was murdered at Auschwitz in the same year.

Before the war, the Gutmanns had amassed pictures from the Old Masters and various impressionist artists. They also owned a renowned silverware collection. In the 1940s, despite their conversion from Judaism, Friedrich and Louise were victims of Nazi anti-semitic laws. Before their death, German art dealers Karl Haberstock and Julius Böhler forced them to sell several items. Other objects were looted by the ERR.

Simon Goodman, the couple’s grandson, described the family’s efforts to reclaim the collection in his 2015 book The Orpheus Clock.

During his life, Baron Mór Lipót Herzog amassed more than 2,600 pre-modern and modern works of art. His private collection, one of the largest in Europe, featured pictures of El Greco, Francisco Goya, and artifacts from the Renaissance period. In 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution in Hungary, the Baron’s possessions were nationalized by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.

In 1944, ten years after Herzog’s death, the Nazi-backed Hungarian government seized the family’s collection. The objects were initially stored in the Hotel Majestic, where Adolf Eichmann supervised his Sondereinsatzkommando, a special unit tasked with coordinating the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Then, the authorities brought the Herzog collection to the Museum of Fine Art.

After the war, the Herzog family filed a lawsuit against the Hungarian government to obtain the restitution of their artworks. To this day, the legal battle, involving 40 objects with a value of $100 million dollars, remains unresolved.

18. The Bernheim-Jeune Collection

In 1944, a group of SS personnel ransacked and set on fire the Château de Rastignac, a castle in southwest France where the Bernheim-Jeune family had hidden some of their paintings. In 1941, the ERR had already seized the Bernheim-Jeunes’ art gallery and properties.

In the second half of the 19th century, the family opened an art gallery in Paris. In the first decades of the 20th century, they started promoting contemporary and avant-garde artists, including Umberto Boccioni, Amedeo Modigliani, Cézanne, and Matisse.

In 1944, as the castle owners searched the ruins for the remains of their possessions, they did not find any trace of the pictures from the Bernheim-Jeune estate. In a later account, a woman recalled seeing the SS loading some canvases on their trucks. To this day, the paintings remain missing.

When the Third Reich annexed Austria, Oscar Bondy was in Czechoslovakia. Upon hearing the news, he found refuge in Switzerland. He then fled with his wife to the United States, where he died in 1944. During his life, Bondy, a sugar factory owner, had amassed a renowned collection of sculptures, paintings, and other items.

After the authorities seized the objects, many German and Austrian museums sought to add them to their exhibitions. In the end, the 1,600 looted items went to the German Monument Protection Office depot in Germany. After World War II, Oscar’s wife returned to Vienna, where she attempted to obtain the restitution of her late husband’s collection.

20. Nazi-Looted Art & The Wildensteins: Victims or Collaborators?

In prewar Paris, George Wildenstein became a leading art dealer. A business partner of Paul Rosenberg, he developed a friendship with French painter Claude Monet. After the German invasion of France, George fled to the United States with his family.

As a result of “Aryanization,” his gallery was seized by the Nazi authorities, who also plundered his art collection. Several of his items later adorned Hermann Goering’s country residence of Carinhall. In his 1997 book The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, Héctor Feliciano accused George Wildenstein of collaboration with Nazi art dealer Karl Haberstock. In 1999, a French court rejected the Wildensteins’ defamation suit against the author. The question thus remains, were art dealers accused of collaborating with the Nazis doing so for their own personal gain or protecting themselves from a worse fate?