Poland Rejects One-Sided German Art Claims

By Robert Strybel

The Polish authorities have rejected calls for the wholesale return of what German cultural-works negotiator Professor Tono Eitel calls “robbed German art works” and rejected such misleading rhetoric.

The German professor and many of his countrymen allege that Poland had “seized” some of Germany’s most priceless art treasures and refuses to return them to their rightful owner. “I am shocked at the use of such rhetoric,” remarked Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga. Polish cultural-works negotiator Professor Wojciech Kowalski believes the contested works of art are legally the property of the Polish state. Who is right?

“All art works, library collections, archival materials and all other objects of German origin, which found themselves on Polish territory in connection with the Second World War, were taken over by the Polish state on the basis of the appropriate legal acts. They constitute Polish state property or belong to specific bodies that legally became their owners,” the Foreign Ministry said in a recent statement.

Foremost among Germany’s “lost” cultural goods is the Prussian Library collection which includes original manuscripts of poet Goethe and composers Beethoven and Mozart. Through no fault of the Poles, these and other priceless writings have been in Polish archives since the end of the war. As the tides of war began shifting against Hitler’s Third Reich, the collection was removed from Berlin and transferred to the Sudety Mountains in what was then a remote corner of southeastern Germany to protect them from Allied bombings.

As it turned out, those eastern German lands, which at various times had belonged to or been fiefdoms of medieval Poland, were assigned to Poland by the Allied Big Three. That was to have provided the Poles with at least partial compensation for the one-half of pre-war Poland annexed by the USSR and never returned. The Hague Convention, which prohibits the looting of foreign art works, does not apply in this case, because German art was not stolen by Poles and carted away. The change of ownership occurred as a result of an internationally recognized border shift. After the war, the Prussian Library Collection was moved to Krakow’s Jagiellonian University where it was catalogued, microfilmed and made available for public viewing.

German cultural claims have understandably been a sore point in Poland, which was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1939 and subjected to a brutal five-year occupation. If anybody engaged in cultural pillage, it was the Germans who plundered Polish art collections and destroyed what they could not cart away or did not want. As a result, Poland lost some 60,000 works of art and more than 50 million volumes of priceless books. The Germans burned libraries and archives, dynamited palaces, churches as well as other cultural landmarks and reduced entire neighborhoods of architectural relics to rubble. With typical German thoroughness, Hitler ordered Warsaw’s historic buildings to be methodically listed and destroyed one by one in their order of importance to Polish culture.

But Polish war losses were staggering not only in the cultural realm. Six million of the country’s citizens had been killed, and Stalin coerced the US and Britain to accept a post-war Poland that had 20 percent less territory than it did prior to 1939. Poland emerged from the war with its cities and industry in ruins. To make matters worse, Poland did not receive the war reparations it rightfully deserved. Stalin forced his Polish Communist puppet regime to “voluntarily” relinquish all reparations in favor of Moscow which would then give the Poles their fair share. Or so he said!? The Soviets also did not allow Poland to accept the American Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Western Europe.

Nevertheless, Poland has not adopted an intransigent position and is open to negotiations, as long as the return of lost art is not viewed as a one-way street. Jacek Miller, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad, recently told Polish Radio that the ministry was currently conducting consultations with the German side in Warsaw and hoped they will produce positive solutions. To succeed such negotiations require bilateral tact, delicacy and willingness to compromise. Professor Easel’s emotive reference to German art works in Poland as “the last German prisoners of war” does not seem any too conducive to improving the climate of two-way talks.

Actually, the two countries have been discussing the possible return of valuable works of art, music and literature off and on for 15 years. Already back in 1977, Polish Communist leader Edward Gierek gave East German dictator Erich Honecker the original scores of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”, “Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter symphony)” and “Mass in C-minor” as well as Bach’s “Concerto in C-minor”. In return, Honecker handed over a portrait of Poland's 17th-century King Jan III Sobieski.

Wedged as it has been between two aggressive powers, Poland’s losses were caused by both Germany and Russia and lost Polish art can be found both to the west and east of its borders. Poland’s Ministry of Culture is still compiling a list of items which had remained east of today’s Polish frontier due to Europe’s post-war border shifts. Poland has also been holding talks on the return of its cultural properties with Russia and Ukraine. So far, only several dozen listed items have found their way back to Polish collections.