QUARANTINE BLOG # 222

November 7 , 2020

The term “Second World War” is seldom used in Russia. It is called  the “Great Patriotic War,” an emotional reminder of the struggle and sacrifice involved to drive  Hitler’s forces out of Russia and assure his ultimate defeat. Over 20 million Soviet citizens died in the war. Russians have not forgotten.

Hundreds of thousands of artworks disappeared throughout Europe during World War II. It was generally believed that the German works had been destroyed in the Allied bombardment of Berlin. However, in the last months of the war and the first years of peace the Russian army removed more than 2 million works of art from Germany and sent them by to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage.

It began in July 1945, with the arrival of a military cargo plane from Berlin at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. On board were seven large crates addressed to the Committee of Arts of the Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR. In the crates were artworks from Hitler’s private collection; The Garden by Claude Monet, Woman with Child by Honoré Daumier, a view of Mont-Sainte-Victoire by Cézanne,  Sleeping Nude by Gustave Courbet, Woman on a Stair by Renoir, and Saint Bernard  by El Greco.

The Garden, by Claude Monet

Woman with Child, by Honore Daumier

Mont-Sainte Victoire, by Cezanne

Sleeping Nude, by Gustae Courbet

Woman on a Stair, by Renoir

Saint Bernard, by El Greco

The seizure of art treasures in Nazi Germany was justified in the minds of many Soviets because of the systematic destruction and pillaging of the Soviet Union by the German armies. According to a commission investigating the crimes of the Nazis in the Soviet Union, during four years of war the Nazis had removed, destroyed, or damaged museum objects with a value of $1.25 billion.

Leningrad was never captured by the Nazis, but the famous czarist palaces outside the city were occupied, pillaged, and destroyed. The destruction was senseless. Horses were stabled in the Pavlovsk palace. The chapel at Tsarskoe Selo was used as a motorcycle garage. From Peterhof alone, the Nazis removed 34,000 art objects.

Peterhof

By September 1941, the German army had advanced to the outskirts of Leningrad and occupied the city of Pushkin and the Catherine Palace. 

The Amber Room was constructed for King Frederick I of Prussia in Danzig (modern-day Gdansk, Poland) between 1701 and 1714. The amber panels making up the room were presented to Peter the Great in 1716.

The only known color photograph of the Amber Room.

The German army dismantled the Amber Room’s panels and decorations within 36 hours, packing it in 27 crates, and shipped it by rail to Königsberg, where it was reassembled and displayed in the city’s castle. 

The Amber Room after the Nazis dismantled it.

Two years later, museum director Dr. Alfred Rohde was ordered to dismantle the room again and crate it in the event that British or U.S. bombers attacked the city. The room panels were last seen January 12, 1945, when Dr. Rohde wrote that the amber panels were being crated.

The Soviet government, which deemed the room a cultural treasure, mandated its reconstruction in 1979, beginning a 24-year process that culminated with its reopening in 2003, after decades of work by Russian craftsmen and donations from Germany, the reconstructed Amber Room was reopened.

In QB 210, I told you that on April 13, 1945, the German steamer Karlsruhe was sunk by Soviet planes in the Baltic Sea. Divers speculated that the original Amber Room may be in the sunken ship. Fingers crossed!

In October 1994 the Hermitage officially announced that it had secretly been holding a major trove of paintings from German private collections. The exhibition “Hidden Treasures Revealed,” opened on March 30, 1995, and ran one year.

To many Russians, the artworks taken from Germany are legitimate spoils of war, compensation for the huge cultural losses inflicted on the Soviet Union by the Nazis. Almost nothing has been repatriated, and the Russian parliament has passed laws giving the state ownership of most of the objects.

In 1998, Russia passed the “Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation,” to prevent any restitution to their rightful owners in Germany.

In 2011 the State Hermitage Museum, was designated a federal government funded institution. Before that, and in spite of generous donations, the Hermitage teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

Watch a video I made about the Hermitage, with many pictures and scene I haven’t posted before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qj7A2IMqBM.

If you have the opportunity to visit St. Petersburg, remember the Museum is closed on Mondays. And January 1. And on May 9, the day the Nazis surrendered, ending the Great Patriotic War – Pobeda!

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