Go figure. 1.3 Billion Dollars of stolen Art Treasures found

despite your professed Christianity and simply stuns me. You don't have a Christian soul James. I, who find the Bible a superb striving for a shared moral guide, containing parts with which I don't agree (but I don't expect 8th Century BC Jewish refugees to necessarily accept certain people as equals, slaves for example or homosexuals or foreigners), I, who left the Church at age 14, have a Christian soul. The Bible is a chronicle of 1000 + years of wrestling with social moral and political issues and I find it inescapable no matter what I do or see or read about or think about.

Christianity infuses how I see the world, of how I see political issues and social issues and moral issues. I cannot separate what I learned very haphazardly in my childhood from what I have seen in the world, and what I see now and how I relate to friends and family and what I conceive my obligations to be.

My wife, raised a Baptist, but not religious at all is utterly lacking in that viewpoint, and doesn't understand my feelings any better than you do. I don't see this as my failing. I see it as her blindness, and yours. I think you should be ashamed of that blindness just as I think she should be ashamed of her blindness and her actions toward myself and toward our son. I feel it is a parent's responsibility to give their children the best start in life possible. Is there a bible verse for that James? I feel it is a parent's responsibility not to squander his inheritance on nothing worth anything at all. Is there a verse for that squandering? How about a verse for the shallowness to be attracted by shiny objects, like a magpie, not a human being.

I don't expect you to join me on the barricades or even to write anything except to deplore this theft and hoarding and private gloating over stolen goods, but to fail to even recognize that there is a moral issue here is frankly shocking to me.

As I understand the story, it is about stolen, looted works of art dating back to the Second World War and deriving from the possessions of Jewish people in Germany before the war (Try learning the term "Objekte" which was the German term for Jewish people who were viewed as Things to be looted of all their wealth and all their possessions, and this long before the deportations began.)

And what of the Treasures of Museums of Nations occupied by the Nazis for 7 years for the aggrandisement of a criminal and profoundly immoral regime. The Treasures of the Museums of Nations are the Treasures of Mankind because Museums are where the paintings and art work are shared with all people who wish to see them.

The goods looted were supposed to be returned where possible after the War to the heirs, if any, of the original owners. It was not supposed to be squirrelled away by some war criminal or hoarder of looted goods and his son. I assume that both those people and their families have been living off the sale of those items, living off the proceeds of stolen property of Nations and individuals and a murdered people for 70 years roughly. The term War Criminal includes those who profited from the looting of individuals whether they survived the war or not, and those who hoarded the art-works of other nations museums.

Countries have been vilified, particularly the Soviet Union for its looting of Museum Treasures which haven't been returned, but then the Soviet Union lost masses of art treasures to the Nazis.

"Thou shalt not steal" should ring a bell for you. So should "Thou shalt not covet."
"Thou shalt not kill." is about what happened to the Objekte after they were stripped of everything.

Perhaps your form of Christianity ignores the teachings of the Old Testament, but I was taught that the whole of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New were parts of the same document, and were equally Holy if not equally Christian. Christianity is an outgrowth of Judaism, not some Partheongenetic creation like Athena bursting from a cyst on the brow of Zeus. It is not a tree without roots.

I'm sorry James. I may have been hard on you previously, but I did have respect for your belief. It turns out that your belief has no depth. You're like a person who has learned all the notes, and has missed the music. I'm not trying to be nasty or mean or belittling. I am very sad right now to have come to this realization.

Rob

discovery of some $1.3 billion in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and others, which were believed stolen by Nazis."

"Among the trash hid some $1.3 billion in missing paintings, prints, and
lithographs - including lost and unknown pieces from 20th century
masters - some of which are believed to have been seized by Nazis ahead of World War II." Note, Lost, meaning they were known to have existed once and to have disappeared, and Unknown, meaning not known to have existed.

"One piece hails from the 16th century." Not "Degenerate Jewish" art then. They're not specific, but I'd think there were other pieces before those Degenerates like Renoir and Manet and Monet and Pisarro and Picasso, and Matisse and Braque and Joao Miro none of whom is Jewish by the way.

"Fast forward to this week: The art world is in a tizzy, and German
officials are on the defense. Why has so much time lapsed between the
discovery of the art and its public disclosure? Where is the man and how
much of the art was legitimately acquired or not and by whom? How was
his collection unknown to the system? " See my post "What is it about the Germans?"

" "When you stand in front of the works, <b>see the ones that were long
thought to have been lost or destroyed</b> and in a relatively good state -
some of them dirty but not damaged - you have an incredible feeling of
happiness," she told the Associated Press." That suggests that the art was known previously and believed, what is the word? Lost. Lost is a dime or a five dollar bill out of your pocket. What this lost means is confiscated, looted, stolen. And not necessarily from a person, but from Museums across Europe. At least the Russians finally acknowledged they had stolen the Schliemann hoard from Troy (except it wasn't from Troy, he bought it from various Turkish vendors of Antiquities and buried it in Troy, and then smuggled it out of Turkey in his wife's clothing. That sneaky Jew! [his wife was Greek Orthodox]) There needs to be an Emoticon for Irony (a bar-bell) or sarcasm (not a clue). And perhaps there should be an Emoticon for Not-A-Clue, too.

"It all started after an elderly man - who German authorities have not named, but several media outlets
including Focus identify as Cornelius Gurlitt, son of late German art
collector Hildebrand Gurlitt - was stopped in a routine check <b>on a train
from Zurich to Munich in 2010</b>." The police then took well over a year to stop by his apartment in February 2012, and we are just hearing about it almost 2 years later.

So the German Government have had questions, but didn't seem to want to pursue them with any diligence since sometime in 2010. Then it took them more than 18 months to reveal what they had found. And just what was it in Zurich, a hot bed of the trade in stolen art, that had Herr Gurlitt on the train with $12,000 in his pocket. I doubt he'd just withdrawn it from his bank, but if he did, what else is in that vault? I don't think it was a buying trip, but I could be wrong, all of this is murky, it seems more likely it was a selling trip, and the 12 Grand was the proceeds.

And the question of looted art has been a hot one for 70 years. Art sold at Auctions and in legitimate transactions is carefully followed not because there's some wild conspiracy chasing Nazi connections, but because art is so easily forged that certified masters are too valuable to just toss around. They're fingerprinted and X-rayed and photographed in every species of light known to man and science in order to establish a provenance and an attribution, so the buyer knows what he's getting. That system has been put in place by the great Auction Houses and the big galleries so that they, the sellers, don't get burned either by passing along a forgery, or by having a forgery sold to them.

You clearly did read the article closely enough to find the solitary minor cavill "it's unclear how much of this collection was looted ..." And yet you passed over every other attribution to Nazi loot of a portion of the collection if not the majority noted above. ""When you stand in front of the works, <b>see the ones that were long
thought to have been lost or destroyed</b> and in a relatively good state ..." Does that suggest to you that all of this is new? Post-War? Clearly the work was known, and given up for lost. That Ms Hoffman knows the work from descriptions on file or photographs and that the works were believed lost or destroyed doesn't suggest an ordinary legal origin.

You do baffle me, James. Your standard response to anything involving Nazis whether it is Ivan the whoever who was absolutely a guard at Treblinka, one of the extermination camps and not a holiday resort and admited it and lied on his admission to the United States, to your belittling of a story in the Christian Science Monitor (whether you like or believe in CS is neither here nor there, they are acknowledged to be one of the finest newspapers in the US.) leaves me shaking my head.

Is it that you think that a statute of limitations should have been imposed on all that unpleasant Nazi stuff? I might not agree with it, but I might understand it if you had ever made the case for it.
What is it about Nazi-ism and bringing people to trial, or discovering looted goods and wanting to repatriate them or return them or the proceeds from them to the very very few heirs out there that gets up your nose so much?

I grant you that I allowed my own discomfort to raise the issue of the stripping of German Jews of all their possessions, a well known historical fact, prior to the US involvement in the war. The origin of this looted material, how ever much of it there is, is not addressed in the article. There is not a single mention of the word Jew in the article.

You must be orbiting an outer planet over The Righteous Among Nations.

Oh, and I may have left a group or two out of my discussion of those persecuted by the Nazis. Homosexuals, and the disabled. If you're opposed to abortion and I seem to recall you are, where is your outrage or at least compassion for the disabled executed in their tens of thousands? Or is there a Denison Statute of Limitations on that too?

While you're at it this Sunday say a prayer for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran who was exterminated during the last two weeks of the war for his Christian ideals.

Rob

I said that despite not being a Christian I cannot escape having a Christian soul because the teachings made such an impression on me that they infuse everything I do and see and think if not enough of what I say.

You do not seem to possess or be possessed by that same all encompassing sense. Your religion seems to be a part of you, like a leg. You function without reference to it except when you choose to.

That you didn't read sufficiently about the issue to know that the art hoarded there was both items previously unrecognized and items known to have been looted from collections and museums, or that my reference to Objekte was only one tiny part of the 1.3 billion dollar hoard of stolen items from every country and every creed and every ethnic background and Museums across Europe is your failure not mine.

You seem to react to every faint mention of an issue which might relate to Nazi action or Jewish victims as a personal offence. In your world they appear not to be a people of God and the Book but a bunch of annoying whiners who haven't gotten over that enormous and earth shattering (at least for some of us) crime yet. Come on, Shake it off. It was only a couple of million of you and all of your possessions,and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Gypsies you are so exercised about, and the Social Democrats and the Communists and staunch Lutherans, and staunch Catholics and their possessions too, though both those religions also managed to coexist with and support the Nazis at the same time.. Get Over It.

And from that attitude and sense of annoyance I see a great emptiness where your sense of understanding and compassion should be. I'm sure you feel I'm being offensive, but it is not intentional. I feel like I have been walking on a road which is very clear to me, and your comment "So What" opened a chasm at my feet on the edge of which I was teetering.

I can't put off my sense that a crime of almost unimaginable proportion happened and that it didn't shake everyone's world equally. I wasn't born during the war. The War had been over for well over a year when I was born, but the crime still reverberates for me. It hasn't always. I was as thoughtless about it as any other kid, though I did begin to sense its scope as a high school kid.

I'm sorry if this seems excessive or glib or whatever it is that you don't like about it, but gradually as I read more, and thought more became more gripped by what seems to me a crime, and action, an occurrence which should have either gripped all mankind and changed it, or destroyed the world completely. I don't say that I think about this continuously, but I do think about this regularly, probably daily if only briefly in passing. I don't visit Holocaust Museums or Memorials. I don't seem to need to. It's always with me. It is not an Obsession, but it is a constant presence, and news stories like that one simply strike the bell once again and leave me shaken.

I am puzzled that other people Don't Get It. I am puzzled that Christians in particular Don't Get It, since it seems to me to be exactly what Christianity is supposed to be about. About being as concerned about other people as one is about oneself. Perhaps it's just that I've never bought the idea of sectarianism. To me the first thing a pointless difference of opinion over an idea does is kill somebody. If the Bible is about anything it is about that, and repeated iterations of that idea, until one should come away with the understanding that that isn't what being righteous is truly about.

I'm getting way out of my depth at the moment, so I'll stop, but my personal journey will continue. If I get somewhere, I'll let you know.

Rob

I don't put things ahead of people. All this stuff about things, whether art, jewels, gold, silver, is nothing compared to the lives lost. Those lives are gone from this world forever. All the treasure won't bring them back. Chasing down every last pfennig, piece of gold, painted canvas, etc with special groups devoted to it like some sort of holy cause I feel devalues the lives of those who died. Things don't mean that much to me, I'm sort of Spartan when it comes to "things".

My mother was a hoarder, not of junk, but good things, many of which I still must sell aka "get rid of" even 10 years after her death. She called them "memory things", but all of them had an over significance to her, bordering on idolatry far as I was concerned.

One of my favorite places is Salvation Army and Goodwill, where we constantly try to keep "things" reduced, so others who want it can have it instead. Oddly, just this past week I tried to get rid of a perfectly working 20" TV that looked almost new, but even Goodwill wouldn't take it since it's a CRT type. I have no need of it, but can't quite bring myself to toss a perfectly good TV, which with cablebox or TV convertor works. I don't know anyone poor enough to need it. Goodwill should be the go between for that. Value Thrift City near Baltimore is my next chance to donate come Sunday when I'm up that way, after church service.

The more things you have, the more things you have to care for, clean, fix, etc. For me, once it's lost it's utility or I have more of something than I need or want, I'm ready to see it go.

So, people fighting over, obtaining and clinging to useless crap is ridiculous to me.

If I was Jewish and had survived that war and lost many family members, my desire would be for pictures of family that maybe had been lost and then found more than anything else. If some of them had done the art, then I'd be interested in those pieces. Spending my life chasing down every last household item or piece of painted canvas that hung on a wall wouldn't mean much to me.

I don't see that any of what has continued for decades AFTER that war and AFTER almost all involved in it are dead or dying, accomplishes anything other than creating new greivances and ressurections of old ones.

I personally don't care who gets all the gold, the paintings, or whatever someone says was looted 70+ years ago, but I do know I get tired of hearing about it and I don't see it does anyone any good appearing as if they are fighting over scraps from a long ago war, like dogs over old bones.

photographs or other memorabilia are gone, as they are for the vast majority. But that's not really what it's about for me. It isn't about things much though you want it to be. It's about the people lost, and art is the common heritage of everyone. I don't mind that it may pass through a dozen hands or more, just that it eventually is made available even if only in photographs to the rest of us.

Speaking of jumping to conclusions this is an awfully big one "Spending my life chasing down every last household item or piece of painted canvas that hung on a wall wouldn't mean much to me."

Nowhere did I refer in any way to that. Nor did I think it. Nor do I know if it is true. That's entirely your construction upon what you believe people's motives are. Clearly you have an issue with people for whom those things may be important, or may merely be an affectation, but that's your issue, not mine.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10434533/British-doctor-believes-familys-missing-masterpieces-among-Nazi-art-trove.html and the doctor lives in California.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/03/nazis-looted-modernist-masterpieces-germany-police

I lost a previous reply, you'll be relieved to hear, which chased down more explicit identification of the items and their origins in Nazi looting which is clear and unequivocal.

http://world.time.com/2013/11/06/previously-unknown-works-from-the-nazi-looted-art-trove/

"late German art collector Hildebrand Gurlitt was a major dealer in looted art for the Nazis."

http://www.focus.de/kultur/kunst/nazi-raubkunst-meisterwerke-zwischen-muell-fahnder-entdecken-kunstschatz-in-milliardenhoehe_aid_1147066.html
"Cornelius Gurlitt jedenfalls verdankt sein jahrzehntelanges Gluck der Luge seiner Mutter. "Ich kann Ihnen nur mitteilen, dass alle Geschaftsunterlagen und Bestande unserer Firma am 13. Februar 1945 - bei dem Grossangriff auf Dresden ..., - verbrannt sind", teilte diese 1967 dem Berliner Wiedergutmachungsamt mit.

[ Approximately: Cornelius Gurlitt's good fortune was thanks to his Mother's lie to the German authorities in 1967 that all the art work and paintings from the family's business were burnt in the attack on Dresden, 13 Feb. 1945.] She said this despite the family living in Munich and carrying on its business there. Berliner Wiedergutmachungsamt, The Berlin Restoration Bureau i.e. restoring art or other things to its previous owners or their heirs.
Interesting instance of someone blaming the Allies for something so they could hoard and then dispose of the proceeds of criminal activity.

You see people fighting over the spoils, where no indication of that exists in any source I've seen as of 8 November. I'd say that's on you. Just as you pointed a similar issue out to me. I understand your feelings, but you're projecting them onto a story without any hint of that yet.

Rob

wasn't the money, it was the 1500 works of art believed destroyed. To me art, music, architecture, books are all part of our cultural heritage and to be cherished as such.

The interesting thing to me is that if this person Cornelius Gurlitt had come clean 10 years ago, and said. "This is what my father hid away, and I want to return it", he'd be the hero of the story, which is part of the reason I wrote "Go figure" (this one out) at the beginning of the story.

Damn, a Canaletto and an Albrecht Durer, and who knows what else including the modern stuff (which isn't to be contemptuous of modern art, it's just a way of distancing the impact of all this).

Rob