Nazi Looted Art Database Now Online

A database of art looted by the Nazi's from France and parts of Belgium is now online at http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/ The database contains over 20,000 items of art many of which have yet to be returned to the rightful owners and families.  The database has some images of original inventory cards recording information on the stolen art.

Bloomberg also reports on the database, stating  that about half the database of 20,000 items have yet to be returned. Items in the database can be searched by artist, owner, inventory number and medium.  Bloomberg states Items range from abstract art to 18th-century furniture, from medieval crucifixes to African masks. To read the full Bloomberg article, click HERE.

It is an interesting site that many appraisers, dealers and auction house specialist should visit.

The Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume site states

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the “Special Task Force” headed by Adolf Hitler’s leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, was one of the main Nazi agencies engaged in the plunder of cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. A particularly notorious operation by the ERR was the plunder of art from French Jewish and a number of Belgian Jewish collections from 1940 to 1944 that were brought to the Jeu de Paume building in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris for processing by the ERR Sonderstab Bildende Kunst or “Special Staff for Pictorial Art.”

This database brings together for the first time in searchable illustrated form the remaining registration cards and photographs produced by the ERR covering more than 20,000 art objects taken from Jews in German-occupied France and, to a lesser extent, in Belgium. Searchable by individual objects and by the owners from whom these objects were taken, the database is a detailed record of a small but important part of the vast seizure of cultural property that was integral to the Holocaust.