Washington Principle #7: A Critique

[Editor’s note: Due to the momentous nature of the upcoming international conference in Berlin, Germany, entitled “20 years Washington Principles: Roadmap for the Future,” it would be worthwhile to revisit these Principles and to put them through a linguistic, methodological and substantive meat grinder, and see what comes out of this critique. There will be eleven articles, each one devoted to one of the Principles enacted in a non-binding fashion in Washington, DC, on December 3, 1998.]

Principle #7
Pre-War owners and their heirs should be encouraged to come forward and make known their claims to art that was confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted.

In June 2011, we noted the following:

“There is nothing good to be said about Principle VII except for the fact that there are no solid mechanisms put into place to allow all owners to come forward and make their claims known regardless of socio-economic background. It is one thing to make their claims known, but the purpose of publicizing a claim is to obtain justice. Principle VII is uninformed and useless until effective national and international public policies are enacted to systematize the processes inherent to this principle and protective of the rights of claimants to seek redress without penalties.”

Seven years later, there has not been substantial progress in establishing mechanisms for “pre-war owners and their heirs to come forward.” Those who are directly related to the victims of plunder are now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In other words, they are three to four times removed from the crime and the loss suffered during the Third Reich. What little memory of the events stayed with the victims proper has all but vanished and few of those evidentiary strands have been transmitted to the next generation so that it can sue for redress.

The more likely path is from the outside—researchers, genealogists, aggressive lawyers, historians and the like—are those more likely to stumble on the evidence of the crime and the losses suffered by individuals. These external players are more likely than not to contact the heirs of the pre-war owners with the evidence of their losses. For a fee, unfortunately. In this regard, governments have created little monsters on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, by not rising above the fray and taking on the mantle of justice for the victims of plunder. Leaving the field wide open for entrepreneurs and private sector players to set the rules for how research is conducted and, more importantly, how claims are to be handled and prosecuted.

Seven years after our initial assessment of the effectiveness of Principle #7, it is time to call it for what it is—a total failure and an open invitation for profiteering at the expense of the claimants, of history and of justice.

Principle #7 could be rewritten and expanded as follows:

The parties signatory to the Washington Principles of December 3, 1998, must ensure that all efforts will be made to disseminate information to as wide public as possible regarding the mechanisms by which pre-war owners and their heirs can make their claims known. Also, pre-1933 owners and their heirs must be encouraged to submit their claims for artistic, cultural and ritual objects confiscated, misappropriated, sold under duress and/or forced sales, subjected to other forms of illicit acts of dispossession by the Nazis, their supporters, profiteers and Fascist allies across Europe between 1933 and 1945 and not subsequently restituted.