Eighty years ago, on January 27th, 1945, the extermination and concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the Soviets. Of the 69,000 Jews deported from France, only 3 percent survived. During World War II, the Nazis looted property belonging to Jewish families. After the Liberation, thousands of stolen works of art were repatriated from Germany. Hundreds were handed back to their owners, or family members who had survived the Holocaust. But others are still in French museums, as curators continue to search for their rightful owners. Claire Paccalin and Stéphanie Trouillard report.
As Europe commemorates the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, FRANCE 24 looks at the artwork that was stolen by Nazi Germany from France during World War II, of which some had found their way back to their original Jewish owners while other were entrusted to national museums in France.
In France’s northern city of Lille, the museum of Fine Arts will soon receive a grant from the commission responsible for resolving claims of those who lost artwork during the Third Reich.
Experts will then trace what happened to the works of art stolen from Jewish families by Nazi Party members.
At the Louvre Museum, which houses some one thousand six hundred works of art believed to have been stolen by the Nazis, curators have been working on finding the legal heirs for several years.
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