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(P1683)
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"Haberstock, who died in 1956 and was never punished by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal because he testified against other Nazi dealers, was best known for having amassed the Linz Collection, a vast trove of European paintings and sculpture with which Adolf Hitler planned to adorn a huge museum in the city of his birth. Some of the 13,000 artworks in the Linz Collection are now the subjects of restitution efforts by Holocaust survivors or their heirs.None of the Italian, Flemish and German works in the Haberstock collection in this Bavarian city have been claimed by dispossessed victims of the Nazis.One professor of art history who has written two books about the Third Reich’s trade in looted and ill-gotten art has been trying for four years--without success--to gain access to the Augsburg archives.“In the first instance, they simply said no due to Datenschutz,” says Jonathan Petropoulos of Claremont McKenna College, referring to Germany’s elaborate network of privacy protection laws. “In the second letter, they stonewalled me, saying they were still waiting for permission from the municipal authorities.”Petropoulos says he was appalled to discover that the museum was displaying a bust of Haberstock in its entrance and a 1912 painting of the dealer in an upstairs gallery--with nothing to indicate the benefactor’s role as Hitler’s favorite fence." (language: en)
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