VIENNA – Five years ago there was a headline in the International Herald Tribune, “Austria to Start Returning Artwork Looted by the Nazis”. The article beneath, reporting on a promise made by the Austrian government in a statement to parliament, came exactly 53 years and 7 months after the defeat of the Nazi Reich. But today, 58 years on, the change at best can be said to have been incremental. Much of Austria still buries its head in the sand, convinced to its bone that it was a “victim” of Hitler, not in fact a co-conspirator as the rest of the world knows it was, and most of the art and other looted artifacts and wealth remains unreturned.
In 1999 the distinguished Austrian writer, Hubertus Czernin, whose previous work had exposed the unsavory war record of Kurt Waldheim, who had been both UN secretary general and president of Austria, and the disgraced Cardinal of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groer, who had to step down because of accusations of homosexual offenses, published a book on the Nazi looting of Austrian art. One chapter was the story of the late banker Alphonse Thorsch who died in exile in Canada in 1945. Thorsch was enormously rich- of the Jewish families living in Vienna before the Nazis came to power second only to the Rothschild’s. His house was a palace of 60 rooms and his desk was that of the former first minister Metternich. In March 1938 the National Socialists stormed in, turfed out the occupants and confiscated the house, the paintings, carpets, jewels and, most important, the bank.
Nineteen pictures were restored to the family in 1949; one more followed in 1952. But most have not been. Since the family couldn’t say where the art was or where the capital of the bank was transferred to, the government has argued that the family “is not in a legal position to demand restitution”. Cabinet papers have revealed that earlier post war governments decided in favor of “dragging this matter out”. When I interviewed Thorsch’s granddaughter, Angela Hartig, last week she was about to put up one of the paintings she did own for auction, in an effort to maintain the still elegant, if much reduced, style of family life.
That the Thorsch family is still well to do by most standards is not the point because their story is the same story as tens of thousands of other Jewish families. And 90% of those who should have benefited from restitution are now dead. Of those who remain few have the will, determination and indeed the financial resources to keep on fighting. In the U.S. lawyers, working on the basis of payment on results, are still attempting to pressure the U.S. government to use its muscle to intervene, as it did with the notorious case of the Swiss banks who belatedly agreed three years ago on a settlement to indemnify Holocaust survivors and heirs for their dormant accounts (but still have only met a tiny number of claims). At the onset the banks had said there were only 8,000 accounts linked to victims. When the case was settled they admitted the actual figure was 50,000.
Austria, as John Kenneth Galbraith has argued, has been post war Western society’s most successful economy with not only a good growth record but a benign distribution of income. Nevertheless, politically and morally it has been seriously schizophrenic about its Nazi past.
In her book “Guilty Victim” Austrian-born Hella Pick, a former diplomatic editor of the British Guardian newspaper, argues that one of the central themes running through Austrian history is “the big lie”- “the self deception that has prompted many Austrians to assert that the country could not be held responsible for the Nazi persecution of Austrian Jews because Austria became Hitler’s first victim”. Only in 1991 was this discarded as official doctrine. Then Chancellor Franz Vranitzsky realized that the crisis that had been triggered by the emergence of Waldheim’s war record should be used to prise open the collective amnesia of the Austrian people. He made a path breaking statement to parliament in which for the first time Austria’s guilt was publicly acknowledged. He finally admitted that many Austrians had supported Hitler and had been instrumental in Nazi crimes.
There is, belatedly, a holocaust memorial in Vienna. Simon Wiesenthal, the world famous Nazi hunter, once reviled in his home country, has now been heaped with honors. Some pictures, some property and other looted art works have been returned. But none of the $360 million promised by the government to Jewish survivors has been dispensed and the big claims simply gather dust. As the Thorsch case makes clear the road to go is still a long one. Outside pressure and outside scrutiny is the only thing that has ever produced results in Austria and although, nearly 60 years later, it is easier to just forget and let bygones be bygones that would destroy our credibility for facing down evil in the future .
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
