Art: Booty Returned

The day after the Soviet army entered Berlin in 1945, Red “Trophy Squads” began rounding up all known German museum men and forced them to show where the nation’s art treasures were stored. About 1,500,000 art objects were crated posthaste, and shipped back to Moscow as “war booty.”

Last week a red and white banner across the entrance gate to East Berlin’s National Gallery proclaimed: TREASURES OF WORLD CULTURE SAVED BY THE SOVIET UNION. Ninety freight cars had already been unloaded at East Berlin’s Museum Island, and 210 more carloads were on the way. Already back in place at the National Gallery and its companion museum, the Pergamon: ¶ The original Ishtar Gate and Procession Street built for King Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon about 580 B.C. and having reliefs of lions, bulls and dragons in white on blue tiles. ¶ Thirty 7½-ft.-high bas-reliefs from the frieze of the Pergamon Altar, a vast Hellenistic masterpiece commissioned by King Eumenes II in Asia Minor about 180 B.C. ¶ A roomful of Botticelli drawings illustrating the Divine Comedy. ¶ Hundreds of top-rank Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Chinese statues and ceramics. ¶ Cranach’s Judith and Holofernes, Bosch’s small Temptation of St. Anthony, Hals’s Mulatto.

What made the Russians decide to part with such loot? Politics, probably. General elections will be held in East Germany next week, and Premier Otto Grotewohl’s regime needs bolstering. At ceremonies celebrating the return of the loot, Grotewohl orated: “In saving all these priceless sculptures and paintings from destruction, while American bombers reduced Germany’s cultural centers to rubble, the Soviet army once again demonstrates its noble mission and its high ideals.” Nonsense, commented one high museum official behind his hand. “The Russians simply confiscated everything.”