Six decades after being plundered, the art the Nazis stole is set to make

[emad]

Independent
Six decades after being plundered, the art the Nazis stole is set to make millions
A treasured collection belonging to Max Steinthal, the Jewish bank chief made destitutute by the Third Reich is coming to auction after floods revealed its resting place. Louise Jury reports
12 November 2004


The black and white photograph from pre-war Germany shows an affluent and important banker sitting beneath one of the important paintings in his treasured collection of art. Max Steinthal was a pillar of the Berlin establishment and chairman of the Deutsche Bank. His wealthy bourgeois family could trace its German roots back at least two centuries.

But come the 1930s, the Nazis were not impressed. All that mattered to them was that Max Steinthal was Jewish. So, as happened to millions of others, he was stripped of everything he held dear.

Even his precious art, despatched to a non-Jewish relative for safe- keeping, was eventually lost to the family in the turmoil of war. Mr Steinthal died in 1939, penniless and homeless, just before his 90th birthday which he would otherwise have marked in a concentration camp. And his family were scattered, left only to lament the cruel destruction of their comfortable world; just more statistics in the horrifying story of the Holocaust.

Today, more than 60 years later, his four sons are all dead, too, leaving only grandsons and a string of cousins to keep up the family name. But against the odds, his art, an eclectic collection of works by artists including Picasso, Pissarro and Manet, has been rediscovered, thanks to the chaos caused by the devastating floods that ripped through central Europe two years ago.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=582012

[ladjf]

1. How many decades will pass before Democracy is

restored in the U.S.?