Drawing on his training as an historian of Nazi Germany and experience as Senior Provenance Research Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jacques Schuhmacher has written a timely and informative guidebook for researchers interested in Nazi-Era provenance research. While Schuhmacher intends his book to assist researchers in their efforts to clarify gaps in the provenances of items in museum collections, he also emphasizes a ’moral imperative’ to unearth the stories about individual objects in their collections and restore to the historical record the lives and fates of European Jews whom Nazi officials, ideologues, and sympathizers systematically annihilated. Nazi-Era provenance of museum collections equips researchers with the rudiments necessary to investigate their own collections in the wake of the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, which was the pivot point from which current Nazi-Era provenance research stems. The Washington Principles resulting from the conference commands museums to scrutinize their collections to identify any Nazi-Era ‘red flags,’ restore tainted objects to their rightful owners or heirs, and, as Schuhmacher writes in his Introduction, ‘ensure that the Nazis’ worldview and their actions do not live on unchallenged in the galleries and storerooms of our museums today.’¹

Each of the book’s three chapters are a master class in showing rather than telling. In Chapter 1, Schuhmacher uses case studies of Communists and then Jews oppressed by the Nazi regime to explore the ideological, political, and economic forces deployed first against the enemies of the state and then later against Jews in territories occupied by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Cynically, ruthlessly, and cruelly, Nazi officials applied various types of ‘enabling’ legislation, wanton violence, and confiscatory economic policies to not only eradicate German Jews, but also to ensure that their oppression benefited the state financially. If Jews wanted to leave Germany, then they had to divest their property at a small fraction of its real value. Most relevant to Schuhmacher and provenance researchers, such property included cultural objects. While Schuhmacher contextualizes Nazi crimes against Jews for readers, he also provides myriad leads for diligent provenance researchers. Nazi officials habitually recorded their proceedings. Those records help provenance researchers trace the thorny histories of objects under investigation and restore their owners to the historical record.

Schuhmacher provides more grist for researchers in Chapter 2, where he examines efforts by Allied governments to trace, locate, warehouse, and then repatriate objects stolen by the Nazis to their countries of origin. Once again, in his telling of the story, Schuhmacher highlights the creation of a crucial paper trail needed by researchers to fill in provenance gaps: the ‘red flag’ registers compiled by curators and art historians detailed to the various Allied armed forces. When compared with captured Nazi documentation, the ‘Monuments Men’ of literary and cinematic fame were able to collect, catalogue, and ultimately return much of the stolen loot deposited at Allied collection points such as the central repository in the former Nazi party headquarters in Munich. Unfortunately for Jews who survived the war the process created in the American, British, and French occupation zones for stolen property claims was as onerous as that employed by the Nazis to confiscate it in the first place. Their cases languished, and, when the ‘Monuments Men’ returned to their museums after the war, they lost interest in the war as they turned their focus back to long-delayed exhibitions in their own galleries. Matters rested there until 1998, when the Washington Conference catalysed a new generation of provenance researchers.

In Chapter 3, Schuhmacher provides a roadmap for newly energized curators and provenance researchers to follow in their quest to answer lingering questions about potential Nazi-Era origins of objects in their collections. At this point, art libraries and librarians become critical linchpins in the research process. In Schuhmacher’s estimation a thorough examination of scholarly literature cited in object files, with a particular emphasis on scouring footnotes and other annotations, is often overlooked by researchers. He suggests consulting not only databases such as the Bibliography of the History of Art, for instance but also using a general bibliographic database such as WorldCat to peruse global libraries. The catalogues of art libraries such as the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Frick Art Reference Library are also vital resources. Beyond published literature, a thicket of evidence exists to guide researchers toward the individual stories of Jewish victims of the Nazis. Schuhmacher leads researchers to resources that are useful but often lead to more questions than answers. Among those resources are online databases such as the Lost Art Database maintained by the German Lost Art Foundation, one of the many research tools that proliferated after the 1998 Washington Conference’s call for a fresh look at Nazi-era provenance issues. If the databases of digitized auction catalogues, Nazi records, lists compiled by Allied ‘Monuments Men’, and looted art cannot provide the granularity required for researchers, Schuhmacher recommends consulting German state and federal archives to uncover individual identities and stories and helpfully advises researchers how to approach them.

Schuhmacher packs a plethora of vital information into the book’s 175 pages. Each chapter concludes with a ‘Further Reading’ section that permits deeper exploration of the issues raised by the chapter. Notes for each chapter are supported by a comprehensive bibliography at the book’s conclusion that introduces readers to most of the critical resources used by Nazi-Era provenance researchers. His selection of photographs adds forgotten faces and visual evidence to buttress the case studies employed to illustrate how the Nazi state liquidated the art collections of German Jews. Finally, and helpfully, the book is available from University College London Press and the Victoria and Albert Museum gratis as a PDF file. Given the urgency of the topic as well as its first-rate writing and research, Nazi-Era provenance of museum collections: a research guide should be in every art library.