The Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa) at the University of Bremen holds a hitherto little-known dossier of several hundred pages bearing the name of Georg Stein (1922–87). The file includes an unpublished manuscript and a collection of copies of documents accumulated in the course of Stein’s almost fanatical search for the Amber Chamber, by now the almost mythical artwork that the Prussian King Frederick William I once gave to Tsar Peter the Great as a present in return for 200 tall Russian soldiers who were incorporated in the king’s favorite Prussian infantry Regiment no. 6, the so-called Potsdam Giants. In 1941, it was looted by the German invader from the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo (in suburban Leningrad) and transported to Konigsberg, where it disappeared by the end of the war. The undertaking occupied Stein for some 20 years. He did not find the Amber Chamber – just as no other treasure hunter has before him. However, he did discover another significant treasure among the German wartime cultural loot: the Russian Orthodox Church treasure from the Pskovo-Pechersky Holy Dormition Monastery (Sviato-Uspenskii Pskovo-Pecherskii Monastyr in Russian) in Pechory (Petseri in Estonian; Petschur in German), Pskov Oblast, near the Russian-Estonian border. He did not find this treasure hidden away in some underground cache but, rather, well preserved – yet shrouded by a veil of secrecy – in the Museum of Icons (Ikonen-Museum) in the city of Recklinghausen, North Rhine-Westphalia.
This article examines the fate of the Pechory Monastery treasure – from its seizure by the Reich Leader Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg [ERR]) as a “wartime preservation” measure, through its curious, politically troubled path to the Museum of Icons in Recklinghausen, and, finally, to its quiet but triumphal return to Pechory in May 1973, just in time for the 500th anniversary of the Pskovo-Pechersky Monastery. The most significant act of cultural restitution to the Soviet Union by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) largely resulted from the efforts of Georg Stein, within the context of East-West politics of the détente years, as attested by the documents he left behind at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen. This article builds on Stein’s unpublished compilation, which at the beginning of the 1990s was given to the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, where it is archived as a part of a huge collection of materials about German art looting in the Soviet Union during World War II. His son preserves another part of his papers, which he generously made accessible to the author.Footnote 1
Origins
The Pskov-Caves Monastery in Pechory (or the Pskovo-Pechersky Dormition Monastery) is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Peipus, near the border between Russia and Estonia. One of the most important Russian Orthodox male monasteries, its name derives from the caves (pechory in Russian) in the sandstone hills on which it stands. These caves served as hermitages in former times and were thus the birthplace of the monastery. Following the monastery’s chronicles, the first hermits settled in the caves during the fourteenth century. Officially, the founding of the monastery dates from August 1473, when the Church of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God (Tserkov Uspeniya Bogoroditsy) was consecrated.Footnote 2 It is one of the few monasteries on Russian territory never to have been closed in the course of its existence, not even in the Soviet interwar decades – when the monastery thrived as part of Estonia – during German wartime occupation, or after World War II, when it was once again part of the Pskov Oblast of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (RSFSR).
The interwar period
The 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty, by which Soviet Russia recognized the independence of Finland and Estonia, assigned the area around Pechory to Estonia. From the present-day perspective of the monastery and the Russian Orthodox Church, this decision appears to have been a stroke of luck because it spared the monastery from the anti-religious measures ranging from closures, confiscations, and plundering to complete destruction, and eventually led to the demise of many religious institutions in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The treasure of the Pskovo-Pechersky Monastery was apparently newly inventoried after the area became part of Estonia. This was probably due to the Estonian efforts to nationalize the Orthodox Church and subordinate it under the Estonian Metropolitan in Tallinn. At that time, the treasure comprised approximately 600 individual items, including ecclesiastical vestments in silk, velvet, and gold and silver brocade, 10 bishops’ gold and silver crowns richly decorated with pearls and gemstones, an ivory funeral crown, and many smaller church objects made of gold and silver – censers, crosses, reliquaries, utensils, plates, and rings – as well as embroideries.Footnote 3
The Estonian inventory outlasted not only the Soviet annexation and the German occupation of Estonia but also the war and the postwar decades. A copy was given to Georg Stein after he had managed to find the treasure in the Museum of Icons (Ikonen-Museum) in Recklinghausen, which is now to be found in the museum’s archive.Footnote 4 In June 1940, Estonia, together with the two other Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, was annexed to the Soviet Union as a result of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union) signed by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov on 23 August 1939. Thus, the Pechory Monastery came under Soviet rule for the first time. This situation lasted little more than one year, until German armed forces invaded the Soviet Union on 21 June 1941. By mid-August 1944, the Red Army had reconquered the eastern parts of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. As early as 23 August 1944, exactly five years after the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and just a few weeks after the liberation of the city of Pskov, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued an order for “the formation of the Pskov Oblast within the RSFSR.” Allegedly “acknowledging the repeated pleas of the local population,” this order incorporated the Pechory area as well as some additional eastern Estonian territory into the Pskov Oblast, thus part of the RSFSR.Footnote 5
German occupation
The Pechory Monastery treasure was probably on Germany’s lists of “cultural goods to be secured” prior to its invasion of the Soviet Union. In line with the nationalist, racist art policy prevailing in National Socialist Germany, the monastery was also apparently considered an Estonian, rather than a Russian, cultural asset. As early as 1940, the art historians Richard Hamann-McLean and Otto Kletzl had taken a series of photographs of the monastery in the context of an extensive photo campaign requested and supplied by the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda). This endeavor is quite revealing because Hamann-McLean and Kletzl were actually supposed to document the immovable cultural assets of the Baltic Germans in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia following the forced evacuation of Germans from those countries as a consequence of the 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
The photographs of the Russian Orthodox monastery cannot be justified within that framework, however, even in the best-case scenario. They might have been taken as a by-product, yet the history of the photo campaign speaks against this explanation. Baltic German art historian Niels von Holst initiated the undertaking in his capacity as head of the External Affairs Office of the Berlin State Museums.Footnote 6 As a member of the commission negotiating the export of movable Baltic German cultural assets in the Soviet Union, he “incidentally” compiled a list of “German cultural assets” in Russian museums that he recommended museum directors in the German Reich should acquire.Footnote 7 This, and the fact that the Ancestral Heritage Society (SS Ahnenerbe) was among those funding the photo campaign, suggests that the images were quite possibly an indication of Nazi covetousness.Footnote 8
Apparently, the Pechory Monastery treasure was put under lock and key as early as late summer 1941 by order of the German Regional Commissar or, as mentioned in other reports, by the “Reichsführer SS.”Footnote 9 Monks were allowed to remove liturgical implements only in exceptional cases with the commissar’s permission and a signed receipt. The Visual Arts Special Staff (Sonderstab Bildende Kunst) of the ERR in the Baltic region quickly took over the “administration” of art objects, inspecting and photographing them, and discussing their future fate.Footnote 10 This could possibly be judged as an attempt to wrest control of the Pechory treasure from the military administration.
Removal of the treasure
On 24 March 1944, the Pechory Monastery treasure was removed by the ERR staff. The objects were loaded onto a civilian truck and taken to the St John Monastery in Riga. According to ERR files, the abbot of the Pechory Monastery had asked the Germans to evacuate the treasure to protect it from plundering or destruction by the advancing Red Army. The treasure was to be returned to the monastery “as soon as the military and political situation allowed.”Footnote 11 The 607 items, which formed the Pechory “treasure” collection, were carefully documented on two lists dated 17 and 18 March 1944, signed by Abbot Pavel Gorshkov (1867–1950) together with three friars. They were packed into four crates, and the abbot personally assisted in their sealing and transfer to the ERR staff.Footnote 12 The Metropolitan of the Baltic states had four copies of the lists sent especially to the Main Working Group Ostland (Hauptarbeitsgruppe Ostland) in Riga on 24 March.Footnote 13
On 24 May, the transport was directed from Riga to Burg Colmberg, an imposing medieval castle complex above Ansbach in the Franconia region of northwestern Bavaria. The Pechory Monastery treasure was stored there together with numerous other looted cultural assets that the ERR had taken over from the Wehrmacht’s Military Art Protection Unit (Militärischer Kunstschutz) in Riga.Footnote 14 The castle had been property of the former German ambassador in Tokyo, Ernst Arthur Voretzsch (1868–1965), since 1927. His nephew, Ernst Adalbert Voretzsch (1908–1991), an expert on Christian archaeology and church history, had been working with the ERR since 1942. He arranged for the ERR’s use of his uncle’s Colmberg property as one of their main Bavarian repositories, especially for cultural valuables from the Baltic republics and northwestern Russia. Once installed, he supervised the ERR storage operations there and was personally responsible for inventorying many of the ERR looted valuables from the Eastern Front.
The monastery treasure enjoyed a special status at the Colmberg repository. The objects taken over from the military art protection unit were usually unpacked, their completeness checked according to the accompanying lists and their conservatory condition examined. The four crates from Pechory remained closed, however. As Ernst Arthur Voretzsch mentioned, “four crates containing the treasure of the monastery of Pechory, inventoried, sealed” were stored in a room in the basement that he called the “crates cellar” (Kistenkeller).Footnote 15 He later confirmed upon request that the crates in Colmberg remained unopened.Footnote 16 There is no explicit explanation for this in the documents. The process suggests, however, that the treasure was meant to be strictly separated from the other objects stored in the castle and protected against “unauthorized” access. Presumably, the repository in Colmberg was intended to be just a short interim storage, which the Pechory Monastery treasure should have left soon. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why all these precious objects and even the most sensitive textiles were left in the crates without regular assessment and without continuous restorative care. This procedure was negligent, to say the least, and in no way appropriate, especially if compared to the procedures applied to the other objects in the repository, and all the more if the reason for removing the treasure from its original place truly was to protect the treasure from any harm.
One incident may illustrate that the ERR Special Staff for the Visual Arts Section were truly convinced that they had taken the treasure into custody until the political situation would allow for it to be returned to the monastery or at least that they did everything to keep this purpose as their official narrative. A few months after the Pechory Monastery treasure had arrived in Colmberg, on 3 October 1944, a staff member of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete) came to Colmberg and demanded access to the treasure in order to choose (and take) one object as a gift to the bishop of Pechory. Voretzsch denied this request since the person could not prove his mission. As a reaction, the head of the Visual Arts Special Staff, Robert Scholz (1902–81), pointed out the fact that the treasure was stored on behalf of the bishop and that the Germans were not allowed to break the monastery seals. Later, Scholz got a reply from Rosenberg’s personal assistant, SS Standartenführer Werner Koeppen (1910–94), explaining that the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories had actually planned to return the treasure in order to disprove Soviet propaganda about the Germans’ art looting.Footnote 17 Both versions hold up the narrative of the treasure being kept in safety and not being taken away from the rightful owners. It may be assumed that the Visual Arts Section’s official version was an instrument to keep away other Nazi authorities. However, the fact that even the custodian in Colmberg did not open the crates for an inspection strongly suggests that this narrative and the actual intentions were at least close to each other, if not identical.Footnote 18
At the end of the war, Voretzsch was arrested in Colmberg for an investigation into his personal involvement in ERR activities and imprisoned in a camp in Hammelburg (Franconia). Before his imprisonment, he handed over the inventory lists to one of the US Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A) officers when US troops reached Colmberg.Footnote 19 The objects stored in Colmberg were kept there for almost another year before being brought to the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP).
The postwar period
Documents of the US Army’s MFA&A section indicate that the cultural assets from the Soviet Union stored at Colmberg arrived at the MCCP between 27 March and 15 April 1946.Footnote 20 The shipment from Colmberg was confirmed, but exact data about the incoming objects – for example, an exact list of the incoming pieces – is missing from the files.Footnote 21 The crates with the Pechory treasure arrived at the MCCP on 2 April 1946.Footnote 22 There, most of the objects from Colmberg were quickly documented, and, just a few months later, in August 1946, the sixth US restitution shipment to the Soviet Union – and the first from the MCCP – was delivered to Soviet authorities.Footnote 23 This transfer followed the general US policy of restitution of German wartime cultural loot to their country of provenance. Thus, from September 1945 until August 1959, American authorities transferred 19 shipments of looted cultural goods to the Soviet Union.Footnote 24
The Pechory Monastery treasure remained in the MCCP. The objects were processed, just like all the other objects, and a part of them photographed. A set of property cards was issued that, amongst other information, also indicated photographs taken onsite.Footnote 25 Very often, however, sets of objects like coins, identically looking cups or plates, as well as objects belonging together like cups and lids or pieces of jewelry were noted on the same property card. Accordingly, the 607 objects that had been packed in the monastery back in 1944 were now documented on only 213 MCCP property cards. From that moment onward, it became impossible to trace every single piece of the collection.
The retention (that is, non-restitution) of the Pechory Monastery treasure resulted from a clarification in US restitution policy toward the Soviet Union with regard to cultural property from the independent Baltic republics, annexed to the Soviet Union following the 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Actually, some archives and museum exhibits from Latvia had been included in the second US restitution transfer to the Soviet Union that took place in Pilsen (Plžen in Czech), Czechoslovakia, in late October 1945. Subsequently, however, the United States, together with the United Kingdom, refused to return any more archives and other cultural property of provenance in the Baltic republics to the Soviet Union. The first restitution from the MCCP to the Soviet Union, dated 28 August 1946, included 1,178 crates of cultural property from Northwest Russia, including paintings, icons, and early cartographic materials from Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov, Gatchina, and Pavlovsk, most of which had been stored in the ERR repository of Colmberg.
On 5 August 1946, Captain Edwin C. Rae, the MFA&A officer handling restitution issues in the Office of Military Government in Bavaria and the MCCP, clarified US policy in an inter-office memorandum. He gave explicit instruction for cultural assets from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia not to be turned over to the Soviet Union representatives:
1. It is desired that materials evacuated from the subject Baltic States and that part of Poland now claimed by Russia be separated from materials definitely from within the boundaries of pre-war Russia and stored in a separate place. The presence of this material in the Collecting Point should not be discussed with the Russians.
2. Should the Russian delegates bring up the matter, they are to be told politely but positively that we are not authorized (i.e. will not) to turn over to them anything that was received from any territories other than those of pre-war Russia.
3. The fact that some materials from the Baltic States have already been turned over to the Russians has no bearing upon the question.Footnote 26
The reason for this policy is to be found in pre-war history. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the area in which the monastery was located had been part of independent Estonia from 1920 until August 1944, that is through the 1939 Soviet annexation and the subsequent German occupation. According to a Western Allied agreement (not signed by the Soviet ally), all cultural assets removed from Nazi-occupied territories of Europe by any German authorities were to be repatriated to the states from which they had been seized. The latter states were subsequently responsible for restituting the goods to their rightful owners, irrespective of whether they were official institutions, private companies, or individuals.
Since the United States never recognized the annexation of the Baltic republics by the Soviet Union in August 1940 as a result of the 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, they were not prepared to return the Pechory Monastery treasure to the Soviet Union. Since Estonia remained part of the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, from the point of view of the US government, there was no state to which the Pechory Monastery treasury could have possibly been handed over at that point.Footnote 27 US authorities may not have been aware that Pechory had officially become part of the RSFSR already in August 1944, having been annexed to the expanded Pskov Oblast. However, even if they were aware of the current status quo starting in August 1944, they apparently refused to recognize the further act of annexation of that important monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church to the RSFSR.
Another argument put forward not to restitute the treasure may also have consisted of the fact that the treasure was considered Russian Orthodox Church property. Bearing in mind the repression of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union and its systematic expropriation in the 1920s, a return of the objects to the Soviet Union may have also been considered unlawful, as it was not very likely that the objects would actually be restituted to their rightful owner – the Pechory Monastery itself or the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Pskov.Footnote 28
As the MCCP was closing its operations, the Pechory Monastery treasure was transferred from Munich (the MCCP) to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point (WCCP) – together with many other cultural assets that had at that point not been returned to their countries of provenance – in two shipments in May and November 1949. A new list of the now 212 Pechory positions was issued and handed over to the WCCP together with the objects, which had been packed in 11 crates.Footnote 29 The first receipt issued on 8 June 1949 bears a typed remark that one item – namely, a Russian bishop crown – never made it to Wiesbaden.Footnote 30 The crown was most probably stolen either during the process of packing in Munich or during its transport to Wiesbaden.
Following the closing of the WCCP in May 1951, the treasure was transferred into the trusteeship of the Municipal Art Gallery in Wiesbaden (Städtische Galerie) and its director, Clemens Weiler (1909–82).Footnote 31 Unlike other cultural assets from the WCCP, however, it did not go into the trusteeship of the State (Land) of Hesse but was placed in the custody of the Foreign Office. This, again, indicates the special status of the Pechory Monastery treasure.
In 1955, the director of the Recklinghausen Municipal Museums, Thomas Grochowiak (1914–2012), successfully initialized the founding of the Museum of Icons, a Museum of Art of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, in his hometown in North Rhine-Westphalia.Footnote 32 For Weiler, the first postwar director of the Wiesbaden museum, this was a welcome opportunity for an energetic attempt to free the museum repository of some of the cultural assets still stored there under trusteeship administration. On 27 April 1955, he contacted Grochowiak and proposed that the new museum take over the Pechory Monastery treasure, which had been stored (neglected and unused) in crates at Wiesbaden for six years and was in danger of being damaged should this storage situation persist.Footnote 33
Grochowiak responded quickly and affirmatively. In early May 1955, he first contacted Ardelia Hall, the responsible MFA&A colleague now at the State Department in Washington, DC, to request that the Pechory Monastery treasure be transferred to Recklinghausen as a loan. He based his request on the current holdings of the museum – valuable icons that “had primarily been sold abroad by Russian government offices in 1925” as well as permanent loans from other museums and “donations from private sources.”Footnote 34 Still lacking, however, were certain types of icons but, above all, liturgical articles and garments, exactly those items represented in the treasure, although no icons were included. He also explained that his Wiesbaden colleague felt it desirable for the treasure to be finally made accessible to the public. The arguments that Grochowiak used show his ignorance and a certain lack of mens rea as far as the true ownership of the cultural items in question was concerned. However, Grochowiak nonetheless sensed that his request could possibly encounter difficulties because he added that he would like to obtain the items even if “reservations should arise regarding their exhibition” since he was very interested in their scholarly study.Footnote 35
The US State Department left the decision about the transfer of the Pechory Monastery treasure to the German authorities. Thus, the ball was in the Foreign Office’s court. A staff member of the Cultural Department initially advised that the matter should be investigated. He had the available documents and prior “inquiries regarding the original owner” examined and summarized the findings in a memorandum dated 5 July 1955:
According to the documents, the matter involves art objects from a Latvian [sic!] monastery that a German officer handed over to American authorities following the German surrender. The U.S. agency stored the art objects at the Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden and later transferred them to the Municipal Picture Gallery for their safekeeping under trusteeship. Department 6 [the legal department] has considerable reservations about transferring this art property to a publicly accessible museum. The possibility exists that the Soviet Union will request the return of the art works if their presence in the Federal Republic of Germany becomes known. Because the objects evidently do not stem from the old Soviet Union, but from Latvia, such a restitution claim would bring up other complicated problems. At a time when the Soviet Union has officially suggested establishing cultural ties with the Federal Republic of Germany, the possible discussion of such a restitution claim seems to me to be particularly undesirable. Hence, I am of the opinion that the application by the Municipal Museum of Recklinghausen should be denied, at least preliminarily. To avoid unpleasant publicity, I intend to verbally inform the director of the Municipal Museum of Recklinghausen of this denial.Footnote 36
There consequently was apprehension about a disruption of German-Soviet relations arising from possible restitution claims, which could be complicated by the Baltic provenance of the art objects. Without explicitly saying so, the author implied that the 1940 Soviet Union’s annexation of the three Baltic republics as a result of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had not been recognized by the United States under international law, as explained above. A position statement by the Foreign Office’s Legal Department issued soon after the memorandum explicitly reiterated this opinion. It was also a clear indication of the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had not yet taken a position on the matter, mostly out of fear that a decision might aggravate either the Baltic emigrants, the United States, and/or the Soviet Union.Footnote 37
Grochowiak showed understanding for the Foreign Office’s concerns. Nevertheless, he requested permission to take custody of the objects in order to preserve and study them in secret. The Foreign Office stated its acceptance of this solution, and, in September of that same year, an agreement was drawn up about the transfer of the treasure to the museum in Recklinghausen. It prohibited any form of public display of the objects and limited access exclusively to scholars. At this point, the Ministry of Culture of North-Rhine Westphalia firmly rejected the transfer of the objects, however, precisely because of their unclear ownership.
Barely two years later, the Foreign Office was forced to reveal its true position on the Baltic question for another reason – namely, when the Soviet Union demanded the restitution of the Tallinn (Reval) City Archives (then still held in Tubingen) in December 1956. In that case, a comprehensive expert opinion determined that the FRG, as early as the beginning of the 1950s, had de facto begun to follow US policy, formulated during the war, and in this regard expressly questioned its own legal succession from the National-Socialist regime.Footnote 38 The non-recognition precluded restitution of cultural assets to the Soviet Baltic republics. Ultimately, it was this answer to the Baltic question that decided the fate of the Pechory Monastery treasure in the postwar period. The West German position resulted in the non-restitution of cultural assets from the Baltic region and required that secrecy subsequently be maintained.
The Soviet demands for restitution of the Tallinn City Archives halted negotiations about the transfer of the Pechory Monastery treasure to the Museum of Icons in Recklinghausen. They did not resume until 1958. With the FRG’s position on the Baltic question apparently clarified for the time being, all German participants accepted the unclear ownership of the treasure. This made it possible for them to concur within just a few months on the previously drafted, and now slightly modified, agreement for the transfer to Recklinghausen.Footnote 39 Other important questions regarding insurance, transport, responsibility for expenses, for example, were also quickly settled. Shortly before the actual transfer of the cultural assets in December 1958, another department in the Foreign Office did raise more concerns, but it was ultimately satisfied with the explicit instruction that absolute secrecy was to be maintained.Footnote 40
New concerns arose in 1958, however, when the Soviets arranged for the ceremonial return of some 1.5 million objects to museums in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). These were a portion of the items removed from the Soviet zone of Germany (as well as Berlin) by Soviet Trophy Commissions after the war. In this context, some GDR officials speculated that there were large quantities of Soviet cultural assets being held back by the government of the FRG.Footnote 41 This assumption, in turn, was based on the Soviet government’s assertion that the Soviet Union had never received any cultural assets that had been looted by German authorities during World War II. Some Russian officials have actually maintained this narrative until recently, although the opposite was proven some 20 years ago when inventories of the shipments from Germany were published in Moscow and Washington, DC, in 2001.Footnote 42 The entire process was characterized by the FRG’s uncertainty about its position and a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union and the GDR.
Georg Stein
Given the circumstances, the Pechory Monastery treasure could have remained in its hiding place for decades. It turned out differently, however: the secrecy was broken by the persistent investigations of an amateur researcher by the name of Georg Stein, a farmer from Lower Saxony who was following the traces of the lost Amber Chamber. Stein was not just another madman among the many treasure hunters fascinated by the myth of the Amber Chamber, who have been obsessively searching for it and whose hypotheses about the whereabouts of the lost marvel continue to produce the most colorful notions even today. Stein had a special motivation. He was born in Königsberg in 1923, fought in the war, and was taken prisoner of war by the Russians. His father had worked as a scholar in the Königsberg museum’s administration until being shot in the spring of 1945 on orders of the local Nazi party leadership. Stein’s sister was a museum assistant in Königsberg Castle, the last proven location of the Amber Chamber, where many specialists believe it was destroyed in one of the castle towers, in part by the British bombing in August 1944 and in part by the Red Army assault in the spring of 1945.Footnote 43 Stein himself had viewed the Amber Chamber exhibited there in November 1941. For him, the Amber Chamber was a family matter, and its recovery as well as its appropriate restitution to Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo) would have been a delayed gratification for his family’s suffering under the Nazi regime.
Stein began his research in 1966, prompted by an article by the British journalist Anthony Terry, who wrote about the Soviet search for the Amber Chamber in the London Sunday Times. In September 1970, he contacted Simon Wiesenthal hoping that he could provide access to documents about National Socialist art looting. From Wiesenthal, Stein first heard about a large-scale operation by the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) in January 1945 to secure all art and church treasures seized during the war and, thus, also about the “monastery treasures from ‘Pecory (sic!) near Dorpat’ (Tartu) that came via Libau (Liepāja) to Kappeln and later to Münster.”Footnote 44
In October of that same year, the German Federal Chancellery responded to a request by Stein with information about a file in the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) indicating that “a church treasure held in a monastery in the Baltic countryside during the Second World War was now located in the Federal Republic of Germany, stored in a museum. The Foreign Office Legal Department is currently investigating where the church treasure belongs.”Footnote 45 Shortly thereafter, he learned the location of the treasure from a Cultural Department employee, who pressured him, however, to keep silent until the ownership issue had been clarified. Stein had no intention of remaining silent. In the summer of 1971, he began his own search for the treasure and its rightful owner. He described the case in a detailed letter to the abbot of the Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery on Holy Mount Athos. The abbot answered immediately, on 14 August 1971, confirming the removal of the treasure: four friars formerly at the Pechory Monastery and now living on Athos had witnessed it. The abbot also forwarded the information to the Moscow patriarch, who, with Stein’s help, began efforts to have the treasure returned.
Through its Department for External Church Relations, the Russian Orthodox Church also immediately declared that it was the rightful owner of the treasure because the monastery had always belonged to the Pskov Diocese, regardless of any existing national boundaries. No other person or entity had any legal claim to the treasure. Vested with the necessary powers by its Department for External Church Relations, Stein was asked to lead negotiations on the church’s behalf.Footnote 46 Interestingly, Stein also received a letter from the archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Belgium, dated 21 August 1971, who asked for further information about the treasure.Footnote 47 The archbishop’s source was the Panteleimon Monastery in Greece. It may not have been the abbot himself, however, but rather someone else, since the archbishop only vaguely referred to the monastery. Soon after, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church invited Stein to Moscow, appointed him agent for the church’s interests in the FRG and provided him with a copy of the above-mentioned Estonian list and a Russian list, which presumably is identical to the list sent to Colmberg in 1944.Footnote 48
Stein passed on his information to Wiesenthal in September 1970. In December of that year, he contacted Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, a member of the editorial board of the national weekly Die Zeit as well as Stein’s compatriot and fellow refugee from East Prussia, and got in touch with the international press.Footnote 49 By 1972, Stein had tried to raise the interest of several newspapers. The first response to his efforts was an article in the Sunday Times (London) that openly accused the German government of purposely keeping the case secret in order to prevent restitution.Footnote 50 The article seems to have hit the mark since a German Foreign Office representative addressed Stein in order to find out whether it had actually been him who had provided the British author with such information.
The German Foreign Office had observed Stein’s activities before, so the article in the Sunday Times did not come as a surprise. Dönhoff contacted her acquaintances in the Political Department of the Foreign Office and informed them about Stein’s steps as well as his further plans, which he had shared with her in October 1971.Footnote 51 Dönhoff’s contact person in the Political Department, Andreas Meyer-Landrut (later the ambassador of the FRG in Moscow), wrote a detailed report and recommended finding a political solution for the Pechory Monastery treasure quickly before Stein could go public. He was concerned about the diplomatic scandal that the disclosure could cause. The Legal Department, however, did not share the concerns and recommended that no action should be taken at that point.Footnote 52
Reactions to Stein’s letters by the German press, collected in his private archive, show that his investigations hit a sensitive spot not only in official politics but also in West German society. In the editorial office of Axel Springer, now one of the largest European publishing houses, the executive staff were openly disturbed that someone brought up the matter of German loot from World War II, especially from Eastern Europe, still in German hands. However, they were anxious not to interfere in the foreign policy of the FRG in that regard, a fact that might raise the question of the independence of German media in the early 1970s.Footnote 53 Another national newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, did publish an article about the Pechory Monastery treasure in September 1972. Without the detailed knowledge that Stein could have provided, the author claimed that it had been the director of the Museum of Icons in Recklinghausen himself who had approached the Foreign Office, asking for the objects to be returned to the monastery.Footnote 54
In this article, the author described the majority of the objects as products of nineteenth-century church manufacturers, thus attempting to downplay the significance of the treasure and the fact that it had been retained for so many years. Stein immediately wrote a letter to the editor to rectify these statements, which were in his eyes unfounded, and to discuss the question of the treasure’s rightful owner. The editorial office informed him that they were not willing to publish his letter, explaining that it was “unusual to have problems pulled out to the public where submissions to the head of state are concerned, because this could harm the finding of an appropriate solution in such a difficult situation.”Footnote 55 The only German newspaper to publish balanced information about the case comparatively early was the Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt. In this newspaper, the author tried to describe the case as objectively as possible. He sought to weigh the different positions – that of the German government, Stein’s perspective, as well as that of the different church institutions claiming to be the rightful owners of the treasure – without stating his own verdict on the matter.Footnote 56
Restitution
The ownership question was precisely the problem causing unease at the FRG’s Foreign Office: who had been the owner of the art objects until 1940 and how had their legal status changed by Soviet annexation of the Baltic republics and by German occupation? Who, therefore, was the owner of the art objects when they were removed in 1944? This is not the place to go into detail either about the considerations contained in the Foreign Office’s legal expertise or about those voiced in an extensive report prepared by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. The central question was whether the abbot of the Pechory Monastery had the right to decide on the treasure’s transfer according to the legal situation in 1944. If that was the case – that is, if the monastery itself and not the Russian Orthodox Church – had been the rightful owner of the treasure at that time, the return of the treasure could be refused because the Russian Orthodox Church was not entitled to it.
Contrary to the state of things at the time of the treasure’s transfer to the Recklinghausen museum still in place at the time of Stein’s first enquiry in 1970, the objective could no longer be to conceal the existence of the treasure in a museum, whatever the justification might be. Instead, it all boiled down to the Baltic question, which was now, once again, under discussion. In 1972, the experts from the Max Planck Institute ultimately came to the following conclusions:
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1. Church assets had become Soviet property in 1940.
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2. The German occupation had not annulled the nationalization of Church assets.
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3. The treasure was thus the property of the Soviet Union at the time of its removal.
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4. These findings are valid, irrespective of whether or not the Federal Republic of Germany recognizes the annexation of the Baltic countries.Footnote 57
Without going into further detail here, it should be mentioned that the experts appear to have been influenced by a desire to make restitution possible. Their judgment answered the question of whether the federal government had to yield to the monastery’s request for the return of the treasure or could decline it by referring to the Baltic question and maintaining the argument that the Pechory Monastery had been part of Estonian territory in 1944. Thus, they did not offer a solution to the Baltic question but, rather, declared it irrelevant in this case. The restitution of the treasure was then negotiated based on the Max Planck Institute’s report.
In this context, it is worth mentioning that in March 1971 the Foreign Office was anxious to promote its own narrative on the handling of the Pechory case through the decades. An official version was issued by the Foreign Office, according to which the people responsible had always been well aware of the treasure and, upon request, never contested nor denied its presence at Recklinghausen. In this version, it was pointed out once more that the abbot of the Pechory Monastery delivered the treasure voluntarily to the ERR in order to have it protected against destruction. It denied that the Foreign Office worried about the international complications when trying to find a solution for the extraordinarily difficult legal situation.Footnote 58
In 1972, the Museum of Icons spread another narrative in a number of communications and publications. They stated that in 1968 the museum’s staff had proactively asked the Foreign Office to organize the restitution of the treasure when they had learned that the Pechory Monastery was open. Regrettably, the inquiry had taken rather long, they argued, but soon the rightful restitution would be put into effect.Footnote 59 This alleged request, however, cannot be verified in the files of the Foreign Office.
The final decision to return the treasure led to one last inspection and examination of the lists. The Museum of Icons’ staff carefully checked the old Estonian list as well as the Russian list that they had received from Stein. It turned out that the Estonian list contained 614 individual items, two more pieces than the 1944 list. The list compiled in Pechory in 1944 was compared to the Estonian list and to the actual inventory of the treasure. The inspection revealed remarkable differences in items and numbers: compared to the Estonian list, 115 items could not be identified in the inventory of the Museum of Icons. The museum’s staff found that 82 items on the Estonian list did not appear at all on the 1944 list, so they assumed that those items had never left the monastery or at least were not evacuated with the transport to Riga. This assumption proved to be false since 43 of those items presumably left in Pechory in 1944 were actually identified in the Recklinghausen inventory. On the other hand, 77 of the 115 items on the Estonian list that were missing in Recklinghausen actually appeared on the 1944 list as being packed for transfer to the ERR. Finally, the Museum of Icons’ staff found that 88 items could not be related to any of the items on the 1944 list. Despite all the discrepancies, the museum’s staff packed 608 items into 12 crates that were shipped from Recklinghausen to Pechory.Footnote 60
On 24 May 1973, the treasure, which had been transported to Leningrad by ship, arrived at the Pechory Monastery. The crates were unloaded, items checked with the accompanying lists, found complete, and put into the monastery’s treasury. The German Consul General Alfred Blumenfeld, Archimandrites Alimpii Voronov and Serafim Rozenberg, as well as Archdeacon Nafanail Pospelov signed an agreement about the return. The next day, the return was celebrated with a solemn service, attended by representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, by delegates of the Metropolitan of Leningrad and the patriarch in Moscow, as well as by political officials from the region. The German side was represented by Alfred Blumenfeld, who later reported about the ceremony; Thomas Grochowiak, representing the Museum of Icons in Recklinghausen; and a delegate of the embassy of the FRG in Moscow.Footnote 61 Blumenfeld was aware that the return took place shortly before the celebrations of the Monastery’s 500th anniversary in August 1973. He concluded his report expressing his hopes that the return would be acknowledged by the Soviet Union as an act of good will and reconciliation.Footnote 62
The restitution was not the first return of cultural objects from the FRG to the Soviet Union. As early as 1962, 15 crates of technical books that had been found in the Heidelberg University Library, which, according to their labeling, originated from various institutions in the Soviet Union, were more or less secretly returned via the Soviet embassy in Bonn.Footnote 63 However, the restitution of the Pechory treasure was the first large-scale return of cultural objects seized during the war by German occupants to the Soviet Union that was effected by the FRG. It aroused a remarkable amount of attention in the FRG’s press and abroad, starting in 1972, when the news broke about the Russian monastery treasure that “had been discovered” in the Museum of Icons in Recklinghausen. The museum’s archive retains a collection of newspaper articles from the region of Recklinghausen, from the national press as well as from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and, not surprisingly, the Soviet Union.Footnote 64 The reports range from attempts to downplay the treasure’s material value and consequently diminish German responsibility for its initial seizure and subsequent secret retainment to tabloid accounts that sensationalize the whole story from beginning to end.
Several local newspapers in Lower Saxony reported about the case by calling Georg Stein a traitor and “Moscow’s spy.”Footnote 65 In September 1972, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung even argued that the Museum of Icons wanted to get rid of the items because they allegedly took up storage space and consumed the restorers’ working hours. The author also praised efforts made to preserve the cultural goods as well as to clarify the question of who was the rightful owner while protecting the FRG from unjust allegations.Footnote 66 When commenting on the actual restitution, the regional newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten celebrated the treasure’s return to the monastery and emphasized the careful handling of the entire case by the FRG as well as the diplomatic respect that the Soviet Union officials had shown in allowing the treasure to be returned directly to the monastery itself.Footnote 67 At the same time, the Soviet Russian newspaper Pravda underlined the immense historical, cultural, and material value of the returned treasure and explained the context of the recently normalized relations between the two states.Footnote 68 These few examples of a much broader press coverage illustrate once more the strong ideological dimension of the debate about wartime-looted cultural treasures during this period.
Overall, after the restitution had finally been put into effect, interventions in the German press sounded quite different from the replies to Stein’s letters sent only the previous year. It should be noted, however, that progressive media, which had generally reacted positively to Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, were much more enthusiastic about it than the conservative newspapers that had previously rejected Stein’s requests and offers.Footnote 69
Closing remarks
In May 1973, the treasure was returned to the Pechory Monastery, thanks to the personal mission and energetic intervention of Georg Stein. The FRG’s Foreign Office had previously made no attempt whatsoever to clarify the ownership of the treasure. Even inquiries by Grochowiak or Weiler were met with reservations, and secrecy was decreed as the solution to the problem. Whether these measures were meant to avoid restitution is a moot point. Surely, there was apprehension about the potential unforeseeable consequences of a serious debate about the matter at hand – that is, the FRG’s position on the Baltic question and the possible damage to the country’s image should the withholding of cultural assets become known. Thus, an earnest discussion only began after Stein had created facts with his research and its publication, which ruled out continued concealment and forced officials to make a decision. However, the political climate had also changed. Without the policy of détente practiced by Chancellor Willy Brandt’s government, Stein would probably have been able to accomplish little.
The story of the Pechory Monastery treasure and its restitution may well be seen as an example on how the problem of Nazi cultural loot and restitution has been discussed and handled throughout the decades. It has been determined by a reluctance to take a clear position, by attempts of keeping the status quo – for example, retaining cultural goods in the museums even when the ownership was clear and unquestioned – and, in this special case, by strong anti-Soviet attitudes in public administration and society. To overcome all the elements of this situation, individual commitment supported by public attention aroused by the media and a political will to change the status quo had to come together at the same time. This also applies – as a pattern – to other individual restitutions as well as to the development of the entire restitution policy in Germany until the present day.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Patricia Kennedy Grimsted for her great support, long and fruitful discussions on the subject, and all the knowledge she generously shared with me. I am equally grateful to Christoph Frank for sharing his archival finds and discussing the matter of Nationalsocialist art looting throughout the many years of research in this field, and especially for drawing my attention to the German Foreign Office documents that initially inspired this article.
