Holocaust Art Reclamation

"His choice, basically, was: you need to pay this much and you had better find a way to come up with the money. And it would have been impossible to secure the money from bank accounts because they were all frozen because Max Stern was a Jew.
"Haas revenues increased eightfold from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s. So he was clearly profiting from the art business that was being flooded with Jewish objects. What the Stuttgart museum believes is that Dr. Scheufelen, the donor of the Stern work, was taking advantage of the discounted sales of Jewish works to build his private collection.
"And what we're counting on, more and more, is that if museums and other institutions really do consider themselves part of the moral and cultural fabric of a society, then they have to act that way, and so this return by Stuttgart has given us incredible hope that Germany may have turned a corner."
Clarence Epstein, Concordia University, Max Stern Art Restitution Project

In Hitler's Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Jews were forbidden from teaching, from acting in the judiciary, from all professional walks of life, and Jewish children were no longer permitted to attend school. Wealthy Jews soon realized that it was too late to sell their belongings and flee Germany. They were still, in any event, in a state of disbelief that they would be harmed, as German citizens.

Berlin, after all, was the urbane, cosmopolitan capital of the world. Its scientists and cultural institutions were renowned worldwide. Culture and the arts were vitally important to German identity, they worshipped their writers, their poets, their artists, their music composers, their scientists. And, as it happened, many of them were Jews. And Jews were also enthusiastic art collectors.

Max Stern was the son of a man who originally assembled and owned a vast collection of treasures in his Stern gallery located in Dusseldorf in 1913. He had professional relations with museums across Germany. And then those treasures, just like the belongings of other Jews who owned property and art across the country were being confiscated by the Nazi regime.

Max Stern was informed he would have to liquidate all his holdings, sell all the art works his gallery owned, and he did. Other non-Jewish collectors and dealers were anxious to acquire the works that Jews were forced to sell, and they grabbed them at bargain prices since Jews were in no position to demand their true value in compensation. Max Stern settled in Montreal in 1941 where he became a renowned art dealer.

He also involved himself in the attempted recovery of priceless works of art stolen by the Nazis. In Germany to the present day, art from that era is considered to be legally the rightful property of whomever happens now to have ownership of it, irrespective of how it was acquired.

But just recently, the estate of Max Stern received at a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin the Stuttgart Museum's Virgin and Child, once owned by Mr. Stern, now deceased.

AFPT

Researchers at the Holocaust Claims Processing Office in New York and museum researchers in Stuttgart worked together to determine that an influential patron had donated the Flemalle masterpiece to the museum in 1948. An art dealer who paid Max Stern a pittance for the work tn years earlier had sold the painting and the buyer had, as a patron given it as a gift to the Stuttgart Museum.

An estimated 100 and more Stern treasures are still out in circulation in Germany. Researchers are working to recover the artwork so that full restitution can be completed. It is a work in progress.