Looted art

The sack of Jerusalem, from the inside wall of the Arch of Titus, Rome

Looted art has been a consequence of looting during war, natural disaster and riot for centuries. Looting of art, archaeology and other cultural property may be an opportunistic criminal act or may be a more organized case of unlawful or unethical pillage by the victor of a conflict. The term "looted art" reflects bias, and whether particular art has been taken legally or illegally is often the subject of conflicting laws and subjective interpretations of governments and people; use of the term "looted art" in reference to a particular art object implies that the art was taken illegally.

Related terms include art theft (the stealing of valuable artifacts, mostly because of commercial reasons), illicit antiquities (covertly traded antiquities or artifacts of archaeological interest, found in illegal or unregulated excavations), provenance (the origin or source of a piece of art), and art repatriation (the process of returning artworks and antiques to their rightful owners).

History

File:Palma Giovane Warsaw.JPG

Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist and St. Stanisław by Palma il Giovane was looted by Napoleon and returned to Warsaw in the 1820s. It was later destroyed by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising.

Art looting has a long history, the winning party of armed conflicts often plundering the loser, and in the absence of social order, the local population often joining in. The contents of nearly all the tombs of the Pharaohs were already completely looted by grave robbers before the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. There have been a total of seven sackings of Rome. The Old Testament includes several references to looting and to the looting of art and treasures; in the Book of Chronicles it is said: "King Shishak of Egypt attacked Jerusalem and took away the treasures of the Lord's temple and of the royal palace; he took everything, including the gold shields that Solomon had made", and in the Book of Jeremiah 15:11 the Lord says: "Jerusalem, I will surely send you away for your own good. I will surely bring the enemy upon you in a time of trouble and distress ... I will give away your wealth and your treasures as plunder. I will give it away free of charge for the sins you have committed throughout your land." Other famous examples include the Roman Sack of Corinth in 146 BC, the Sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, the Sack of Baghdad in 1258, Hernán Cortés and the looting of the Aztec gold. In only some of these was the removal of artworks for their own sake (rather than the value of their materials for example) a primary motivation.

Since the rise of an art market for monumental sculpture, abandoned monuments all over the world have been at risk, notably in Iran, the old territories of Mesoamerican culture and Cambodia.

After the looting of Europe by Napoleon, others copied the institutionalized model of systematic plunder and looting. During the American Civil War, legal frameworks and guidelines emerged that justified and legalized the plunder and looting of opposing parties and nations. Henry Wager Halleck, a United States Army officer, scholar, and lawyer argued: "No belligerent would be justifiable in destroying temples, tombs, statutes [sic], paintings, or other works of art (except so far as their destruction may be the accidental or necessary result of military operations.) But, may he not seize and appropriate to his own use such works of genius and taste as belong to the hostile state, and are of a moveable character?".

In July 1862, Francis Lieber, a professor at Columbia College, who had worked with Halleck on guidelines for guerrilla warfare, was asked by Halleck, now General-in-Chief of armies of the Union, to develop a code of conduct for the armed forces. The code of conduct, published as General Orders No. 100 on April 24, 1863, signed by United States President Abraham Lincoln, later became known as the Lieber Code and specifically authorized the Armies of the United States to plunder and loot the enemy – a mindset that Hitler's armies copied one century later. The Lieber Code said in Article 36: "If such works of art, libraries, collections, or instruments belonging to a hostile nation or government, can be removed without injury, the ruler of the conquering state or nation may order them to be seized and removed for the benefit of the said nation. The ultimate ownership is to be settled by the ensuing treaty of peace." Russian and American forces relied on similar frameworks when they plundered Germany after the defeat of the Nazis.

The Lieber Code further defined the conditions of looting and the relationship between private plunder and booty and institutionalized looting "All captures and booty belong, according to the modern law of war, primarily to the government of the captor." (Article 45), "Neither officers nor soldiers are allowed to make use of their position or power in the hostile country for private gain, not even for commercial transactions otherwise legitimate." (Article 46) and "... [I]f large sums are found upon the persons of prisoners, or in their possession, they shall be taken from them, and the surplus, after providing for their own support, appropriated for the use of the army, under the direction of the commander, unless otherwise ordered by the government." (Article 72)

Massive art looting occurred during World War II; see art theft during World War II.

Looting of countries

Looting of Afghanistan

Many art pieces and artifacts from Afghanistan were looted during several wars; scores of artworks were smuggled to Britain and sold to wealthy collectors. "There are also fears that the bulk of the collection once in Kabul Museum, ... is now in smugglers' or collectors' hands. The most famous exhibits were the Begram ivories, a series of exquisite Indian panels nearly 2,000 years old, excavated by French archaeologists in the Thirties (1930s)". In November 2004, much of the missing collection numbering 22,513 items was found safely hidden. Over 200 crates had been moved downtown for storage at the end of the Soviet occupation including the Bactrian gold and Bagram Ivories. Some 228 of these treasures, including pieces of Bactrian Gold and many of the Bagram Ivories, were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from May 25 to September 7, 2008.

Looting of Cyprus

Following the invasion of Cyprus in 1974 by Turkey and the occupation of the northern part of the island, churches belonging to the Cypriot Orthodox Church have been looted in what is described as "…one of the most systematic examples of the looting of art since World War II". Several-high-profile cases have made headline news on the international scene. Most notable was the case of the Kanakaria mosaics, 6th-century AD frescos that were removed from the original church, trafficked to the US and offered for sale to a museum for the sum of US$20,000,000. These were subsequently recovered by the Orthodox Church following a court case in Indianapolis.

History of the Cyprus conflict

Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, Turkish-Cypriots and Christian Greek-Cypriot populations have been living together on the island. Starting around 1954, terrorist groups for both Greek and Turkish Cyprus citizens began to emerge, and these groups led to the beginning of the bloodshed on the island. The conflict between the terrorist groups created a reason for a national constitution to be drafted, which could offer greater independence and protection of Cyprus’ citizens rights. After the constitution was created the Greek-Cypriot leaders suggested around 10 constitutional amendments; these amendments were determined by the Turkish-Cypriots to be detrimental to their rights, and this caused the Turkish-Cypriots to ask mainland Turkey for help.

Starting in 1967, the Greek mainland was ruled by a military junta that was not satisfied with Cyprus’ new ideas of making their country independent. The Greek junta created a coup that would take out the acting Cypriot leader and place Nicos Sampson, a puppet of Athens, in charge on the island of Cyprus. Turkey, however, was not satisfied with their citizens on Cyprus being under Greek military rule, so they decided to advance on Cyprus to restore constitutional order because no other countries were offering to help. During the first phase of the Turkish advancement, the Turks only held about 8% of the island, but after the second phase of the advancement, the Turks occupied 38% of Cyprus. This invasion triggered the process of “ethnic cleansing”, and the southern part of the country became mostly Greek-Cypriot while the northern part became mostly Turkish-Cypriot; about 142,000 Greek-Cypriot citizens were displaced from the north, which moved about 1/4 of the existing population of Cyprus into the southern part of the country.
With Turkey and the Turkish-Cypriots in charge of the northern part of Cyprus, they started to rename streets, cities, and villages in Arabic because they wanted to take away any associations with the previous Greek culture that had occupied the area. This part of the conquest was a part of the process to make the Turkish regime more legitimate, and by doing this, they created an area that was a better fit for their national Turkish needs. A short time after the invasion, the Turkish north had built an airport and an access road because these two items had been lost to the north with the division of the island. These projects were built on large scales with the idea that someday people will be touring the northern part of Cyprus, and Turkish-Cypriot government has constructed a memorial of their invasion on the northern coast where the Turkish forces initially landed. The northern part of the island is where the church and art looting was concentrated. It is rumored that the Turkish-Cypriot leaders did not feel an obligation to preserve the artifacts and monuments in the north because they felt that the Greek-Cypriot government had oppressed them for too long.

In the southern part of the island, there have been many more extensive building projects under way because of the massive amounts of people who were displaced from the north. These refugees needed housing and support, so the southern part of the country needed to start large housing projects to help their citizens have homes. No monuments have been built in the southern part of the country because this situation is considered a national disaster and not a call for patriotism; the Greek-Cypriots want to believe that this situation will only be temporary but the northern government is working hard to stay.

Cyprus looting overview

The looting of northern Cyprus by the Turkish forces has been described as “one of the most systematic examples of the looting of art since World War II”. Archaeological sites, museums, churches, monasteries, castles, libraries, and private art collections have all been affected by the looting of the northern area of Cyprus; icons, frescoes, archaeological artifacts, and cultural heritage have been stripped from areas around the island and have been taken to places all over the world or simply destroyed. Some believe that this has been done to ‘Turkify’ the northern region of the country and erase the characteristics of the Cypriot predecessors, while people like Aydin Dikmen have been working to make money off of cultural heritage artifacts by selling them in international markets.

Non-Christian places of importance

Many non-Christian sites have been affected by the looting and destruction of northern Cyprus. During the time of the invasion, work on archaeological sites was halted. While the projects on the Greek-Cypriot southern area were started again after a short period of delay, the projects in the Turkish north were never started again. Many of the houses and workshops associated with archaeological projects in the north were looted, so the work that had been done was lost to the researchers. Many areas on the island of Cyprus were damaged by bombing and machine gun fire, and because of these issues, the pavement mosaics of the House of Dionysos in Paphos suffered extensive damage. The fighting not only was destroying Byzantine and Christian cultural heritage, but it was even destroying culture that had been in existence for far longer. There have been appeals filed with UNESCO, ICOM, and ICOMOS to help with the preservation of the remaining cultural heritage on the island, and a representative of UNESCO was appointed to help by 1976.

Looted religious sites and icons

On the island of Cyprus before the invasion, the majority of the inhabitants were Greek-Cypriots, and for these citizens, the Greek Orthodox Church was and continues today to be central to their identity and faith. In the north, there is a fear that Christianity is dying out because the churches and monasteries have been destroyed, transformed, or are falling into ruin. The northern Turkish inhabitants have transformed some former religious sites into to mosques, army barracks, stables, night clubs, and hotels, and it has been documented that only 3 churches and 1 monastery are currently in a dignified state out of the 520 churches and monasteries that were in the northern area of the country before the Turkish invasion. At least 55 churches have been converted into mosques, while another 50 churches and monasteries have been converted into other structures to serve the Turkish-Cypriots’. A spokesman for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus stated that the transformations of buildings happened because the buildings were falling into ruin, and he also stated that it is an Ottoman custom to transform buildings attributed to other religions into mosques; this idea can be linked to other Islamic sites, like the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Israel.

Yannis Eliades, the director of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, has estimated that 25,000 icons have disappeared since the Turkish military initially invaded the island in 1974, while others estimate that between 15,000 and 20,000 icons are missing, along with dozens of frescoes and mosaics dating between the 6th and 15th centuries, thousands of chalices, wood carvings, crucifixes, and Bibles. However, there have been some case in which the Church of Cyprus was able to reclaim icons or mosaics, and this is a great step forward for the reformation of their cultural heritage.

The transformations of religious sites have also spurred lawsuits from the few hundred Greek-Cypriots that are still living in the northern area. The Greek Orthodox Church has taken Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights because they were preventing practicing Christians from worshiping at previously religious, but currently transformed buildings. Even though the buildings have been destroyed or converted, the Greek-Cypriot citizens still want to be able to worship at these places to keep continuity with their faith without regard to the destruction.

For more examples of the transformations of the Christian sites in the north see: Magister, Sandro. ”Cyprus: Portrait of a Christianity Obliterated”. Chiesa News. Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso Spa. 3 September 2006. Web. 9 February 2012. <http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/46544?eng=y>.

Aydin Dikmen considered a key suspect

Aydin Dikmen is a 60-year-old man who has been arrested in relation to the looting and selling of looted goods from the island of Cyprus. He had been suspected of being involved in the selling of looted art since 1982, but he kept a low profile and fell off the radar for some time. His involvement was cemented when Peg Goldberg was sued by the Church of Cyprus in 1989 because she knew that she bought the mosaics from Dikmen; he claimed that he found the remains in the rubble of a church that had been forgotten and basically destroyed while he was working as an archaeologist in the northern part of Cyprus. We also have documentation of another transaction where Dikmen worked with art collectors in the United States; Dominique de Menil, of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, bought two 13th-century frescoes from Dikmen on behalf of the Church of Cyprus in 1983.

Those two previous cases are only two cases in which Dikmen’s presence has been suggested; he has been implicated in many more transactions, but those accusations have yet to be proven. However, in 1997, former colleagues of Dikmen helped the authorities arrest Dikmen and raid his many apartments. In these apartments, some of which Dikmen rented under false names and used as storage space, the authorities found a surplus of icons, frescoes, early Bibles, ancient pottery, statues, and coins from Cyprus. After learning of another residence of Dikmen’s, the authorities found 30 to 40 more crates filled with icons, frescoes, mosaics, and artifacts. Also in one of the residences, the authorities found drawings containing information on how to cut out mosaics to keep the faces of the religious figures intact, while still taking the piece away from the original space; this shows how systematic and planned out the looting of the churches and monasteries was for Dikmen and his associates in the northern part of Cyprus. The organization and the intense planning involved brings up the issue of possible aid coming from Turkish authorities in the northern part of Cyprus; there are rumors that the government and military knew about the looting and chose to not do anything about it. This discomforting idea is continually straining the ties between Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus.

Since Dikmen’s arrest in 1998, the Antiphonitis frescoes and the Kanakarian mosaics have been returned to Cyprus, and soon the 13th-century frescoes currently housed by the Menil Collection in Houston will be returned to the island, as well. The search for the looted art of Cyprus continues, and there seems to be more and more evidence of Dikmen’s presence in other transactions of international looted art. Many think that Dikmen is just a middle man who is working on behalf of more knowledgeable and rich patrons, but the mystery is still not solved. Hopefully the truth will be discovered in the future, and these beautiful artifacts, icons, mosaics, and frescoes can be returned to Cyprus to enhance their cultural heritage and identity.

Cases of repatriation

The Menil Collection and 13th-century frescoes

One case of repatriation for the Church of Cyprus is associated with the Menil Collection, based in Houston, Texas. This particular collection is one of the most important collections of icons, which have originated in areas such as Greece, the Balkans, and Russia and span a diverse range of times from the 6th to 18th centuries. Dominique de Menil, the founder of the Menil Collection, found the three 13th-century Byzantine frescoes for sale in 1983, by which time they had been separated into 38 different pieces. De Menil bought the frescoes on behalf of the Church of Cyprus, with whom she made an agreement to exhibit the frescoes in a purpose-built chapel until 2012; the collection offered to keep the frescoes longer, but the Archbishop of Cyprus has instead agreed to have an iconographer recreate the frescoes on the Houston chapel’s dome and apse and give the Houston chapel a 19th- and a 20th-century icon in return for the safekeeping of the 13th-century icons.

The original Cypriot chapel in the Ayios Themomianos Church in the northern part of Cyprus was a small limestone structure, with a central dome and pointed barrel vaults; the original was mostly used for prayer because of its small size. When the de Menil collection was granted temporary possession of the frescoes, they constructed a chapel to house the frescoes and keep them safe. This specially built chapel was designed by De Menil’s husband, François de Menil, who studied traditional Byzantine architecture and spatial arrangement from the original chapel at Lysi; the layout and the placement of the mosaics mirrors the arrangement from the original chapel. The interior of the chapel has black walls which are illuminated to create a sense of vastness and infinity; the black walls help to focus the attention of the viewer on the frescoes and create a divine experience for the viewer.

Icons are important because they depict images of greater significance, and they are used to instruct and inspire worship. These particular Cypriot frescoes have been identified with three different religious images: Christ Pantocrator surrounded by a frieze of angels, the Preparation of the Throne attended by the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, and the Virgin Mary flanked by Archangels Michael and Gabriel. The collection announced that March 4, 2012 would be the last day to see the frescoes in their place in Houston after being on long-term exhibit for 15 years. The frescoes in this collection are the largest intact Byzantine frescoes that can be seen in the Western Hempisphere.

Boy George and the Gold Icon of Christ

One Cypriot artifact that has been found was in the home of pop singer Boy George, also known as George O’Dowd. The artifact, a golden icon of Christ, had been hanging above the singer’s fireplace for 26 years, until the piece was recognized by a patron watching a TV interview of O’Dowd, which was taped in the singer’s living room. The icon is thought to have been stolen around 1974, during the chaotic time of the Turkish invasion of the Northern part of Cyprus, and there is documentation to believe that the icon was once housed in The Church of St. Charalambos in Neo Chorio-Kythrea. O’Dowd was unaware that the icon had been stolen because he bought the artifact “with good faith” from an art dealer in 1985. The singer is glad that the piece is going back to its original home because he wants everyone to see it on display in its rightful place. However, it will not be going back to the original Church in the northern part of Cyprus; it is being held in Brussels, Belgium, and it will return to Cyprus at a later date when The Church of Cyprus has an appropriate space in which it can be stored. This case has contributed to the Church of Cyprus and their efforts to repatriate “stolen spiritual treasures” that have come from their homeland of Cyprus.

Peg Goldberg and the Kankarian mosaics

This case study outlines the events that occurred in 1989 between Peg Goldberg, a local art dealer in Indianapolis, Indiana, and the Church of Cyprus when Goldberg gained “ownership” and then tried to sell Cypriot mosaics from the 6th century. These mosaics have been looted from the Church of the Virgin of Kankaria in the village of Lythrangomi in Northern Cyprus after surviving the 8th and 9th century. These mosaics had survived the 8th- and 9th-century iconoclasm in the Byzantine world and were considered to be finer than other mosaics, even the mosaics found in Ravenna, Italy and the mosaics in St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai. The Kankarian mosaics were cut into pieces when they were looted from the original church, and Peg Goldberg was able to purchase four segments of these early mosaics from Aydin Dikmen. These mosaics are important to the cultural, artistic, and religious heritage of Cyprus because they are some of the few remaining Byzantine mosaics from the island; when and how these mosaics were taken from Cyprus is unknown because there is documentation to show that they were still intact in 1976, two years after the initial invasion by the Turkish troops.

These mosaics first came into the view of the Church of Cyprus when Goldberg approached the Getty Museum to purchase the mosaic pieces. The Getty Museum recognized them as the lost Kankarian mosaics and informed Cyprus that they were in the United States. Shortly afterward, the Church of Cyprus filed a claim at the district court to try to reclaim the mosaics. The federal court in Indiana made a verdict in favor of the Church of Cyprus, and the mosaics were returned in 1991 to the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus. The verdict showed that Goldberg could not own the pieces because Dikmen had stolen the mosaics and had no right to pass on the ownership of the stolen mosaics. Goldberg stated that the pieces had been bought “in good faith” from a “Turkish antiquities dealer” who found the mosaics in an abandoned church, but the judge ruled that not looking into the background and workings of the dealer was unacceptable because it was her responsibility to look into the people she was working with. This case called in the multilateral treaty of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which calls for all available parties to help recover and return items that have been requested by the country of origin; using this international decree helped to show the importance of these artifacts which needed to be sent to their home land of Cyprus. People have been happy with this verdict for the Kankarian case because they want others to realize that cultural heritage of the world is not for sale, and hopefully discourage further selling of looted art in the international market.

The mosaic pieces that were involved in the Kankarian case have four different religious images. They depict Jesus as a young boy, the archangel Michael, Matthew, and James; the final two are images of apostles from the 1st century. The mosaics were named after the Church in which they were placed originally around 530. These mosaics have fallen into destruction because of the damage that they experienced through the process of removal from the church, shipping around the world, and during the restoration work that Goldberg commissioned. It is unlikely that these mosaics will ever be reinstalled in their original home, even if there are changes in the political situation on Cyprus, because they would most likely not make it through the re-installation process in the state that they are currently in.

Looting of Germany

After World War II, Germany was looted by Allied and Soviet forces; the systematic pillaging and looting by the Allies (particularly the Soviet Union) is still causing disputes and conflicts between Germany, Russia and the United States, as many of the objects have never been returned to Germany.

The Soviet plunder of Europe's art treasures constituted institutionalized revenge, while the American military's role in the stealing of Europe's treasures mostly involved individuals looting for personal gain.

The looting of Germany by the Soviet Union was not limited to official Trophy Brigades, but included many ordinary soldiers and officials who plundered for personal reasons. At least 2.5 million artworks and 10 million books and manuscripts disappeared in the Soviet Union and later in Russia, including but not limited to Gutenberg Bibles and Impressionist paintings once in German private collections. According to Time magazine, the Soviets created special "hit lists ... of what the Soviet Union wanted" and followed the historical "examples" given by Napoleon, Hitler, British and American armies. Other estimates focus on German artworks and cultural treasures supposedly secured against bombing in safe places that were looted after World War II, detailing 200,000 works of art, three kilometers of archival material and three million books.

Germany's collections lost 180,000 artworks, which, according to cultural experts are "being held in secret depots in Russia and Poland". The stolen artworks include sculptures by Nicola Pisano, reliefs by Donatello, Gothic Madonnas, paintings by Botticelli and Van Dyck and Baroque works rendered in stone and wood. In 2007, Germany published a catalog of missing artworks to document the extent, prevent the resale, and speed up the return of the war booty. Berlin's State Museum alone lost around 400 artworks during World War II. The German state (Land) of Saxony-Anhalt still maintains a list entitled Beutekunst ("Looted Art") of more than 1000 missing paintings and books believed confiscated by the US or the Soviet Union.

Poland is also in possession of some collections that Germany evacuated to remote places in Eastern Germany (the Recovered Territories that are part of Poland since 1945) as well as in occupied Poland. Among those there is a large collection from Berlin, which in Polish referred to as Berlinka. Another notable collection in Polish possession is Hermann Göring's collection of 25 historic airplanes (Deutsche Luftfahrt Sammlung) – ironically, it contains two Polish planes captured by Germans during their invasion of Poland (including a PZL P-11c of Army Kraków). Poland refuses to return those collections to Germany unless Germany returns some of the collections looted in Poland and still in its possession in exchange.

Entire libraries and archives with files from all over Europe were looted and their files taken to Russia by the Soviet Trophy Brigades. The Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenni Voennyi Arkhiv- RGVA) still contains a large number of files of foreign origin, including papers relating to Jewish organisations.

Berlin's Gemäldegalerie at Friedrichshain lost 441 major paintings, among them seven works by Peter Paul Rubens, three Caravaggios and three Van Dycks. The looted artworks might still be in "secret depositories ... in Moscow and St Petersburg". Veteran BBC foreign correspondent Charles Wheeler, then Berlin correspondent of the BBC's German Service, received a small painting as a wedding present in 1952 from an East German farmer, given in return for some potatoes. The portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (1522–1562), the daughter of the Neapolitan viceroy and wife of the first Duke of Florence, Cosimo di Medici I, which he found from the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, had been looted from the Gemäldegalerie. The gallery had photographed the picture by Alessandro Allori (1535–1607) before closing down and, in 1939, putting its collection in secure storage areas, which Soviet troops broke into at the war's end. Wheeler covered the process in It's My Story: Looted Art for BBC Radio 4, contacting the Commission for Looted Art, the identification of the painting's rightful owner in Germany and the hand-over in Berlin. On May 31, 2006, the commission, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, representing the Berlin state museums, announced the return of the painting.

The Eberswalde Gold Treasures and German Merovingian Art Treasures were taken from Berlin to Soviet Russia.

British troops and the Naval War Trophies Committee also looted artworks from Germany, including several pictures by marine artist Claus Bergen ("Wreath in the North Sea in Memory of the Battle of Jutland", "The Commander U-boat", "Admiral Hipper's Battle Cruiser at Jutland" and "The German Pocket Battleship Admiral Von Scheer Bombarding the Spanish Coast"), Carl Saltzmann ("German Fleet Manoeuvres on the High Seas") and Ehrhard ("Before the Hurricane at Apia Samoa" and "During the Hurricane at Apia"). The pictures were looted from Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik, as documented by a 1965–66 Ministry of defense file in the UK National Archives. The trophies were sent to British museums, five remain in the National Maritime Museum in London (NMM), and one picture ("Before the Hurricane at Apia") was lent to HMS Calliope in 1959, lost, and formally written off in 1979. The National Maritime Museum admitted in January 2007 that "the documentation at the NMM and the National Archives is not complete"; according to spoliation guidelines, the pictures should be regarded as having been "wrongly taken".

The Sistine Madonna by Raphael, looted by the Soviets after World War II and returned to the Dresden Gallery (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) in East Germany in 1955.

On 25 August 1955, the Soviet functionaries handed over to the representatives of East Germany 1240 paintings from the Dresden Gallery, including the Sistine Madonna and Sleeping Venus, which had been "saved and restored" by the Soviets after the Battle of Berlin. According to Irina Antonova, "a cultural bureaucrat in the traditional Soviet style" and Director of the Pushkin Museum, more than 1,500,000 items of cultural value (including the frieze reliefs of the Pergamon Altar and the Grünes Gewölbe treasures) were restituted to German museums at the behest of the Soviet government in the 1950s and 1960s. "We have not received anything in return," Antonova observed in 1999.

The reasons for the Soviet looting of Germany and the subsequent Russian attempts are revealed in an interview that Irina Antonova gave to the German Die Welt newspaper; the interview specifically focuses on the Russian notion of looting, using the historical example of Napoleon as a direct reference for the Russian justification of the Plunder of Germany: "Three quarters of all the Italian art in the Louvre came to Paris with Napoleon. We all know this, yet the works remain in the Louvre. I know the place where Veronese's large painting used to hang in the monastery of Vicenza. Now it's in the Louvre where it will stay. It's the same with the Elgin Marbles in London. That's just the way it is."

At the 1998 conference, Eizenstat was "impressed ... almost overwhelmed" when Boris Yeltsin's government promised "to identify and return art that was looted by the Nazis and then plundered by Stalin's troops as 'reparations' for Germany's wartime assault." Alarmed by these negotiations, the State Duma of the Russian Federation promulgated a law (15 April 1998) whereby "the cultural valuables translocated to the USSR after World War II" were declared national patrimony of the Russian Federation and each occasion of their alienation was to be sanctioned by the Russian parliament. The preamble to the law classifies the remaining valuables, such as Priam's Treasure, as a compensation for "the unprecedented nature of Germany's war crimes" and irreparable damage inflicted by the German invaders on Russian cultural heritage during the war.

Following the law adopted by the State Duma on 17 April 2002, the Hermitage Museum returned to Frankfurt an der Oder the looted medieval stained-glass windows of the Marienkirche; six of the 117 individual pieces, however, still remain missing. Andrei Vorobiev, the former Academic Secretary of the Museum, confirmed in 2005 the assumption that they are still in Russia (in the Pushkin Museum.) According to the Hermitage, "As a gesture in return, the German company Wintershall paid for the restoration of a church destroyed during the Second World War, Novgorod's Church of the Assumption on Volotovoe Pole". In addition, the Hermitage did demand and receive a compensation of USD 400,000 for "restoring and exhibiting the windows".

The so-called Priam's Treasure, discovered at and illegally taken from Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. It disappeared in 1945 from a protective bunker in Berlin to which it had been transferred from the Berlin State Museums and reappeared in September 1993 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

A silver collection consisting of 18 pieces was plundered by the NKVD after World War II from the German Prince of Anhalt, who suffered under both the Nazis and Bolsheviks alike, before he was posthumously rehabilitated. In a so-called "good will gesture", the collection was returned to the descendants of the Prince by the Ministry of Culture even though the Russian prosecutor originally refused the request of the children of the rehabilitated prince.

Lev Bezymenski, a Russian officer and translator who became a controversial historian and professor at Moscow's military academy, died on June 26, 2007, at age 86 in Moscow. He was a military intelligence officer of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov, participated in the interrogation of German Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, and translated the message confirming Adolf Hitler's death for Stalin. After the Red Army captured Berlin in 1945, he investigated Adolf Hitler's death and headquarters. In his many articles and books (Bezymenski, L. Stalin and Hitler (2002), Bezymenski, L. (1968). The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. Harcourt Brace. ISBN 978-0-7181-0634-8), he failed to mention that he looted several containers filled with around 100 gramophone records from the Reich Chancellery, recordings performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age. The collection stolen by Bezymenski, who himself was Jewish, included many Russian and Jewish artists. Bezymenski brought the looted collection of the Führer's favourite discs to Moscow, where he felt "guilty about his larceny and hid the records in an attic, where his daughter, Alexandra Besymenskaja, discovered them by accident in 1991." Bezymenski understood the political implications of his actions and "kept quiet about the records during his lifetime for fear that he would be accused of looting." The collection still remains in Russia.

Baldin Collection

Main article: Baldin Collection

In another high-profile case, Viktor Baldin, a Soviet army captain in World War II and later directed the Shchusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow, took 362 drawings and two small paintings on May 29, 1945, from Karnzow Castle in Brandenburg which had been stored there by the Kunsthalle Bremen. Russian Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi estimates the worth of the Baldin Collection at USD 1.5 billion. From the entire collection of the Kunsthalle, more than 1,500 artworks are still missing; in 1991 and 1997, the Kunsthalle published printed catalogues of the works of art from the lost during the evacuation in the Second World War.

Looting of Iraq

Main article: Archaeological looting in Iraq

The National Museum of Iraq after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A hole caused by a shell can be seen in the wall above the tank. The museum was looted after the invasion, and many antiquities were missing or destroyed.

More recently, the term is used to describe the looting in Iraq after the American-led invasion, including, but not limited to, the National Museum of Iraq. Following the looting during the chaos of war, the British and American troops were accused of not preventing the pillaging of Iraq's heritage. Furthermore, many U.S. military and civilian personnel were subsequently caught in U.S. airports trying to bring in stolen artifacts. The occupying forces, busy with combat missions, failed to protect the National Museum and Library in Baghdad from Iraqi thieves. While the Iraqi Ministry of Oil building was quickly and famously secured in the hours following the invasion for its reported wealth of geological maps, U.S. troops were busy with combat missions as museums, national archives and government offices were vandalized by the Iraqis themselves. The troops were criticized: "American officials came under sharp criticism from archaeologists and others for not securing the museum, a vast storehouse of artifacts from some of civilization's first cities."

After the U.S. troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003, at least 13,000 artifacts were stolen during the looting by Iraqis, including many moved from other sites into the National Museum for safekeeping. U.S. troops and tanks were stationed in that area but, concerned with defending themselves from attack and without orders to stop the looting, "watched for several days before moving against the thieves." Sergeant Jackson of the 1st Marine Battalion explained that "...our orders were to avoid engaging religious Muslims who were unarmed. So when groups of Imams demanded to remove religious items to prevent them from being defiled by the infidels, how were we supposed to know that they were thieves? Our captain didn't want to create an international incident by arresting religious leaders."

The Boston Globe writes: "Armies not of fighters but of looters, capitalizing on a security vacuum after war, have pillaged Babylon." Donny George, the curator of Iraq's National Museum says about the art looting:

"It's the crime of the century because it affects the heritage of all mankind."

George's comments followed widespread reporting that 100 percent of the museum's 170,000 inventoried lots (about 501,000 pieces) had been removed by Iraqi looters. In fact, about 95 percent of the museum's contents never left the museum. According to investigators of the thefts, about two percent of the museum pieces were stored elsewhere for safekeeping. Another two percent were stolen, in an apparent "inside job", just before U.S. troops arrived; about one percent, or about 5,000 items, were taken by outside looters. Most of the looted items were tiny beads and amulets.

The horror of art looting in general is made clear by Hashem Hama Abdoulah, director of the museum of antiquities in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish-controlled zone of northern Iraq.

"When your history is stolen from you, you lose your sense of that history. Not just the Iraqi people, but all of civilization that can trace its roots back to this area."

Many other looted art objects ended up in black markets with rich art collectors and art dealers, mostly in the United States, Great Britain, Italy and Syria; in 2006, the Netherlands returned to Iraqi authorities three clay tablets that it believed had been stolen from the museum. One of the most valuable artifacts looted during the plunder of the National Museum of Iraq, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was recovered in the United States with the help of Hicham Aboutaam, an art dealer in New York. Thousands of smaller pieces have remained in Iraq or been returned by other countries, including Italy and the Netherlands.

Some of the artifacts have been recovered, custom officials in the United States intercepted at least 1,000 pieces, but many are still advertised on eBay or are available through known collectors and black markets. "U.S. troops, journalists and contractors returning from Iraq are among those who have been caught with forbidden souvenirs." The U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs maintains a list and image gallery of looted artworks from Iraq at the Iraq Cultural Property Image Collection.

Despite public announcements and temporary efforts by the Iraqi and American administrations, the situation in Iraqi Museums and archaeological sites did not improve. Donny George, the curator of Iraq's National Museum, the first person who raised his voice and alarmed the world about the looting in Iraq after the American invasion and publicly stated his opinion about the "ongoing failure of Iraqi leaders and the American military to protect the sites", left the country and resigned in August 2006. Before he left, he closed and sealed the museum and plugged the doors with concrete. In an article in Newsweek, he even said that the stolen items should not be returned to Iraq under the given circumstances: "We believe this is not the right time now to have them back. Since we know all about them and are promised them back whenever we want them, it is better to keep them in these countries."

Looting of Italy

The looting of Italian art was not limited to Napoleon alone; Italian criminals have long been, and remain, extremely active in the field, and Italy's battle to recover the antiquities it says were looted from the country and sold to museums and art collectors worldwide is still ongoing. The Italian government and the Art Squad of the Carabinieri, Italy's national police force, made special efforts to "[crack] the network of looters, smugglers, and dealers supplying American museums," collecting "mountains of evidence—thousands of antiquities, photographs, and documents—seized from looters and dealers in a series of dramatic raids." According to the BBC, Italian authorities have for several years insisted on the return of stolen or looted artworks from wealthy museums and collectors, particularly in America. Italy is demanding the return of the looted art and antiquities from many famous American institutions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Princeton Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the private collection of the Leon Levy and his wife, Shelby White.

In an interview with Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, investigative journalist Peter Watson wrote in June 2006 that according to the Italian public prosecutor Paolo Ferri, 100,000 tombs have been looted in Italy alone, representing a value of US$500 million. He estimates that the overall monetary value of looted art, including Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, West Africa, Central America, Peru, and China, is at least four times the Italian figure. Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini authored The Medici Conspiracy, a book that uncovers the connection between looted art, the art and antiquities markets, auction houses, and museums.

In 2007, the Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum, at the center of allegations by Italian officials about the pillaging of cultural artifacts from the country and other controversies, was forced to return 40 artifacts, including a 5th-century BC statue of the goddess Aphrodite, which was looted from Morgantina, an ancient Greek settlement in Sicily. The Getty acquired the statue in 1988 for $18 million USD from an anonymous collector fully aware about the controversy focusing on the unclear provenance and origin. The Getty resisted the requests of the Italian government for nearly two decades, only to admit later that "there might be 'problems' attached to the acquisition." In 2006, Italian senior cultural official Giuseppe Proietti said: "The negotiations haven't made a single step forward", only after he suggested the Italian government "to take cultural sanctions against the Getty, suspending all cultural cooperation," did the Getty Museum return the antiquities. According to the New York Times, the Getty confirmed in May 2007 that the statue "most likely comes from Italy."

Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase, stolen from an Etruscan tomb and smuggled from Italy, returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006

Similar disputes about stolen and looted art have also involved the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which was forced to return a set of 16 silver pieces from the 3rd century BC, illegally excavated from Morgantina, Italy. In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art relinquished ownership of a 2,500-year-old Greek vase known as the Euphronios krater, a krater painted by Euphronios, stolen from an Etruscan tomb and smuggled from Italy, 15 pieces of Sicilian silver and four ancient vessels in exchange for long-term loans of other prized antiquities. According to the New York Times, the case, "of its kind, perhaps second only to the dispute between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin marbles," "became emblematic of the ethical questions surrounding the acquisition of ancient art by major museums."

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was forced to return 34 stolen artifacts – including Hellenistic silverware, Etruscan vases and Roman statues. The aforementioned institutions have agreed to hand over the artworks in exchange for loans of other treasures.

In 2005 Marion True, former curator of the Getty Museum, and art dealer Robert E. Hecht were placed on trial in Rome; Italy accused them of buying and trafficking stolen and illicit artworks (including the Aphrodite statue). Evidence against both emerged in a 1995 raid of a Geneva, Switzerland, warehouse that contained many stolen artifacts. In September 2007, Italy dropped the civil charges against True. The court hearings against True ended in October 2010, and against Hecht in January 2012, as under Italian law the statute of limitations, for their alleged crimes had expired.

The warehouses were registered to a Swiss company called Editions Services, which police traced to an Italian art dealer, Giacomo Medici. The Carabinieri stated that the warehouses contained 10,000 artifacts worth 50 billion lire (about $35 million). In 1997, Giacomo Medici was arrested; his operation is believed to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market." Medici was sentenced in 2004 by a Rome court to ten years in prison and a fine of 10 million euros, "the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy."

In another, unrelated case in 1999, the Getty had to hand over three antiquities to Italy after determining they were stolen. The objects included a Greek red-figure kylix from the 5th century BC signed by the painter, Onesimos, and the potter, Euphronios, looted from the Etruscan site of Cerveteri; a torso of the god Mithra from the 2nd century AD; and the head of a youth by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos. According to the New York Times, the Getty refused for several years to return the antiquities to their rightful owners.

Yet another case emerged in 2007, when Italy's art-theft investigation squad discovered a hidden cache of ancient marble carvings depicting early gladiators, the lower portion of a marble statue of a man in a toga and a piece of a column. Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli used the case to underline the importance of these artifacts for Italy.

Looting of Poland

File:Throne Augustus Poniatowski.jpg

Throne of Stanisław August Poniatowski displayed in the Moscow Kremlin. The throne was looted after the collapse of the November Uprising in the 1830s. In the 1920s, the Soviet government returned it to Poland, yet it was deliberately destroyed by the Germans during World War II.

The Załuski Library, the first public library in Poland, was founded by two brothers, Józef Andrzej Załuski, crown referendary and bishop of Kiev, and Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, crown chancellor and bishop of Cracow. The library was considered one of the most important libraries of the world, featuring a collection of about 400,000 printed items, manuscripts, artworks, scientific instruments, and plant and animal specimens. Located in Warsaw's Daniłowiczowski Palace, it was looted in the aftermath of the second Partition of Poland and Kościuszko Uprising in 1794 by Russian troops on orders from Russian Tsarina Catherine II; the stolen artworks were transported to St. Petersburg and became part of the Russian Imperial Library, which was founded one year later. Although some pieces were returned by the Soviet Union in 1921 and were burned during the Warsaw Uprising against German forces, other parts of the collection have still not been returned by Russia. Polish scientists have been allowed to access and study the objects.

The Polish Crown Jewels were removed by the Prussians in 1795 after the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

After the collapse of the November Uprising, literary and art treasures were removed from Poland. Poland regained some of the artefacts after the Treaty of Riga, comprising the furnishings of the Warsaw Castle and the Wawel Castle.

During the Second World War, Germany tried to destroy Poland completely and exterminate its population as well as culture. Countless art objects were looted, as Germany systematically carried out a plan of looting prepared even before the start of hostilities (see also Nazi plunder). Twenty-five museums and many other facilities were destroyed. The total cost of German theft and destruction of Polish art is estimated at 20 billion dollars, or an estimated 43% of Polish cultural heritage; over 516,000 individual art pieces were looted (including 2,800 paintings by European painters; 11,000 paintings by Polish painters; 1,400 sculptures, 75,000 manuscripts, 25,000 maps, 90,000 books including over 20,000 printed before 1800, and hundreds of thousands of other items of artistic and historical value). Soviet troops afterward contributed to the plunder as well.

Looting of Latin and South America

The looting of Central and South America by the conquistadors is one of the best-known plunders in the world.

Roger Atwood writes in Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World: "Mayan stonework became one of those things that good art museums in America just had to have, and looters in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala worked overtime to meet the demand." (See: Maya stelae#Looting)

Looting in Mesoamerica has a long tradition and history. Graves are often looted before the archaeologists can reach them, and the artifacts are then sold to wealthy collectors in the United States, Japan, or Europe. Guillermo Cock, a Lima-based archaeologist, says about a recent find of dozens of exquisitely preserved Inca mummies on the outskirts of Peru's capital city, Lima: "The true problem is the looters," he said. "If we leave the cemetery it is going to be destroyed in a few weeks."

Looting by perpetrator

Looting by the British Empire

The transformation of theft and plunder as an incentive for troops to institutionalized, indiscriminate looting following military conflict can be observed in the wake of British conquest in Asia, Africa and India. The looting of artifacts for "both personal and institutional reasons" became "increasingly important in the process of "othering" Oriental and African societies and was exemplified in the professionalism of exploration and the growth of ethnographic departments in museums, the new 'temples of Empire'." Looting, not necessarily of art, became a vital instrument for the projection of power and the British imperial desire to gather and provide information about the "exotic" cultures and primitive tribes.

India had been home to great treasures of the world (knowledge and material wealth both) for over 2000 years. Initially raided by multiple middle eastern Islamist looters, Some of whom would eventually come over for as many as 17 raids (Mahmud of Ghazni) and every time go back with loot to be carried by thousands of horses and elephants. The later generations realized that why should they come here and loot only when they could come to India and rule the peace-loving Buddhist and Hindu natives. India was ruled for seven centuries by Mughal rulers when the British heard of the richness India had and came to India as businessmen to set up the East India Company, which would eventually rule India for over 200 years. In the total existence of 400 years huge taxes were imposed on rulers all over India and India help fund each and every of the British dreams to be achieved. All the huge Diamonds from the Golconda Mines were gifted to the British Crown and individual generals looted whatever they could lay their hands on. Diamonds, rubies and emeralds studded in all the monuments were replaced with glass stones and originals taken away either by British civil authorities or by individual British officers. The estimates vary from as low as around 100,000 pounds every annum during Mughal times to 35 Million pounds or so by Dadabhai Nauroji. Till the battle of Plassey, India of course had a big trade surplus with the World which had nothing to offer except gold in exchange for textiles, silk and spices. But once the British won the battle of Plassey, the great looting of Bengal started and they had a monopoly on trade, which basically funded everything from their industrial revolution to high taxes for British goods in America to the World wars Britain fought successfully. Basically in 200 years of British rule India was transformed from one of the World's wealthiest nation (along with China controlled world's 70-80% GDP for past twenty or so centuries) to one of the poorest.

Looting by Napoleon

File:Descent from the Cross (Rembrant).jpg

Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross was looted in 1806 by French soldiers from the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, Germany; current location: Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Napoleon's conquests in Europe were followed by a systematic attempt, later more tentatively echoed by Hitler, to take the finest works of art of conquered nations back to the Louvre in Paris for a grand central museum of all Europe. Napoleon boasted:

"We will now have all that is beautiful in Italy except for a few objects in Turin and Naples."

Many works were returned after his fall, but many others were not, and remain in France. Many works confiscated from religious institutions under the French occupation now form the backbone of national museums: "Napoleon's art-loot depots became the foundation of Venice's Accademia, Milan's Brera galleries. His brother Louis founded Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum; brother Joseph started Madrid's Prado" (for the Spanish royal collection).

Napoleonic commander and Marechal Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult stole in 1810 six large pictures painted by Murillo in 1668 for the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville. One painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, is now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; a second looted painting, The Healing of the Paralytic, is in the National Gallery in London; only two of the original paintings have returned to Seville.

Another French general looted several pictures, including four Claudes and Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, from the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel in 1806. The stolen goods were later bought by the Empress Josephine and subsequently by the tsar. Since 1918, when the Bolshevik government signed a peace treaty with Germany and Austria, have German negotiators demanded the return of the paintings. Russia refused to return the stolen goods; the pictures still remain in the Hermitage.

Looting by the Union and Confederate Armies during the American Civil War

On November 7, 1863, Edward D. Townsend of the Union army wrote General Order No. 360: “Satisfactory evidence having been produced to the War Department that a bronze equestrian statue, unlawfully taken from a private house in Fredericksburg, at the time of the capture of that place by the Union forces, was the private property of Mr. Douglas Gordon, of that city, it is— .Ordered: That it be restored to Mrs. Annie C. Thomas, the sister of Mr. Gordon, who has made application therefor.” Some of Gordon's works of art were recovered through Lafayette C. Baker, chief of the Union secret police.

The United States Congress enacted legislation allowing for claims to be filed for property losses on July 4, 1864. Claims were restricted to loyal citizens.

Looting by Nazi Germany

Main articles: Nazi plunder and 2012 Nazi loot discovery

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, accompanied by General Omar N. Bradley and Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., inspects art treasures hidden in a salt mine in Germany.

During World War II, the Nazis set up special departments "for a limited time for the seizure and securing of objects of cultural value", especially in the Occupied Eastern Territories, including the Baltic states, Ukraine, Hungary and Greece. The Russian imperial residences around St. Petersburg were thoroughly looted and deliberately blown up, so that their restoration is still under way. The Catherine Palace and Peterhof were reduced to smoldering ruins; among the innumerable trophies was the world-famous Amber Room. Medieval churches of Novgorod and Pskov, with their unique 12th-century frescoes, were systematically plundered and reduced to piles of rubble. Major museums around Moscow, including Yasnaya Polyana, Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery, and New Jerusalem, faced a similar fate, with their architectural integrity irrevocably impaired.

The legal framework and the language of the instructions used by Germany resembles the Lieber Code, but in the Nuremberg Trial proceedings, the victorious Allied armies applied different standards and sentenced the Nazis involved as war criminals. Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, detailing the Jurisdiction and General Principles, declares the "plunder of public or private property" a war crime, while the Lieber Code and the actions of the Allied armies in the aftermath of World War II allowed or tolerated the looting. The main objective of the looting is made clear by Dr. Muhlmann, responsible for the securing of all Polish art treasures: "I confirm that the art treasures ... would not have remained in Poland in case of a German victory, but they would have been used to complement German artistic property."

One inventory of 39 volumes featuring the looted art and antiques, prepared by the Nazis and discussed during the Nuremberg trials, lists "21,903 Works of Art: 5,281 paintings, pastels, water colors, drawings; 684 miniatures, glass and enamel paintings, illuminated books and manuscripts; 583 sculptures, terra cottas, medallions, and plaques; 2,477 articles of furniture of art historical value; 583 textiles (tapestries, rugs, embroideries, Coptic textiles); 5,825 objects of decorative art (porcelains, bronzes, faience, majolica, ceramics, jewelry, coins, art objects with precious stones); 1,286 East Asiatic art works (bronzes, sculpture, porcelains, paintings, folding screens, weapons); 259 art works of antiquity (sculptures, bronzes, vases, jewelry, bowls, engraved gems, terracottas)."

When Allied forces bombed Germany's cities and historic institutions, Germany "began storing the artworks in salt mines and caves for protection from Allied bombing raids. These mines and caves offered the appropriate humidity and temperature conditions for artworks."

Looting by the Soviet Union

The Eberswalde Hoard from Germany disappeared in 1945 from Berlin and was located in 2004 in a secret depot within Moscow's Pushkin Museum.

The Soviet Union engaged in systematic looting during World War II, particularly of Germany – seeing this as reparations for damage and looting done by Germany in the Soviet Union. The Soviets also looted other occupied territories; for example, looting by Soviets was common on the territories theoretically assigned to its ally, communist Poland. Even Polish Communists were uneasy, as in 1945, the future Chairman of the Polish Council of State, Aleksander Zawadzki, worried that the "raping and looting by the Soviet army would provoke a civil war." Soviet forces had engaged in plunder on the former eastern territories of Germany that were to be transferred to Poland, stripping it of anything of value. A recently recovered masterwork is Gustave Courbet's Femme nue couchée, looted in Budapest, Hungary, in 1945.

In 1998, and after considerable controversy, Russia passed the Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation, which allowed Russians to keep the illegally stolen art works and museum pieces and to prevent any restitution to their rightful owners in Germany.

Looting by the Spanish Empire and others

The conquistadors looting Latin and South America became one of the most commonly recognized plunders in the world.

Roger Atwood writes in Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World: "Mayan stonework became one of those things that good art museums in America just had to have, and looters in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala worked overtime to meet the demand." (See: Maya stelae#Looting)

Looting in Mesoamerica has a long tradition and history, many graves are looted before the archaeologists could reach them, and the artifacts are then sold to wealthy collectors in the United States, Japan or Europe. Guillermo Cock, a Lima-based archaeologist, says about a recent find of dozens of exquisitely preserved Inca mummies on the outskirts of Peru's capital city, Lima: "The true problem is the looters," he said. "If we leave the cemetery it is going to be destroyed in a few weeks."

See also

• Antiquities trade
• Art theft
• Art theft and looting during World War II
• Interpol
• List of artworks with contested provenance
• Royal Casket
• Polish Crown Jewels
• War loot
• List of missing treasure
• United States restitution to the Soviet Union

Further reading

• O'Connor, Anne-Marie (2012). The Lady in Gold, The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-307-26564-1.

External links

• War-booty exhibition at Livrustkammaren, Stockholm, 22 November, 2007–28 February, 2009 (In English)
• Commission for Looted Art in Europe
• Lost Art Database Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste, Magdeburg, Germany (In English)