Trophy pictures. Forgotten names: German collector Otto Krebs

On the top floor of the Hermitage there is one of the "special storages" of the museum, where there is a part of the trophy works of art taken to Russia from Germany after World War II.

On the top floor of the Hermitage is one of the "special storages" of the museum, where there is a part of the trophy works of art taken to Russia from Germany after the Second World War. Until recently, only the director and the direct curator of the hall had access here.

"Over the past 55 years, none of the works stored there have been studied by specialists," admitted Boris Asvarishch, curator of the department of the history of Western European art. This is a sad fact, because about 800 paintings are kept in the special room.

Most of the trophy works of art are planned to be transferred to the modern storage of the Hermitage when it is completed. According to experts, it will take several more years if the museum finds a source of funding to complete only half of the rebuilt building.

Some of the paintings are damaged, but Hermitage experts claim that this happened during the Second World War, when the paintings were kept in German banks.

The most beautiful examples of trophy painting belong to Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir and Picasso. They are now on public display in the halls of the Hermitage. In addition, among the works in special storage, there are canvases by El Greco, works by the schools of Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens. Most of the paintings came to the museum from private collections, such as the German industrialists Otto Gerstenberg and Otto Krebs.

The origin of some of the paintings has not yet been established, but some of them ended up in the museum from the personal collections of Adolf Hitler and other leaders of the Third Reich.

One floor below, on the second floor of the Hermitage not far from the main expositions, there is another special depository, which contains up to 6,000 items of oriental art. Most of them were previously exhibited at the Museum of East Asian Art in Berlin. These works have also spent the last half century in complete oblivion. Among the highlights of the collection are 8th-9th century wall frescoes from a Buddhist monastery located in western China. All of them are still (!) stored in metal boxes that were used by soldiers to transport them.

There may be fragments of frescoes removed in the 1900s from the Bezeklik temple by the German archaeologist Albert von le Coq. Von le Coq discovered caves near the city of Turfan in the province of Xinjiang and took all their contents (and this is no less than 24 tons of cargo!), He took them to Europe in three stages. Later, the British archaeologist Orel Stein also removed rarities from Bezeklik, now these treasures are stored in the National Museum of Delhi. After two such "successful" scientific forays, practically not a single work remained in place.

If there are indeed Bezeklik frescoes in the drawers of the Hermitage, then their rediscovery may have a serious impact on the further study of Asian antiquities.

Other art objects in this room are hundreds of Japanese silk paintings dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as various Japanese and Chinese arts and crafts.

In the pantries of the Hermitage there are about 400 items from the Schliemann collection dating back to the Trojan War. Of all the 9,000 items in the Schliemann collection, about 6,000 are again exhibited in Berlin, but 300 of the most valuable gold artifacts "got" the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. About 2,000 more are irretrievably lost.

Other pieces of art kept in this section date from the Roman and Celtic civilizations and from the Merovingian period. The latter form a significant part of a large collection of several hundred items that the Hermitage management plans to place together with their colleagues from Berlin, possibly as early as 2002.

Where is the time line beyond which the trophy cultural values ​​of other countries become an integral legal part of the cultural layer of another country, if this, of course, is not a gift, not an official purchase, but a robbery?

PASSION FOR TROPHY CULTURAL PROPERTIES

As long as humanity remembers itself, it has been engaged in large-scale and petty theft of everything and everything with demonic rapture: a neighbor from a neighbor, a company from a company, the state from the state. At the same time, the majority have no shame in front of each other for their kidnapping. This phenomenon, stunning the imagination, is difficult to comprehend.
The best representatives of the human race understood the disastrous sinfulness of the unceremonious violation of one of the most important biblical commandments. And on the threshold of the twentieth century, international norms were adopted providing for the obligation to return spiritual values ​​​​to their “historical homeland” - art objects, libraries, archives taken out (read - stolen) as a result of riots, revolutions, cruel civil and international wars, and in general - compensate for the damage caused to the so-called "national economy" of the ruined kingdom-state.
The authors of these wonderful conventions seemed to have a premonition of the coming devastating revolutionary storms and the most terrible global military tragedy of 1939-1945 in the history of mankind, during which they were engaged in international theft with particular passion.
There is an opinion that villains, misanthropes who do not shudder at the sight of the painful death of thousands of people, are alien to the craving for beauty. An eternal riddle for psychologists: why some, looking at the paintings of Raphael or listening to the sounds of the music of Verdi, Wagner, become even more ennobled and in the future are unable to raise their voices and throw a stone at the most miserable little dog; others, receiving no less aesthetic pleasure from the same creations, are ready, a moment later, to do dirty deeds.
We are talking about the leaders of the Third Reich. Carrying out plans for the conquest of the eastern countries of Europe, preparing for their peoples the life of obliging slaves, they also had plans to capture all significant works of art.
On the European continent they did not yet know what desecration their spiritual shrines would undergo; how, by the will of the new "masters of the world", they will mysteriously disappear and orphan admirers of beauty.
The fate of cultural masterpieces was a foregone conclusion on May 1, 1941, at the headquarters of the Reichsmarschall of the German Reich, the life-loving G. Goering, when he signed a circular letter on the establishment of headquarters in all occupied territories with the aim of "collecting research materials and cultural values ​​and sending them to Germany." As usual in such cases, all party, state and military organizations were instructed to provide all possible support and assistance - to the chief of staff of the operational headquarters, Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the head of the main imperial bureau of Utikalo and his deputy, the head of the field department of the German Red Cross, von Behr - in fulfilling their tasks.
However, the highest bosses of the Third Reich did not have a unity of views on the problem of robbery in the conquered countries. Too many wanted to be first. The German Foreign Minister, Baron von Ribbentrrop, roughly speaking, spit on Goering's directive. Such a conclusion can be drawn from the following established circumstances.
October 13, 1942 in the area with. Achikulak, northeast of Grozny, Soviet troops captured SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Norman Paul Foerster, the son of a manufacturer who graduated from the law faculty of Berlin University in 1936, who supplemented his knowledge at the universities of Leipzig, Geneva, London, Paris and Rome (for the robbery of the great Slavic art, they were preparing far from simple!). After mobilization for military service, he participated in small battles on the western front. And somehow, in August 1941, Foerster met with his comrade SS Untersturmführer Dr. Focke Ernst Günther, who at that time worked as an employee of the press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who invited his friend to go to his service. Who didn't want to sneak away from the disastrous eastern front then? But Foerster did not even imagine that, when he transferred to the service in the Foreign Ministry, he would be drawn into a secret and shameful adventure for him on this very eastern front.
Then - in August 1941 - Foerster was recalled to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the next day he appeared in Berlin. There he learned that he had been appointed to the Sonderkommando SS, which existed under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The team was led by Baron von Künsberg. The latter popularly explained to the educated recruit that his team was created on the personal instructions of Ribbentrop. She had to closely follow the advanced German units in the occupied territories in order to protect museums, libraries, art galleries, archives from looting - who do you think? - by their own heated battles, not very aesthetically educated soldiers. And then everything that was of cultural or historical significance was exported to Germany.
The team zealously got down to business. Already in late autumn, the company of Hauptsturmführer Gaubold from Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg skillfully and cleanly removed the contents of the world-famous palace-museum of Catherine II. First of all, Chinese silk wallpapers and gilded carved decorations were requisitioned. They carefully dismantled the type-setting floor of a complex fantastic pattern. Lists of works of art located in the palaces of the suburbs of Northern Palmyra were compiled in advance, and the work was arguing. In the palace of Emperor Alexander I, the invaders of beauty were attracted by antique furniture and a unique library in French, numbering 7 thousand volumes, among which there were many works by Roman and Greek classics, which made it attractive. About 5,000 Russian old manuscripts were also stolen from here.
The Sonderkommando, which numbered about half a thousand specialists, spread its tentacles from north to south. She managed to "work" in Warsaw, Kiev, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Smolensk, Pskov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Melitopol, Rostov, Krasnodar, Bobruisk, Roslavl. The activities of the “sonders” in Ukraine were especially “fruitful”. So, the library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR was torn apart like an anthill. First of all, the rarest manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and Chinese writing, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, the first copies of books printed by Ivan Fedorov were seized. Ukraine lost about 200 thousand books. This operation was performed by Dr. Paulsen.
The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra did not remain undisturbed either, from where, along with the rarest originals of ancient Russian church literature, the originals of Rubens' works were sent to Germany.
And how many canvases, studies by Russian painters of the 90th century - Repin, Vereshchagin, Fedotov, Ge, Polenov, Aivazovsky, Shishkin disappeared from the Central Museum. Shevchenko, Kharkov Art Gallery. Then from the Kharkiv Library named after. Korolenko sent to Berlin about 5,000 thousand book editions, including 59 volumes of Voltaire's works, in luxurious yellow leather bindings. The Slavic "barbarians" had so many excellent books that the less valuable ones were simply destroyed on the spot.
The most rare books and canvases were sent straight to the leaders of the Reich. So, two albums of engravings, including those signed by Rubens, - to Goering; 59 volumes of a rare edition of Voltaire - Rosenberg; two huge albums of watercolors of roses - Ribbentrop. Hitler and Goebbels were not forgotten. The first was presented from the royal palace near St. Petersburg with about 80 volumes in French about Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, but Goebbels, knowing his passion for propaganda work, received a set of Neustroiter newspapers for 1759.
Great perseverance and amazing hypocrisy was shown by the Sonderkommando during the robbery of the Pskov-Caves Monastery. Archpriest N. Makedonsky was graciously left even a letter in Russian: “The sacristy remains the property of the monastery. Under favorable conditions, it will be returned. But look for the wind in the field. In 1944, three boxes of rare gold and silver utensils from the monastery went to Germany through Riga - a total of 500 items.
Moscow remained the main goal of Rosenberg's team. Personally, Foerster had to lead the capture of all state archives, the Commissariats of Foreign Affairs and Justice, the Tretyakov Gallery, the library. Lenin. For obvious reasons, this act of vandalism did not come true, and poor fellow Foerster did not know that the vast majority of archives, books and paintings from Moscow were evacuated to the depths of Russia or safely hidden in the capital itself.
Modern seekers of missing valuables from the former USSR and other countries have always been interested in the question: where exactly in Germany was the loot brought and what is the fate of the treasures? While the highest ranks of the Sonderkommando were masters of the situation, they had certain information on this subject, so to speak, by the nature of their service, but when they were captured, they could not (or did not want to) say anything worthwhile. It is only known that in 1941 - 1942 some of the valuables were delivered to Berlin and there, in the premises of the Adler company, a private exhibition was arranged for distinguished guests. Who visited her? For example, the head of Hitler's personal office - Walter Butler, Himmler's brother - Helmut, Secretary of State Kerner, Ambassador Schullenberg (the one who was shot in connection with an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler), an employee of the former embassy in Moscow - Gilgers, one of the highest SS officials - Obergruppenführer Yutner, adviser to the propaganda ministry - Hans Fritsche, state secretary of the propaganda ministry - Hutterer, state secretary of the Foreign Ministry - Luther.
The exhibition was staged on a grand scale: music sounded, cognac was drunk, trophy films were watched; then there was a pleasant ceremony of presenting gifts to high officials for impeccable service. Among them were Himmler, Buhler, Dullenberg and others.
What was Rosenberg's headquarters like? He was an administrative apparatus in the occupied eastern territories with very broad powers. The robbery of cultural property was in the background for him. According to the investigative documents, the main task of Rosenberg was the mass destruction and internment of people. The volume of bloody deeds of these "masters of all trades" is amazing. The robbery of valuables was a kind of respite from executioner's deeds. Rosenberg had mobile groups (headquarters) of 4-5 specialists dressed in distinctive brown uniforms. A few days after the capture of a city, "specialists" arrived there to select works of culture and were often late, because Ribbentrop's people - from the Sonderkommando of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - broke into the defeated cities, figuratively speaking, on the shoulders of Wehrmacht combat units and left Rosenberg's people only "horns and legs." Rosenberg then ordered his people to enter the cities at the same time as the "Ribbentrops", and luck here smiled on the most agile.
Another subordinate of Rosenberg is interesting with his stories about robberies and destruction in the USSR - SS and police Obergruppenführer in Ostland Eckeln Friedrich, born in 1895, a native of Hornberg, the son of a manufacturer. This rank in April 1942 was located on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, mainly in the famous Krasnoye Selo.
The meaning of the vandal destruction committed by the Nazis on the outskirts of Leningrad and in the city itself becomes clear after the conversation (as follows from the interrogation of Jeckeln) that took place between the latter and Himmler, who arrived on the banks of the Neva for a short time. Jeckeln expressed the firm view that, in principle, Leningrad could be captured, and that this opinion was shared by many military generals. Himmler stunned them that, according to Hitler, it is worth not rushing to capture the city, so as not to feed the blockade, but next year the city will be taken by storm and destroyed. It turned out that Hitler did not need the architectural and other beauties of Northern Palmyra and its uniquely beautiful suburbs. That is why the Germans did not stand on ceremony with the palaces of Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk, Gatchina. The Peterhof Palace, for example, was not destroyed by an accidental artillery shelling, as they say, but was purposefully burned.
Jeckeln watched how the people of Rosenberg's headquarters in the Catherine and Alexander Palaces in Pushkin (in Tsarskoye Selo) and in the Gatchina Palace tore, knocked down, ripped off jewelry, tapestries, furniture from their eternal places, giving these actions an even more terrifying look to dilapidated palaces. A special subject of attention were precious stones from the palace of Catherine II, carefully transported to the estate of Koch, who allegedly was going to donate them to the Koenigsberg Museum.
The attitude towards works of art testified, first of all, to the low cultural level of German officers (I emphasize, officers, not soldiers), because these objects were created in many respects not even by Russians, but by Western masters (including Germans). Only the barbarians could have dragged the sumptuous 18th-century rococo furniture from the palaces to the officers' casinos to satisfy their vanity based on strength and stupidity. How wonderful, lounging in elegant armchairs, splashing beer foam on the perfectly polished surface of tables inlaid with precious woods on elaborately curved legs!
The foolish attempts of the would-be Baltic nationalists to justify or hush up many of the villainous actions of the "Rosenbergites" and their accomplices from among the "patriots" in relation to the Baltics can only cause a smile now. If the Nazis had ruled for ten years in the Baltic states, the original names of the Baltic lands would have disappeared from the memory of people in general.
Rosenberg, the main protagonist within the "Ostlands", preparing to settle in the Baltic for a long time, staffed his headquarters with predominantly German Baltic barons, who, like himself, fiercely hated the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. Looting in the Baltic States began already in August 1941. By order of Rosenberg, it was decided to requisition the Tallinn archive, the Derpt university library, art objects from numerous Estonian estates, such as Erlene, Vodya, Lahmes.
It was thanks to the Germans that entire neighborhoods built in the 15th-17th centuries were wiped off the face of the earth in Riga. It was they who burned the Riga city library, which had existed since 1524, along with 800 thousand books, and another 100 thousand, the most valuable, were taken out of the cordon.
It was the "friends" of the Lithuanians who burned down the old library of the Evangelical Reform Synod, along with 20,000 volumes of books from the 16th century. And they also took to Frankfurt am Main the canvases of Repin, Levitan, Chagall, sculptures by Antokolsky.
One of the greatest stupidities of the Baltic nationalists is their blind malice towards the "offenders" from Moscow, their inability to understand the essence of the issues, the sequence and timeliness of solving problems - political, social and cultural. Gaining independence after the collapse of the USSR is happiness for the Baltic countries compared to the “freedom” that the Nazis brought them in 1941.
If the archives of the Hanseatic cities had not been taken by the Red Army as a trophy, the people of Tallinn would not have seen their old city archive stolen by the Germans - the national pride of Estonia even in the 21st century. But the authorities of the USSR, rescuing the Tallinn archive literally on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, gave Germany three times more in terms of the volume of documents from the funds of the Hanseatic cities, which contain interesting information about the history of Russia. Here is a true act of friendship, not appreciated by Estonians. Nezavisimov saw with his own eyes in the national archives of Germany how Estonian and German archivists frankly rejoiced at the idleness of their Moscow colleagues to the clink of champagne glasses. But this is so, to the question of historical incidents.
The fact that the teams of Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, Himmler had the task of destroying works of architecture and stealing cultural property was evident everywhere. Like Leningrad, like Kyiv - they were preparing an equally sad fate.
In Kyiv, the city of stone poetry, it was decided to blow up the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and destroy the central quarters of the city. It all started in mid-October 1941, when SS Sturmbannführer Derner, Himmler's staff officer, came to Jeckeln in Kiev and presented the head of the Eastern Police with a mandate, signed by the chief, who were ordered to blow up the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. Jeckeln was not surprised by this, because even earlier, from the words of Himmler, he knew that the Fuhrer desired the complete destruction of both Kiev and the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra as a religious and national symbol of Ukrainians, hoping that the next generations of "Ukrainian serfs" would completely forget their culture and their traditions.
Despite such a formidable mandate, it was not so easy for Derner to carry out the Fuhrer's undertaking, for purely German pedantry interfered. The fact is that the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra was under the protection of army units that did not get along with the SS. Derner and asked Jeckeln, as an influential person, to transfer the Lavra to the jurisdiction of the police. Jeckeln, apparently afraid to take the responsibility to bless such a demonic case, and suggested that Derner inform the boss about the situation by radio. The next day, an answer was received: “According to the order of the Fuhrer, the military guard at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra should be removed and the Lavra handed over to the SS and the police. Himmler. Preparing for the explosion for quite a long time, more than a month. During this time, Jeckeln managed to go to Riga and Kremenchug on his thieves' affairs, and the temples of the Lavra still did not live their golden domes in the autumn sun. What's the matter? And there was no reason for the fact that for no apparent reason even such swindling beasts as the SS men did not dare to commit sacrilege. And there was a reason. In early November, the President of Slovakia, Tissot, arrived in Kyiv, either by his own will, or by agreement of the Germans - to admire the beauties of the Lavra. The explosion of the Lavra, or rather its unique divine beauty of the dominant - the Assumption Cathedral, erected in 1075-1089. Prince Svyatoslav, took place on November 3, 1941, 30 minutes after President Tissot left the Lavra. Following that, the Germans reported that the Assumption Cathedral was blown up by Russian saboteurs in order to kill the president of friendly Germany, Slovakia. Sometimes even an old woman gets a hole. A more helpless version of the Fritz could not have been invented. It seems that the Tissot puppet in those days was of little interest to the Soviet special services.
What did the Nazis do? The words of the Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia are about this: “One cannot look without sorrow at the piles of ruins of the Assumption Cathedral, created in the 11th century by the genius of immortal builders. The explosions created several huge sinkholes in the ground around the cathedral, and, looking at them, it seems that even the earth trembled at the sight of the atrocities of those who have no right to a human name. It was like a terrible hurricane swept through the Lavra, turned everything upside down, scattered and scattered the mighty Lavra buildings. You still experience this feeling and aching regret for the mutilated temple.

Two more German "knights" were in Soviet captivity - Axel Konrad Spongolz, a native of Tartu, captain and translator of the Nord group, and Major General Dr. Leber Max Heinrich. They are interesting because they were involved in the disappearance of the famous Amber Room.
Spongolz - a purely civilian man, of poor health, inclined to fine arts, studied at the Gallery of Old Artists, in Munich, and then worked as a conservator and restorer in the Cologne City Museum. Despite the creative warehouse of nature, Spongolz nevertheless joined the NSDAP, because, according to him, he shared Hitler's views on art. Shpongolts was used as a consultant in the looting of the museum property of palaces near Leningrad. From his words, it is known that the headquarters of the Spanish "Blue Division" unexpectedly competed with the headquarters of Rosenberg, which also turned out to be greedy for someone else's art. Spaniards with a southern temperament in the blink of an eye stole the church property of the cathedrals and monasteries of Novgorod. There is reason to ask Spanish art historians a question on this delicate topic: have they ever seen anything Russian in the Pyrenean public or private collections?
Spongolz is the only prisoner from the Rosenberg Sonderkommando who admitted that, together with the “protection of arts” officer of the “Nord” group, von Solms, he was involved in the removal of the Amber Room from Pushkino (along with collections of paintings of the 19th century, the sculptural group of the Neptune fountain from the upper park Peterhof, individual icons and entire iconostases of the 13th and 16th centuries from the churches of the Novgorod Kremlin, typesetting parquet from the Catherine Palace ...). However, it is difficult to learn anything from his explanations about the route of the Amber Room and the place of its new, let's say, storage. Shpongolts, for all his “sins”, in combination with other crimes, got 25 years in prison in the Gulag. However, like all the other "twenty-five", he was soon released.
Major General Dr. Max Heinrich Leber had nothing to do with Rosenberg's Sonderkommando, but by the will of fate in September 1941 he ended up in Krasnogvardeysk, where he learned from the officers of the headquarters of the 50th Army about a special commission that seized valuable items from all the palaces on the Leningrad front art and antiquity. Here he met Solms, apparently a key figure in organizing the robbery of Russian cultural objects. From him, Leber learned that it was from Krasnogvardeisk to Koenigsberg that two wagons with valuables were sent, and a little earlier, along the same route from Tsarskoe Selo, the famous Amber Room also proceeded to the same Koenigsberg.
There were other staff officers of the 50th Army Corps who knew a lot about the actions of the Rosenberg team, including the fate of the Amber Room. In particular, the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sperl. He was a convinced Nazi, extremely hostile to the USSR and did not want to give any evidence at all in captivity.
It must be admitted that the Soviet leadership was either extremely self-confident, believing that it would not allow German troops in the vicinity of Leningrad, or showed obvious short-sightedness in the evacuation of cultural property from these places. After the evacuation, more than 30 thousand museum exhibits remained in Petrodvorets (!!). And not some mediocre fakes, but originals. And it never occurred to anyone that in the first place it would be necessary to dismantle and take it out, and if there was no such possibility, securely immure the Amber Room on the territory of Leningrad itself.
There was no mercy for the Slavs in anything. Goering's circular letter dated May 1, 1941 provided for the unceremonious seizure of cultural objects in the Slavic states and the ostentatious observance of the rules of decency when weaning works of art in Western countries. If this is Yugoslavia hated by Hitler - peremptory confiscation of valuables, books in Esseg, Ragusa, Zagreb. If it is Belgium or France - gentlemanly relations with sellers of masterpieces of medieval art for the new Nazi museums in Linz and Konigsberg. It was useless to object to the Nazis in the West as well. Behind the outwardly decent act of purchase and sale, the possibility of using force was guessed. A lot has been purchased. And why not buy when the entire economy of Europe was in the pocket of the Nazis.
Paintings from the Demeter collection went from Belgium to the Linz Museum: “The Holy Family” by Massis (XVI century), “Neptune and Amphitrate” by the Italian painter Giordano (XVII century), copper products by Piranese; from Hungary to the Dresden Gallery - Gothic paintings by ancient German artists; from the Netherlands to the Dresden Gallery - drawings by French, Dutch, German, Flemish artists (royal collection), Gordon Krang's theater collection and library; from France to the Königsberg Museum at the personal request of the Fuhrer - works made of gold, enamel, porcelain, glass (Mannheimer collection).
Hitler also swung at the world-famous collection of Adolf Schloss in Paris, in which he was attracted by masterfully executed genre works by little-known artists. About 50 thousand Reichsmarks were allocated for the purchase. In the same place, in France, negotiations were underway with Count Trefolo on the acquisition of a collection of weapons from the time of Napoleon for the museum in Linz. An extensive correspondence has been preserved about the purchase for the Fuhrer of two paintings by Lenbach from a private collection in Florence, as well as paintings by Dutch artists and the Fleming Pieter Ertsen (XVI century). Obsequious intermediaries of the Nazis, for the sake of self-interest, were ready to sell Hitler anything they wanted. So, a certain Phillip von Hansen received a large sum to buy a painting by Leonardo da Vinci "Leda".
This is only a small part of the examples from the predatory practices of the Nazis in the countries that their raking hands reached out to. Only approximate figures of works of art and archives exported from European countries are known. As a result of behind-the-scenes intrigues, they spread to the castles of Hitler's highest and middle bosses and other secluded places, such as the Goering estate in Carinhall, the Hohenfurt vault on the upper Danube, the salt mines in Bad Aussee, possibly the dungeons of the powerful forts of Königsberg, etc.

But the allies finally finished off the fascist monster, as they say, in its lair and, especially the USSR and France, began to search for cultural property stolen from them. Little is known about the success of the French in this field. The Soviets returned their fair share, but, of course, not everything they wanted, for example, the Amber Room. At the same time, according to the ancient rule of the winners, German archives, libraries, art galleries were taken to the USSR - everything they found.
The short post-war peace gave way to a protracted Cold War. Gradually coming to their senses, the Europeans, led by France, counting the losses from their cultural heritage, began to scratch their heads and think about how to arrange a fair restitution. And they turned their eyes primarily to the USSR and not without reason.
Among the trophies of the Red Army were not only rarities of German origin, but also the cultural riches of many European states robbed by Germany, which were both allies of the USSR and neutral ones, which did not cause any harm to either Hitler or Stalin. The feeling of an absolute and indisputable winner dictated to the Soviet leadership the wrong decision regarding trophy cultural property. Its approximate definition is as follows: everything taken is ours, be it Germany, France, Belgium or Liechtenstein. But somehow they did not really want to announce such a decision to the whole world, in words the Soviet government supported many international agreements.
The fact that trophy documents and art objects were found in the USSR was immediately classified. To all - from time to time arising in the West - questions on this delicate problem invariably followed by "innocent" answers: we know nothing, we have nothing. And, really, how can one declare that over a million files of the most important funds of the ally in the war of France "Surte Generale", the General Staff of the Army, the family funds of the Rothschilds, Du Ponts, and others lie in the secret Special Archive. In those days, in hot pursuit - an international scandal!
Well, what about former allies? The United States, Britain, and France did not consider it shameful to admit that they had confiscated German documents in 1945. They honestly declared that they needed German documentary materials for long-term study. But at the same time, the Allies did not obstruct the researchers of the Federal Republic of Germany to the German documents. After microphotocopying the funds they needed, the originals were generally transferred to the FRG, although not all of them.
"Stalinists" have always professed a double morality. If the USSR had not collapsed, French funds would remain under the Soviet shadow for many decades. Yes, how could one return such a tidbit on the move! Here, you understand, day and night, plans are being hatched for a worldwide communist “mastery” of humanity, and how can one not take advantage of such important socio-political and intelligence information of a country that has information about everything in the world.
And for what, for example, the harmless Liechtenstein suffered? Only I thousand dossiers captured by the mighty Soviet hand from a defenseless country, but what! A thousand thick old calfskin-bound folios in a language no one here can read. And for Liechtenstein, these books are national pride, because they contain detailed information about the succession to the throne. They also hid, believing that they are our national treasure.
The same position was taken by those who were entrusted with overseeing trophy books, paintings, and sculptures. With genuine pride in her uncompromising adherence to principles in the 90s of the last century, the then Deputy Minister of Culture N. Zhukova broadcast to the whole country: in the yard was not the end of the twentieth century, but 1945 - A.P.), finding out where the values ​​\u200b\u200bthat they considered “their own”, but I considered and still consider Russian. I answered that they were in Russia, in the reliable hands of specialists, but I considered myself not entitled to say where they were. Irina Antonova, director of the Museum. A.S. Pushkina, like a partisan, was also silent about what was stored in the storerooms of the cultural hearth entrusted to her. And what did these and other respectable ladies achieve by their silence? Confusing and absurd. Where has it been seen that the great masterpieces of the art of the Germans (and not only the Germans), for decades were found in the darkness of the cellars, instead of being put on display for admirers of painting. That's when they were finally allowed to do this, the golden collection of Schliemann appeared in the light of day. How sad it is to overcome injustice by order! For a person with a free spirit, this is savagery, for a person deprived of considerations of spirituality, this is a familiar state.
And what a disgrace the “patriots of culture” have done with thousands of priceless trophy books from many European states, once immured by them (you can’t say more precisely) in a church building in the town of Uzkoye near Moscow. Heaped on top of each other, many of them deformed over time under their own weight. A brilliant, truly "scientific-applied" application of these founts of knowledge and enlightenment was found by our Cerberus from culture!

The announcement by Nezavisimy of the honest world about the giant layers of trophy archival documents in the USSR caused many mental movements in the heads of responsible officials, both in Western countries and in Russia. Some, as you know, especially in France (it must be said for the sake of justice that the Germans modestly did not stick out), demanded the return of rarities on the basis of reasonable agreements, while others, represented by deputies of the State Duma, spread burdensome pseudo-patriotic turuses on wheels.
The French were so taken aback by the news that the holy of holies, the gigantic Surte Generale Foundation, was in Moscow and must have been turned upside down by the KGB, that they did not believe it until they received confirmation from the Russian government.
Our "patriots" tensed up somewhat. Accidentally or not, exactly at that time in the Special Archive the writer, as he called himself, Platonov, was poring over the Masonic funds (just do not confuse him with the real writer Platonov, thereby, that at the behest of the same false patriots as the aforementioned namesake, he once wrote then the courtyard at the Literary Institute). And this namesake pored over the manuscripts of freemasons solely for one purpose - the reader guessed correctly - well, of course, in order to finally prove with documents in his hands that the phenomenon of Freemasonry was exclusively generated by the Jews! All the harm in the world, especially for Russia, as you know, is from the Jews, from, as the nationalists put it, the "world behind the scenes", into whose possessions they can not penetrate. And since the fighter against “Jewish Freemasonry” could not get anything so fried from impartial manuscripts about Pierre Bezukhov’s like-minded people, he looked dejectedly through the barred window of the office allotted to him. And once the view of the street was blocked for him by something huge and opaquely bodily... A terrible conjecture dawned on him. At the entrance stood trailers with French numbers. They never came to pick up their French, ugh! - our Russian national treasure? And countermeasures were immediately taken - in the form of patriotic indoctrination, of course, with the help of the exclusively Orthodox newspapers Literaturnaya Rossiya and Zavtra. The editorial and journalistic staff of these publications was a collection of “hard-hitting humanist-Leninists,” as Nezavisimov’s good friend, writer and folk healer B. Kamov wrote, “who, if someone does not according to “theirs” Orthodox faith, either Marxism-Leninism out of ignorance violate, they will shoot at such and such a mother from typewriters (for now!), mixed with earth, drowned in a latrine.
The writer Platonov, "shifted in phase" on the basis of the intrigues of the "world behind the scenes", managed to ignite righteous anger and his like-minded people in the State Duma, "opening their eyes" to an unheard-of crime against their own homeland of those who started the transfer of French archives to the banks of the Seine. Well, how not to believe these words: “Hitler knowingly collected trophy documents in one place. For concentrated together, they were a powerful weapon of secret influence on humanity - a kind of Archive of Secret Power; the politician received not only knowledge of the technology of secret work, but also a ready-made army of agents, many of whom could be led by bribery or blackmail. Having lists of members of the Masonic lodges and information about their various frauds, especially financial ones, the Gestapo officers forced the Masons to work for themselves ... Stalin and the political leadership of the USSR immediately realized the great importance of the Secret Power Archive for strengthening their own regime. An order was immediately given to transport the archive to Moscow, where a special building with blind windows and iron doors was being built for it by the hands of prisoners of war. Few even in the highest echelons of power know about its existence ..., the technology and evolution of secret power are being studied, but later the efficiency of its action drops sharply. (Apparently the secret power has ceased to interest the leadership of the USSR - A.P.)
Platonov also indicated the reasons for the “destruction” of the Special Archive: “The Mondialist structures of the West (read “world behind the scenes” - A.P.), interested in weakening and dismembering our country, are making efforts to deprive us of knowledge about the secret political mechanisms on which the modern Western civilization (i.e. our direct enemy - A.P.)”.
Identified Platonov and the initiators: “The impulse of destruction came from the mondialist (really, what a terrible word? - A.P.) structures of the West, in which they were considered not strangers, in particular, members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU Yakovlev and Shevardnadze (now in the Masonic club " Magisterium). The first act of destruction (spring 1990) coincides in time with the official resumption in Moscow of the Masonic organization under the jurisdiction of the "Grand National Lodge" of France and the creation in our country of the lodges "Northern Star", "Free Russia", "Harmony" and some others ".
And, finally, the most important thing: “The concrete executor of the destruction action was a certain Nezavisimov, who worked as a director, involved, as I know, in a serious official crime - the secret sale of archival data abroad (the case was even discussed at the board of the Main Archive Department). Nezavisimov went to great lengths to “light up” the Special Archive. In one of his conversations with a journalist, he admitted that he once decided to push the French so that they would still ask where such priceless archival materials really are, ... in the spring of 1990 he fully reveals the secret nature of the archive, and in the fall of 1991 comes out with a proposal to transfer it to the West. The protests of the employees are brutally suppressed (directly, some kind of Chekist! - A.P.).”
Further, Platonov perspicaciously notes that this anti-patriot Nezavisimov “went on a promotion - he became the deputy head of the Rosarkhiv and is the closest employee of A.N. Yakovlev in the Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Stalinist Repressions. The latter is mentioned in order to understand the criminal connection between the "thief" Nezavisimov and the "mondialist" Yakovlev. Immediately clearly imagine how Nezavisimov is somewhere there, in the offices inaccessible to the people on Staraya Square, says:
- Well, Alexander Nikolaevich, shall we give France its documents?
- And why not give it away, - the designer of the destruction of the USSR agrees.
And after that, Foreign Minister Kozyrev, suspected of Jewish Freemasonry, signs an agreement on the transfer of the archive. It is difficult to imagine a more terrible and offensive secret for false patriots. Yes, and ordinary people, having read this, will also be offended for the state. This is how clumsily, but deliberately, a lie is constructed.
Plato's statements greatly amused the already mentioned B. Kamov. In an article on this subject, prepared in 1995 for the Spy magazine, he wrote the following: “... My most superficial acquaintance with the funds of the Special Archive turned out to be enough to understand that colossal historical and information riches were collected here. Thousands of the most inquisitive historians had a chance, by examining these materials, to make many sensational and even great discoveries of interest to individuals, to individual states and to the planet as a whole.
Together with German documents, hundreds of thousands of folders - the archive of French intelligence - ended up on the shelves of the Special Archive. The Nazis captured it in 1940, easily entering Paris.
For me, the archive of French intelligence was interesting primarily because there were dossiers on all the more or less remarkable figures of the Soviet Union - from politicians, military leaders, scientists - to writers, actors, journalists, factory directors. The life of thousands of our compatriots was seen through the eyes of illegal intelligence agents.
All this ocean of information for forty-five years was used only by "historians" from Lubyanka. They looked for compromising references to "fellow citizens" in foreign documents.
They say - let's be fair - by examining French and German sources, our counterintelligence officers exposed quite a few genuine agents of foreign intelligence. But a much larger number of innocent people suffered only because they were mentioned in some documents.
In 1988 Stefan Stepanovich Nezavisimov, historian and professional archivist, was appointed director of the Special Archive. However, the main thing was that he was a Germanist by vocation. As a young man he studied German, knew and understood German culture. Having become the head of an unmarked facility, five floors of which were filled with documents, he himself, without translators, leafed through and read folders for many hours a day. I fully admit that Nezavisimov was among the few who became aware of the value of the depository documents not only for the purposes of political investigation.
That is why in 1991, when the suffocating power of Bolshevism collapsed, he took a hitherto unexampled step: he invited an Izvestia correspondent and told about the existence of a previously unknown Special Storage.
A series of sensational articles “Five Days in the Special Archive” attracted the attention of thousands of Soviet (then) historians, writers, and journalists. Hundreds of newspapers around the world reprinted them in whole or in retelling. Hitlerism, World War II, tens of millions of dead - all this has not yet grown into moss in the minds of people.
If you, dear reader, have ever encountered such a mindless, dangerous and uncontrolled phenomenon as the Soviet regime of secrecy, behind which stood an even more dangerous and even less controlled institution called the KGB, then you must appreciate the unostentatious courage of Stefan Stepanovich Nezavisimov . He challenged the then not yet strongly shaken System.
The first step was followed by the second.
In May 1995, mankind will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Victory over fascism, but there are still families on Earth for whom the Second World War has not yet ended, because in these houses the fate of loved ones who did not return from it is unknown.
And the director of the Special Archive, back in those days when a grain of any information was considered a state or military secret, discovered poods of documents, hiding which in fact was a crime against humanity. And when they stopped imprisoning and shooting for disclosing imaginary secrets, Nezavisimov published the letters of dead German soldiers that he found in the vault. But this was only the first application.
... All the post-war years, to the request of the Japanese authorities about the fate of tens of thousands of officers and soldiers taken prisoner by the Soviet army, the Soviet government replied that only four thousand people died in our camps. And all other claims against our country are in vain.
And Nezavisimov discovered documents from which it followed that not four thousand, but tens of thousands actually died. There was no mistake here. In the same papers, the burial places of each prisoner were precisely indicated.
Nezavisimov handed copies of the lists to the President of the All Japan Association of Siberian Prisoners of War (Japanese), Mr. R. Saito. The ceremony was covered by the largest television companies in the world. They wrote newspapers and magazines.
After some time, Nezavisimov circulated a statement through TASS channels that the Special Archive contains information about hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers who fought on the side of Nazi Germany and died in prisoner of war camps. The governments of the countries - the former allies of Nazi Germany, did not have any information about these victims of the war. Meanwhile, these documents also indicated exactly who and where was buried. The discovery made by Nezavisimy had such a powerful resonance that most European countries immediately concluded bilateral agreements on the mutual transfer of the lists of the dead and respect for the graves of foreigners in their territories.
These facts alone would be enough to bow low to Stefan Stepanovich Nezavisimov for his humanity and courage, for his personal contribution to introducing wild, truly bastard Russia, to civilized relations with other states. After all, it has long been known: where the dead are not respected, they walk on the living with their feet.
But Nezavisimov had the bitter fortune of once again shaking the minds and hearts of millions of inhabitants of our planet.
When the International Red Cross in the post-war years repeatedly turned to the Soviet Union with a request to help find traces of the victims of the Nazi genocide, the then leadership replied that they did not have the slightest information on this matter.
And Nezavisimov, studying the funds of the Special Archive, discovered the Books of Death. These were, with German accuracy, inventories of those who had been poisoned and burned in Auschwitz.
Twice, on behalf of the new democratic Russia, in the most solemn atmosphere, I handed over these lists to the Independent representatives of the International Red Cross. Twice millions of people cried while watching the ceremony on TV. And there was a reason. In total, there were two hundred and twenty thousand names in thick bound volumes.
This humane action not only allowed a great many families in different countries to finally find out how and where their relatives and friends ended their life path. On the basis of these lists, the widows and children of the victims acquired the right to receive compensation from the German government.
And quite recently, the French part of the documents that were stored in the Special Archive was sent to Paris by decision of the government of the Russian Federation. But Nezavisimov by that time was no longer working in the Special Archive and had nothing to do with the return of documents to France.
Now that we've got some idea of ​​"a certain Nezavisimov", let's see why two newspapers got angry at him at once.
Since LitRussia turned out to be the instigator, and the Zavtra newspaper only relayed it, let's see what they tried to open our eyes to.
According to the writer Platonov, he personally became reliably aware that Nezavisimov was "involved in a serious malfeasance - a secret (!) Sale (!!) of archival data abroad (!!!)". The same writer Platonov also became aware that "Nezavisimov's malfeasance was discussed at the collegium of the Main Archive."
Let's start with the fact that, according to the information provided by the editors of Spy, Nezavisimov's personal file was never brought to the board of the Main Archive and never discussed. There was no such meeting. The writer Platonov, delicately speaking, misled the readers of his newspaper.
In addition, as our readers are well aware, the "secret sale abroad ... of data" constituting state or military secrets is referred to in the Criminal Code as "treason against the Motherland in the form of espionage." Or the writer Platonov “did not finish the gymnasiums” and therefore does not know that such cases are usually considered not by the collegium of the Main Archive, but by the collegium of the military court (its long, permanent leader was Comrade Ulrich, the favorite of the party and the people).
Or, on the contrary, the writer Platonov from childhood knows very well which collegium is considering what, and therefore decided to give one of them a job, to give the “enemy of the Russian people”. But the writer Platonov was a little late. Forty years. Otherwise, national fame could have awaited him. As "the great Russian patriot Lydia Timashuk". This cavalier lady was even awarded an order cast in gold with a bald platinum profile. True, then she had to take it back. Her patriotism was not confirmed. Donos too.
Another thing is interesting: why did the competent authorities, who continue to stay on the same square and work in the same alleys near it, as before, still not respond to the call of the writer Platonov to deal with Nezavisimy?
There was nothing to understand. Fooling their few readers, LitRussia and Zavtra, an organ of the "spiritual opposition", meant by "secret transfer of archival data abroad" - the transfer of lists of German soldiers who died on the Soviet front, Japanese soldiers who froze to death in Siberian camps, names civilians. Including women and children gassed in Auschwitz.
I am not going to enter into a discussion of the moral character of the representatives of the "spiritual opposition". They don't have any form. These people still live according to the "moral code" that Stalin, Yezhov and Beria introduced in the country and in concentration camps.
But I inform the reader that almost all the documents published by Nezavisimy in our and foreign press were copied and transferred abroad with the permission of the leadership of the Main Archive, with the participation of the Foreign Ministry services and the government apparatus, because they were handed over on behalf of the government of the Russian Federation. And those that were handed over to them on their own did not contain any secrets.
The statement that Nezavisimov sold the archival data is also a cynical lie. If Platonov has Nezavisimov's receipt for receiving stamps, yen or dollars for the transfer of materials abroad, then let him present it. If he does not have such a receipt, then the writer Platonov will have to pay Nezavisimov an impressive amount in domestic convertible rubles. By court. For insulting a person.
Although this is rather disgusting, we have to delve into the essence of another accusation made by the writer Platonov against Stefan Stepanovich Nezavisimo. In the article “The End of the Special Archive of the USSR” we read: “... in the autumn of 1991 (Nezavisimov - B.K.) comes out (add - to the government of the Russian Federation - B.K.) with a proposal to transfer it (of the Special Archive - B.K. .) West.” Listen for intonation. It was in such terms that the newspaper Pravda, the main guillotine of the Bolshevik party, informed the happy Soviet people about the next exposure of some kind of espionage and sabotage gang.
Nezavisimov, in fact, guided by international standards, offered to transfer part of the materials of the Special Archive to the countries from which they were taken. In December 1991, he wrote in the Rossiya newspaper: “What about the French archives that ended up in the USSR? Return to rightful owner.
In this part of his accusations, the writer Platonov turned out to be absolutely right. He turned out to be wrong only in that, continuing to consider the subscribers of his newspaper as sheared sheep, he hid from them the continuation of the quote.
“The future treaty...,” Nezavisimov wrote in the Rossiya newspaper, “should be based on the following principles:
-recognition of the unconditional need to transfer originals with preliminary copying (hereinafter, it is emphasized by me - B.K.)
- the withdrawal from the agreement of documents of Russian origin and former international organizations;
- the return of Russian documents in the French archives that came to France during the October Revolution and the Russian emigration that followed it.
In particular, Nezavisimov pointed out the need to return to Russia 50 boxes of documents weighing about 6 tons, which were handed over to France by Count A.A. Ignatiev; archive of the Russian embassy, ​​etc.
The writer Platonov omitted this part of Nezavisimov's article. For what? And in order to reproach the same Nezavisimov for allegedly not demanding that the French side return to us “the archives of the Russian embassy in Paris, the archive of the Russian expeditionary corps”, etc.
I have already said that I am not going to discuss the moral character of the representatives of the "spiritual opposition". I will only refer to the old Russian custom, when, for distorting cards, the guilty person's hair and sideburns were severely thinned out.
It remains for me to answer the last, trifling question: What did this “spiritual opposition” need from Nezavisimov at all? Why did these sister newspapers grab onto him?
But for what. In the French papers, which, together with the archive of French intelligence, were sent to their homeland in Paris, documents of Masonic lodges collected over five centuries were kept. In one of his articles, Nezavisimov noted that real Masons had nothing in common with that stuffed scarecrow, with those secret intriguers - the destroyers of the universe, with whom imaginary patriots frighten us.
“Masonry is not involved in politics,” Nezavisimov quoted authentic documents, “the methods of Masonic construction are directly opposite to political methods ... Freemasonry seeks to replace the principle of struggle with the unity of brothers in the name of the triumph of truth.” The principles of real Freemasons were completely different from the “plans of the Jewish Freemasons” with which true anti-Semites tirelessly frighten us.
Doctor of Economics, member of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR Oleg Platonov, like most of the "spiritual opposition", is seriously ill. They suffer from Jewish-Masonic-phobia.”

Platonov did inflame the suspicion and determination of the leading false patriots. And one of them personally arrived at the Special Archive, a deputy of those distant times of the State Duma, imposing in appearance, but hard-stoned inside, S. Baburin, and with an imperious hand suspended the “destruction” of the Special Archive. With lightning speed, a law is being born that declares cultural property that was transferred to the USSR as a result of World War II and located on the territory of the Russian Federation as its property.
So, "Muse the French", as they say, "please excuse me." And you, gentlemen of the Fritz, do not stick your head out at all! The “Patriots” smiled broadly and quite happily on the occasion of the adoption of such a wonderful protective law, and the enlightened world was once again perplexed, marveling at the ability of Russians to think unpredictably in an original way. For it was pointless to consider Russian law from the point of view of law. The history of mankind impartially testifies that in endless military clashes, alas! - the right of the winner has always triumphed, the right of the strongest, which has little to do with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bjustice.
Where is the time line beyond which the trophy cultural values ​​of other countries become an integral legal part of the cultural layer of another country, if this, of course, is not a gift, not an official purchase, but a robbery? Where is she? At the turn of the bloody crusades? Thirty Years' War? Napoleon's French campaign in Russia? Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the Kazan Khanate? World War I? Where is she? The answer is no and cannot be. The earlier the "confiscation" of other people's cultural values ​​took place, the more timid were the claims of the victims. For this reason, few people are outraged that the treasures of Egypt, Greece, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa are found in the museums of France, the USA, and Spain. Once Schliemann dug up the Trojan treasure and thievishly took it to Germany without asking permission. The Germans are sure that the “gold of Troy” is theirs, Russia is even more so. And it must belong to the country in whose land it originally rested.
The robberies of wars fifty years ago cause fierce debate: to whom, what and in what volume, from the displaced (read stolen), should belong. For the participants in the recent bloody events are still alive, for not everyone has yet healed spiritual wounds and mutual insults.
The Duma members did not come up with anything better than how to exchange a “piece” stolen from us for a “piece” of a cultural trophy stolen by us. There is something hopelessly flawed about it.
The past cannot be returned. But you have to think broadly. The adopted Law is dangerous in that, declaring everything exported to the USSR as a national treasure, it seems to push one to the idea of ​​the inevitability of future military conflicts and, therefore, the inevitability of stealing trophies, as well as the possibility, having secretly buried valuables, to pretend that we don’t know anything, we don’t know that “our hut is on the edge.”
Decisions on the principle of "piece by piece" are almost impossible, because they are the product of the dense obstinacy of people who see only black and white in the world. So, following this principle, whose "Schliemann's gold"? Who and with what "thing" is obliged to compensate these treasures to their current owner - Russia?
How, in accordance with this absurd principle, should the Principality of Liechtenstein act, which has absolutely not stolen anything from Russia, but Russia has appropriated a thousand of its rare documents? Russia, in the end, gave them to Liechtenstein, but how
this exchange was a disgrace for a huge country in the eyes of the rest of the world!
If you read the Russian press in the mid-90s, then everything looked quite decent. Here is a note from Izvestia: “The troubling question of what to do with the “trophy art” and who owns the cultural property that fell into the territory of another state during and after the war seems to find a way of a civilized solution. An example for the rest was given by Russia and the Principality of Liechtenstein. With mutual agreement and to everyone's pleasure, they exchanged antiques, which are of undoubted interest to both sides.
A pleasant ceremony took place in the building of our embassy in Switzerland. Director of the Federal Archival Service of Russia V. Kozlov solemnly handed over to Prince Nikolaus, a trustee of the ruling Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein, a complete inventory of archival materials belonging to the princely house, which members of the great family had not seen for more than 50 years.
For his part, the prince, on behalf of the prince, handed over to Russia the diaries of N. Sokolov, an officer in the tsarist army, who, at his own peril and risk, in 1918-1919. investigated the circumstances of the death of the family of Nicholas II.
The diaries were bought a couple of years ago at the Sotheby's London auction on the initiative of the well-known philanthropist, the Russian baron Eduard Alexandrovich Falz-Fein, who, in fact, advised the prince to exchange them for family archives. The decisions of the State Duma and the government last summer helped finalize the deal in a legal sense.
Despite the fact that the dimensions are incommensurable (the papers of the prince's house barely fit in two trucks, and Sokolov's diaries - in a small box), the deal, by all accounts, is quite equivalent.
Nezavisimov knew that in reality everything was far from being as blissful as the newspaper described, and he knew this from the words of Falz-Fein himself, whom he met more than once when he was looking for the Amber Room.
In fact, the Prince of Liechtenstein, as a person who clearly understands the principles of justice, believed that Russia would finally do what it was supposed to do - return his family heirlooms to his “historical” homeland in Vaduz without any stupid conditions such as a mutual deal ....
But ours, how can we disobey the "Baburins" who have settled in the Duma with their "one piece at a time"? And Hans Adam II didn’t have such and such a “thing”. The situation was corrected by a generous baron (the reader would know how much he bought at various auctions of Russian cultural goods and gave all this free of charge to the homeland of his ancestors, who founded the brilliant Askania Nova reserve in southern Ukraine), to help his housemate and old friend - the ruling prince, really like. Reluctantly, not understanding why the Russians needed to pay for their family relics, the prince made a deal, but swore that he would never have business with these petty merchants from Russia. However, for our great power, the squeamish attitude of the prince of some dwarf country is like water off a duck's back!
But Nezavisimov, long before this shameful action, warned Russian officials, both in print and privately: “Do not try to bargain with Liechtenstein. It is necessary solemnly, at the highest level, to perform a gratuitous act of transferring to the owner of his legitimate heritage. Such an act of democratic Russia there, in Liechtenstein, will always be remembered with gratitude.” But, as always, it did not work out - due to the special thinking of the Russian rulers.
And what about the Germans? Russia conscientiously compiled a set of its cultural values, absorbed by the Moloch of the Second World War (it contains more than 40 thousand items). The Germans also prepared such a conduit: they appear as addressees in the direction of which German rarities “floated away”, not only Russia, but also
other countries. Perhaps this will help Russia somehow resolve the problem of restitution. But the proposed exchange is futile and not due to the evil will of the Russians or the Germans. There are, as they say, objective circumstances in which mutual aspirations will certainly rest. This is the inviolability of private property in Western countries and in Germany in particular. What can you do if she is sacred there, like a cow in India.
There are definitely no Russian trophies in the state archives and museums of Germany. Even if the German Chancellor calls on his population to scrape the bottom of the barrel and return Russian cultural values ​​in order to return their own from Russia, nothing will come of it. You need to know the psychology of private traders. “For nothing” they will not give anything to anyone.
What if Russian rarities are hidden in underground galleries and at the bottom of alpine lakes? But these data, according to Nezavisimov, the German government does not have. He himself would learn the secrets of the wells, as well as dozens of adventurers from all over the world, many of whom died under unclear circumstances in the vicinity of these very lakes.
And there are many secret vaults that attract attention. In the Kaliningrad region, not far from Baltiysk (formerly Pilau), a mysterious structure rises, something between a man-made mountain and the tomb of Egyptian pharaohs. No one today can answer when this mountain was built, for what purpose and what is in its womb. According to military engineers, this structure may have been cleverly mined. In any case, its design is such that the violation of any proportions can cause a collapse.
Tourists from Germany often came to the mysterious mountain when it became possible. One of these groups included a former military man. While the rest of the tourists showed an almost childish interest in the structure, he stood a little further away and smiled discreetly. It suddenly became clear to everyone present that the former military contemplates the “tomb of the twentieth century” not for the first time, that he knows much more about it ...
Studying German documents in the Special Archive, Stefan Stepanovich unexpectedly discovered maps of the Koenigsberg fortified area, in particular its famous forts. He called the General Staff and asked to send specialists familiar with the area.
Soon a whole brigade of topographers arrived. They brought their maps, drawn up in 1945, when Koenigsberg was taken by the Soviet Army. The officers who arrived established that our maps did not correspond to the German topographical plans. Many passages, corridors, trenches, and chambers did not appear on the Soviet drawings. According to the experts of the General Staff, the premises were skillfully disguised. Naturally, they did not hide air in them. After all, the Amber Room was originally brought to Koenigsberg.
There was a lot of enthusiasm. But then the August events of 1991 came and everyone forgot about the immured dungeons. Here, according to Nezavisimov, is the object of the joint efforts of the Russian Federation and the Federal Republic of Germany to unravel the mysteries of grandiose structures.
And who hasn't heard about the exemplary German colony in Paraguay, full of mysteries about its inhabitants, mainly the founders and successors of the Third Reich? Just heard. For no one really knows the inner life in this mini-state behind the Iron Curtain. What if European cultural values ​​are found there, delivered ahead of time by the Nazis to these reserved places? Nezavisimov somehow dropped to the author of these lines that he would not be surprised by the news of the discovery of the same Amber Room in Paraguay.
The Germans, who do not possess, whatever one may say - or twist, an adequate amount of trophy Russian cultural treasures, could bring such great joy to Russian connoisseurs of beauty and grace, about which the writers of the dead-end law did not
guess. In exchange for their rarities, both archival and pictorial, they could give Russia such money that (unless, of course, officials plunder, as already happened with German financial injections) would restore the churches and monasteries destroyed by the Nazis, restore decaying cathedrals and fortifications of Pskov, Ryazan, art galleries were built. Indeed, in the storerooms of domestic museums, a great many works of Russian masters of brush and cutter are immured, which have no place in the permanent exhibition, often for political and taste reasons. The Russians would have learned that along with the replicated exponents of the Soviet way of life Vuchetich, Nalbaldyan, Serov, Mukhina, there are Shemyakin, Safronov, Ivanov and others.
But no! Only piece by piece! Well done, thinkers! For many seekers of their property, which has been stored in Russia since the post-war years, this principle will discourage them from stuttering about this. The Czech Republic and Slovakia, Serbia and Switzerland and Italy are coming to us. And we answered them: “Where is ours?”. And that's it. Oh, Norway wants to get their parchments of the XII century? What about the arrogant and arrogant British Foundation "British Expeditionary Forces"? Drive back our "things". And out of harm, we will not give the pedigrees of princely families to the Poles at all. This is our great state value and secret!
Who else do we have here? Yep, Masonic lodges! It must be said that not only were their documents stolen from the Masons twice (first by Hitler, then by Stalin), but at the same time they took cult objects, many of which were decorated with precious stones. Hitler did not have time to put them into action, and the Soviets fussed immediately. In general, a huge number of jewels disappeared somewhere. Only a thick inventory with the names of these jewels remained in the Special Archive.

Nezavisimov repeatedly returned to the idea that humanity at all times, with manic constancy, seeks to eliminate the consequences, and not the causes, that lead to chaos in their home. And thus makes a senseless run like a squirrel in a wheel. And he continues to go crazy, blindly appeasing the ambitions of power-hungry and radical-minded subjects who imagine themselves capable of governing peoples, imposing on them norms of life that contradict the laws of the Creator, leading over and over again to bloody and destructive catastrophes. This practice, which arose millennia ago, manifests itself in more and more sophisticated forms of cruelty and senselessness.
Because of their stubborn unwillingness to improve their spirit, the first and only condition for a harmonious and happy existence on planet Earth, people doomed themselves to painful Sisyphean labor. And indeed. From century to century, they lovingly create creations of inexpressible beauty, many of which were called "wonders of the world" even in ancient times. They build cities with unique palaces, bridges, parks, highways, air and sea ports. They fill the galleries with wonderful canvases and sculptures, lovingly cherish libraries and archives. And also, from century to century, filled with inexplicable hatred for each other, forgetting overnight the wise commandments of Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, the messengers of the one God, destroy themselves and everything that has been created in the name of false national, religious, state ideas. Another peaceful respite is coming. Cities and villages are reborn again. Peoples are counting their losses and demanding compensation from each other: in money, "greyhound puppies", stolen creations of human genius...
And nothing changes over time under the eternal sky. The states are puffing up, trying to punish the defeated aggressors with demonstration courts, national and international, so that others would not be in the habit. The Nuremberg trials of the Nazis took place. But the court failed or did not want to disclose all the details of the barbaric mechanism of the destruction of mankind. They punished the top of the Third Reich, those who specifically started the aggression. But the creators of eugenic racist theories - psychiatrists - remained in the shadows and continue their diabolical activities to destroy human souls. The Hague Tribunal judges modern terrorists. Fair declarations are born by the United Nations. And the planet Earth is washed with blood over and over again and covered with hot ashes of destroyed cities and villages.
Someday this madness on Earth will end. It is then that Christ's commandment will triumph: “Do not be overcome by evil. And overcome evil with good." Fast or not, it doesn't matter. Everything in this world is predetermined, and everything is in the power of the people themselves.
Sooner or later, such strange concepts and expressions as “displaced valuables”, “restitution”, and with them the shameful disputes and verbal fights of states over who, to whom, how much and for what money will disappear from the lexicon of mankind.
And spiritual wealth - paintings, sculptures, masterpieces of book art, crafts, archival rarities will forever remain in the countries whose creators revealed them to the world, traveling to other lands only at the good will of their rightful owners, in order to please all connoisseurs of beauty with their beauty and unique. For the works of culture forcibly taken from another people and not returned to it under all sorts of false pretexts cannot give satisfaction to people who know the price of justice and goodness.
Since Freemasons have been mentioned in this chapter, it is time to reflect on these enigmatic, freemasons.

Exhibitions are held in many German cities to mark the 50th anniversary of the return to East Germany of 1.5 million works seized as trophies at the end of the war

Fifty years ago, the Soviet Union returned to East Germany 1.5 million treasures of world art seized as trophies at the end of the Great Patriotic War. Recently, 28 German museums decided to say thanks again for this and organized exhibitions where you can see the works returned to Germany.

Of course, it was not only a sense of gratitude that prompted the museums to organize these exhibitions. The second part of their message is: can't we get everything else back?.. After all, there are still at least a million stolen works in Russia...

German museums have been pushing for the return of trophy art since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. But Russia gives away the works very reluctantly, citing the fact that the "Rembrandts", "Caravaggio", "Rubens" captured by the Soviet army should be considered compensation for the masterpieces stolen or mutilated by the Nazis from Russian museums. According to Russian law, all works of art exported from Germany under the leadership of Stalin's Trophy Committee are the property of the Russian state.

The attention of the Russian authorities and the media is now focused on the situation in South Ossetia, so few people are interested in exhibitions in German museums. The first exhibition of trophy art has recently opened (there are nine planned in total). It is called "Fifty Years of Lost and Newfound Art" and takes place in Potsdam, in the famous Sanssouci Palace, which was once the summer residence of the Prussian King Frederick the Great.

The exhibition tells about the large-scale restitution of 1958. Then, as a sign of friendship with East Germany, 300 wagons were sent from Moscow and Leningrad, in which there were 1.5 million of the 2.5 million trophy masterpieces taken out of Germany at the end of the war. If not for this restitution, many German museums would forever be left without their main treasures. How can one, for example, imagine the Pergamon Museum without the famous Pergamon Altar? Or souvenir shops in Dresden without postcards and mouse pads depicting cherubs from Raphael's "Sistine Madonna"? But all this could remain in the Soviet Union ...

Those who opened those boxes of trophy art must have felt like children on Christmas Eve. Museums in East Germany celebrated the return of the treasures in a big way. But the celebrations soon ended, and nothing helped to hide the hard truth: almost half of the stolen works never returned to Germany.

The directors of German museums still cannot get an answer to the question of what criteria the Soviet authorities were guided by when deciding which paintings and sculptures to return to Germany and which not. At the opening of the exhibition in Sanssouci, the president of the Prussian Cultural Center, Hermann Parzinger, suggested that the remaining works belong to those that were stolen by individuals even before the arrival of the Trophy Committee.

“We think a lot of the work has ended up in private collections,” Parzinger said. According to him, Germany does not hope that thanks to the exhibitions, Russia will decide to immediately return the remaining trophies. The main task is to establish interaction with representatives of Russian museums so that the curators know what works have disappeared, where they are and in what condition.

Representatives of the Prussian Palaces and Parks of Berlin-Brandenburg Foundation, under whose patronage Sanssouci is located, say that about 3 thousand works have disappeared without a trace from the palaces and castles of East Germany under their care. Of the 159 paintings that hung in Frederick the Great's richly furnished art gallery before the war, only 99 "returned from the war." The curators cover the empty spaces on the walls with other trophy works of art, many of which were taken from the walls of castles destroyed during the war. These works include paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Ferdinand Bol, Guido Reni and Jan Lievens (Jan Lievens), which almost completely cover the gallery wall.

The exhibition also includes illustrations showing what Friedrich's gallery looked like before the war, as well as black and white photographs of stolen works. It is impossible not to notice that the paintings that now hang on the walls of Sanssouci no longer correspond to the taste preferences of the Prussian monarch. Most of the "lacunae" were filled with canvases on religious themes, although Friedrich preferred mythological painting. He liked paintings with images of sensual naked bodies and scenes of love. Someone who plundered his collection in 1945 apparently had a similar taste - the lush Danae and Venus disappeared from the walls of the gallery, as well as the Renaissance erotic fantasies of Giulio Romano (Giulio Romano). In particular, a canvas was stolen, which depicts a naked young man and a girl kissing on a bed under the supervision of an elderly woman (presumably a nurse).

Most of all mourn the loss of the canvas "Tarquinius and Lucretia", an unforgettable masterpiece by Rubens. Even before the arrival of the Trophy Committee, one Soviet officer cut the picture out of the frame and took it home. The canvas lay in his attic until his death in 1999. Then a Moscow collector bought the painting for $3.5 million and paid for restoration work, after which he tried to sell it to Germany for $60 million. The German government did not want to pay such an amount for the painting and tried to return the masterpiece through the courts. But the Moscow court rejected the claim, arguing that the owner of the painting acquired it legally.

However, not everything ends so sadly. In 1993, a World War II veteran donated 101 graphic works to the German embassy in Moscow, including works by Albrecht Duerer, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Francisco de Goya (Francisco de Goya). Before the war, the works of art were in the Bremen Art Museum, and in 1943 they were hidden in the Karnzow castle. There they were found by officers of the Soviet army. In 2000, the drawings and engravings returned to the Bremen Museum.

The exhibition of trophy art at Sanssouci Castle will run until October 31st. Similar exhibitions will be held in Aachen, Berlin, Bremen, Dessau, Dresden, Gotha and Schwerin.

For more than 15 years now, now flaring up, now fading, there has been a debate about the fate of the “trophy art” exported to the territory of the USSR from Germany during the Second World War. The director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Irina Antonova, declares: “We owe nothing to anyone,” the former chairman of the State Duma Committee on Culture, Nikolai Gubenko, proposed replacing German paintings with Russian ones stolen by the Nazis, and Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography, cautiously advocates the return of some collections of "trophy art" under the "displaced cultural property" law. The word "restitution" (as the return of property to the rightful owner is called) has firmly entered the lexicon of scandalous publications in the Russian press. But what is restitution in world practice, when this concept arose, and how “prisoner of war art” was treated in different eras, is practically unknown to the Russian reader.

The tradition of taking away artistic masterpieces from a defeated enemy arose in ancient times. Moreover, this act was considered one of the most important symbols of victory. The tradition is based on the custom of capturing statues of foreign gods and placing them in their temples, "subduing" them to their own as stronger and more successful. The Romans even developed a special “triumph” ritual, during which the captives themselves brought their “idols” into the Eternal City and threw them at the feet of Capitoline Jupiter and Juno. The same harsh people were the first to realize the material, and not only the spiritual and moral value of "prisoner of war art." A real art market arose, where some commander could earn more money for a pair of statues of Praxiteles than for a crowd of Greek slaves. Robbery at the state level was supplemented by private looting for understandable profit.

From a legal point of view, both were just a way to get legitimate booty. The only right that regulated the relationship between the owners of works of art at the time of the military conflict was the right of the winner.

Relief of the triumphal arch of Titus depicting trophies from the Jerusalem temple captured in 70 CE. e.

Law of Survival: Trophies don't "burn"

The history of mankind is full of not just examples of "artistic robbery" of the enemy, but real cultural disasters of this kind - disasters that turned the whole course of world development.

In 146 BC. e. Roman general Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth. This city was the center of the production of special bronze with the addition of gold and silver to its composition. Sculptures and arts and crafts from this unique alloy were considered a special "secret" of Greece. After the destruction by the Romans, Corinth fell into decay, and the secret of making this bronze forever sunk into oblivion.

In June 455, Gaiseric, the king of the Vandals, sacked Rome for two weeks in a row. Unlike the Goths of Alaric, forty years earlier, the first of the barbarians to break through the fortress walls of the city, these people were interested not only in precious metals, but also in marble statues. The booty from the temples of the Capitol was loaded onto ships and sent to the capital of Gaiseric - the revived Carthage (the former Roman province of Africa was conquered by the Vandals ten years earlier). However, along the way, several ships with trophy art sank.

In 1204, crusaders from Western Europe captured Constantinople. This great capital had never before fallen into the hands of the enemy. Not only the best examples of Byzantine art were stored here, but also the famous monuments of antiquity, taken from Italy, Greece and Egypt by many emperors, starting with Constantine the Great. Now most of these treasures went to the Venetians in payment for the financing of the knightly campaign. And the greatest robbery in history fully demonstrated the “law of the survival of art” - trophies are most often not destroyed. The four horses (of the same Corinthian bronze!) by Lysippus, the court sculptor of Alexander the Great, stolen from the Hippodrome of Constantinople, eventually decorated St. Mark's Cathedral and have survived to this day. And the statue of the Charioteer from the same hippodrome and thousands of other masterpieces that the Venetians did not consider valuable trophies were melted down by the crusaders into a copper coin.

In May 1527, the army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V entered Rome. Mercenaries from all over Europe have turned into an uncontrollable mob of killers and destroyers. The churches and palaces of the papal capital, full of paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo and Raphael, were devastated. Sacco di Roma, the sacking of Rome drew a line under the High Renaissance period in art history.

To rob is a bad form: you give indemnity!

The Thirty Years' War in Europe in 1618-1648 revolutionized not only military affairs, but also international relations. What was reflected in the problem of "prisoner of war art". At the beginning of this all-European conflict, the unwritten right of the winner still dominated. The imperial Catholic troops of Field Marshals Tilly and Wallenstein plundered cities and churches just as shamelessly as the Protestant armies of the Bavarian elector Maximilian and the Swedish king Gustavus Adolf. But by the end of the war, “civilized generals” had already begun to include lists of works of art in demands for indemnities (this is the name for payments in cash or “in kind” in favor of the winner, imposed on the vanquished). This was a huge step forward: centralized, agreed-upon payments made it possible to avoid excesses that were harmful to both sides. The soldiers destroyed more than they took away. There was even an opportunity to buy some masterpieces from the winner: the indemnity document included a clause stating that he could sell them to the side only if the vanquished did not pay the predetermined “ransom” on time.

A little more than half a century has passed since the end of the Thirty Years' War, and it has become good form for enlightened sovereigns not to rob art at all. So, Peter I, having imposed a fine on Danzig (Gdansk), already after signing the act of indemnity, saw the Last Judgment by Hans Memling in the Church of St. Mary and wanted to get it. He hinted to the magistrate to give him a present. The city fathers answered: if you want, plunder, but we will not give it back ourselves. In the face of European public opinion, Peter did not dare to pass for a barbarian. However, this example is not entirely indicative: the robberies of works of art did not become a thing of the past, they simply began to be condemned by peoples who considered themselves civilized. Finally, Napoleon once again updated the rules of the game. He not only began to include lists of art objects in acts of indemnities, but also to stipulate his right to own them in the final peace treaties. Under the unheard of scale operation to “seize” masterpieces from the vanquished, an ideological basis was even laid down: the French, led by the genius of all times, Napoleon Bonaparte, will assemble a super-museum in the Louvre for the benefit of all mankind! The paintings and sculptures of great artists, once scattered in monasteries and palaces, where they were not seen by anyone but ignorant churchmen and swaggering aristocrats, are now available to anyone who comes to Paris.

"Casus Louvre"
After the first abdication of Napoleon in 1814, the allied victorious monarchs, led by Alexander I, did not dare to touch the Louvre, full of confiscated works. Only after the defeat of the "ungrateful French" at Waterloo did the patience of the allies snap and the "distribution" of the supermuseum began. This was the first restitution in the world. Here is how the 1997 International Law reference book defines this word: “From Lat. restitutio - restoration. Return in kind of property (things) illegally seized and exported by one of the belligerent states from the territory of another state that was its military adversary. Until 1815, masterpieces captured by the enemy could either be redeemed or recaptured. Now it has become possible to return them "according to the law." To do this, the winners had, however, to cancel all the peace treaties concluded by Napoleon during the period of his victories. The Congress of Vienna stigmatized "the robbery of the usurper" and obliged France to return the art treasures to their rightful owners. In total, more than 5,000 unique pieces were returned, including the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece and the statue of Apollo Belvedere. So the common assertion that the current Louvre is full of treasures stolen by Napoleon is a delusion. Only those paintings and sculptures remained there, which the owners themselves did not want to take back, believing that the “transportation costs” did not correspond to their price. Thus, the Duke of Tuscany left the French "Maesta" Cimabue and the works of other masters of the proto-Renaissance, the meaning of which in Europe no one then understood, except for the director of the Louvre, Dominique Vivant Denon. Like the French confiscation, restitution also took on political overtones. The Austrians used the return of valuables to Venice and Lombardy as a demonstration of their concern for the rights of these Italian territories annexed to the Austrian Empire. Prussia, under whose pressure France returned paintings and sculptures to the German principalities, strengthened the position of the state, capable of defending common German interests. In many German cities, the return of treasures was accompanied by an explosion of patriotism: young people unharnessed their horses and literally carried wagons with works of art in their arms.

"Revenge for Versailles": compensatory restitution

The 20th century, with its unheard of brutal wars, rejected the views of the humanists of the 19th century, such as the Russian lawyer Fyodor Martens, who fiercely criticized the "right of the strong." Already in September 1914, after the Germans shelled the Belgian city of Louvain, the famous library burned down there. By this time, Article 56 of the Hague Convention had already been adopted, which stated that “any deliberate capture, destruction or damage ... of historical monuments, works of art and science is prohibited ...” During the four years of the First World War, many such cases had accumulated.

After the defeat of Germany, the victors had to decide how exactly they would punish the aggressor. According to the formula of Martens "art outside of war" - the cultural values ​​of the guilty party could not be touched even for the sake of restoring justice. Nevertheless, Article 247 appeared in the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, according to which Germany compensated for the losses of the same Belgians with books from their libraries and the return to Ghent of six altar doors by the van Eyck brothers, legally bought by the Berlin Museum back in the 19th century. So for the first time in history, restitution was carried out not by returning the same values ​​that were stolen, but by replacing them with similar ones - in value and purpose. Such compensatory restitution is also called substitution, or restitution in kind ("restitution of a similar type"). It was believed that at Versailles it was adopted not in order to make it a rule, but as a kind of warning, "so that others would be disrespectful." But as experience has shown, the “lesson” did not achieve its goal. As for ordinary restitution, after the First World War it was used more than once, especially during the “divorce” of countries that were part of three collapsed empires: German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian. For example, under the peace treaty of 1921 between Soviet Russia and Poland, the latter returned not only the art treasures evacuated to the east in 1914-1916, but also all the trophies taken by the tsarist troops since 1772.

All to the fees: "big restitution"

As soon as the guns in Europe died down in 1945, the process of returning cultural property to its rightful owners began. The fundamental principle of this greatest restitution in the history of mankind was proclaimed the return of valuables not to a specific owner: a museum, a church or a private person, but to the state from whose territory the Nazis took them. This state itself was later given the right to distribute the former "cultural trophies" among legal entities and individuals. The British and Americans created a network of collection points in Germany, where they concentrated all the works of art found in the country. For ten years, they distributed to third countries-owners what they managed to identify in this mass as loot.

The USSR behaved differently. Special trophy brigades indiscriminately exported cultural property from the Soviet zone of occupation to Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv. In addition, receiving from the British and Americans tens of thousands of their books and works of art that ended up on the territory of West Germany, our command gave them almost nothing in return from East. Moreover, it demanded from the Allies part of the exhibits of German museums, which fell under Anglo-American and French control, as a compensatory restitution for their cultural heritage, which perished in the flames of the Nazi invasion. The United States, Britain and the de Gaulle government did not object, although, for example, the British, who lost many libraries and museums during the Luftwaffe air raids, refused such compensation for themselves. However, before giving away anything, the sworn friends of the Soviet Union requested exact lists of what was already within its borders, intending to "subtract" these valuables from the total amount of compensation. The Soviet authorities flatly refused to provide such information, arguing that everything that was taken out was war trophies, and they had nothing to do with "this case". Negotiations on compensatory restitution in the Control Council, which ruled the occupied Reich, ended in 1947 with nothing. And Stalin ordered, just in case, to classify "cultural booty" as a possible political weapon for the future.

Protection from Predators: Ideological Restitution

... And this weapon was used already in 1955 by the successors of the leader. On March 3, 1955, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR V. Molotov sent a memo to the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee (as the highest party body began to be called instead of the "Politburo" then). In it, he wrote: “The current situation regarding the paintings of the Dresden Gallery (the main “symbol” of all the artistic conquests of the USSR. - Approx. ed.) Is abnormal. Two solutions to this issue can be proposed: either declare that the paintings of the Dresden Art Gallery belong to the Soviet people as trophy property and provide them with wide public access, or return them to the German people as a national treasure. In the current political situation, the second solution seems to be more correct. What is meant by "the present political situation"?

As you know, realizing that the creation of a united communist Germany is beyond its power, Moscow set a course for the split of this country and the formation of a satellite of the USSR in its east, which would be recognized by the international community, and was the first to set an example, on March 25, 1954, declaring the recognition of full sovereignty GDR. And just a month later, an international UNESCO conference began in The Hague, revising the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflicts. It was decided to use it as an important means of ideological struggle in the conditions of the Cold War. "Protection of the world's cultural heritage from the predators of capitalism" became the most important slogan of Soviet propaganda, like the slogan "struggle for peace against warmongers." We were among the first to sign and ratify the convention.

In 1945, the collection of the Dresden Gallery was taken to the USSR, and most of the masterpieces returned to their place ten years later.

But here a problem arose. The Allies, having completed the restitution of the Nazi loot, did not take anything for themselves. True, the Americans are by no means saints: a group of generals, with the support of some museum directors, made an attempt to expropriate two hundred exhibits from museums in Berlin. However, American art historians raised a fuss in the press, and the case died out. The United States, France and Great Britain even handed over to the German authorities control over collection points, where mostly objects from German museums remained. Therefore, stories about the Amber Room, Russian icons and masterpieces from German museums that are secretly stored overseas in Fort Knox are fiction. Thus, the "predators of capitalism" appeared in the international arena as heroes of restitution, and the "progressive USSR" as a barbarian who hid "trophies" not only from the world community, but also from his own people. So Molotov proposed not only to "save face", but also to intercept the political initiative: to solemnly return the collection of the Dresden Gallery, pretending that it was originally taken out for the sake of "salvation".

The action was timed to coincide with the creation of the Warsaw Pact in the summer of 1955. In order to give weight to one of its key members, the GDR, the “socialist Germans” were gradually returned not only the works from the gallery, but also all the valuables from the museums of East Germany. By 1960, only works from West Germany, capitalist countries like Holland, and private collections remained in the USSR. According to the same scheme, artistic values ​​​​were returned to all countries of the "people's democracy", including even the Romanian exhibits, transferred to tsarist Russia for storage back in the First World War. The German, Romanian, Polish "returns" turned into big political shows and became a tool for strengthening the socialist camp, and the "big brother", emphasizing not the legal, but the political nature of what was happening, stubbornly called them not "restitution", but "return" and "an act of good will."

The word of the SS against the word of the Jew

After 1955, the FRG and Austria, of course, dealt with the problem of "stolen art" on their own. We remember that some of the cultural property looted by the Nazis could not find their owners, who died in the camps and on the battlefield, and settled in "special guards" like the Mauerbach monastery near Vienna. Much more often, the robbed owners themselves could not find their paintings and sculptures.

Since the end of the 1950s, when the "German economic miracle" began and the FRG suddenly became rich, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer launched a program of paying monetary compensation to the victims. At the same time, the Germans abandoned the "state" principle, which was the basis of the "Great Restitution" in 1945. However, by the beginning of the 1950s, the Americans had already partially begun to abandon it. The reason was the numerous "episodes" in which the governments of the socialist bloc simply nationalized the returned property, and did not transfer them to collectors or churches. Now, in order to get a thing belonging to him, the owner - whether a museum or a private person - himself had to prove that he not only had the rights to a painting or sculpture, but also that it was not criminals or marauders who stole it from him, but the Nazis.

Despite this, the payments very soon reached multi-million sums, and the Ministry of Finance of the Federal Republic of Germany, which paid compensation, decided to put an end to the "disgrace" (most of its officials in the recent past in similar positions served the Third Reich and did not suffer from a "guilt complex" at all). On November 3, 1964, right at the entrance to this department in Bonn, the chief specialist in dealing with compensation for stolen works, lawyer Dr. Hans Deutsch, was arrested. He was accused of fraud.

The main trump card of the German prosecutor's office and the government in this case was the testimony of the former SS Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Wilke. He said that in 1961 Deutsch persuaded him to confirm that the paintings of the Hungarian collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany were confiscated by the Nazis, when in fact the Russians did. The word of the SS-man Wilcke outweighed the word of the Jew Deutsch, who denied collusion. The lawyer was kept in prison for 17 months, released on bail of two million marks, and acquitted many years later. But the compensation process was discredited, and by the time Deutsch was released, it had come to naught. (Now it turned out that some of Khatvani's paintings actually ended up in the USSR, but Soviet soldiers found them near Berlin.) Thus, by the end of the 1960s, the “big” post-war restitution died out. Sporadically, there were still occasional cases of paintings from private collections stolen by the Nazis and “surfaced” suddenly at auctions or in museums. But it became increasingly difficult for the plaintiffs to prove their case. Not only the deadlines set by the documents on the "Great Restitution" have expired, but also those stipulated in various national legislations. After all, there are no special laws regulating the rights of private ownership of art objects. Property rights are governed by ordinary civil law, where the statute of limitations is common to all cases.

The interstate restitution also seemed complete - only from time to time the USSR returned to the GDR the paintings of the Dresden Gallery, caught on the antique market. Everything changed in the 1990s. Germany was united, and the Cold War went down in history...

Fyodor Martens - Father of the Hague Convention
The optimistic 19th century was sure that humanity was able to protect art from war. International lawyers took up the case, the most striking figure among whom was Fyodor Martens. "The child prodigy from the orphanage," as his contemporaries called him, became the star of Russian jurisprudence and won the attention of the reformer Tsar Alexander II. Martens was one of the first to criticize the concept of law based on force. Force only protects the right, but it is based on respect for the human person. A lawyer from St. Petersburg considered the right of a person and a nation to own a work of art to be one of the most important. He considered respect for this right as a measure of the state's civility. Having drafted an international convention on the rules of warfare, Martens proposed the formula "art outside of war." There are no pretexts that can serve as a basis for the destruction and confiscation of cultural property. The project was submitted by the Russian delegation to the Brussels International Conference in 1874 and formed the basis of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.

"It was yours - it became ours"?

... And the problem of the so-called "displaced values" came to light again - more precisely, it got into the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between the USSR and the FRG in the fall of 1990. Article 16 of this document read: "The parties declare that stolen or illegally exported art treasures found on their territory will be returned to their rightful owners or their heirs." Soon, information appeared in the press: there are secret vaults in Russia, where hundreds of thousands of works from Germany and other countries of Eastern Europe have been hidden for half a century, including paintings by the Impressionists and the famous Gold of Troy.

Germany immediately stated that the article applies to "trophy art." In the USSR, they first said that journalists were lying and everything was returned back in the 1950s and 1960s, which means that there was no subject for conversation, but after the collapse of the country, the new Russia recognized the existence of “prisoner of war art”. In August 1992, a special Restitution Commission was formed, headed by the then Minister of Culture of Russia, Yevgeny Sidorov. She began negotiations with the German side. The fact of hiding first-class art treasures in storerooms for half a century complicated the Russian position. It was perceived in the West as a "crime against humanity", which, in the eyes of many, partly counterbalanced the crimes of the Nazis against Russian culture during the war years. Official Bonn refused to start everything from scratch and take into account part of the art exported from Germany as compensatory restitution for Russian valuables that were lost during the Nazi invasion. Since the USSR secretly removed everything in 1945 as booty and refused to settle the issue in the Control Council, it means that it violated the Hague Convention. Therefore, the export was illegal and the case falls under Article 16 of the 1990 treaty.

To turn the tide, Russian special guards began to be gradually declassified. German experts even got access to some of them. At the same time, the Sidorov Commission announced that it was starting a series of exhibitions of "trophy" works of art, since it was immoral to hide masterpieces. Meanwhile, some German owners, believing that the official German position is too tough, tried to find a compromise with the Russians...

The Bremen Kunstverein (“artistic association”), a society of art lovers, a non-governmental organization, expressed its readiness to leave to the Hermitage several drawings that were once kept in the city on the Weser, as a token of gratitude for the return of the rest of the collection, taken out in 1945 by unofficial trophy brigades , but personally by the architect, Captain Viktor Baldin, who found them in a cache near Berlin. In addition, Bremen raised money for the restoration of several ancient Russian churches destroyed by the Germans during the war. Our Minister of Culture has even signed an agreement with the Kunstverein.

However, already in May 1994, a campaign began in the Russian "patriotic" press under the slogan "We will not allow a second robbery of Russia" (the first meant Stalin's sales of masterpieces from the Hermitage abroad). The return of "art trophies" began to be seen as a sign of recognition of our defeat not only in the Cold War, but almost in the Second World War. As a result, on the eve of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Victory, negotiations with Bremen reached an impasse.

Then the State Duma came into play, developing a draft federal law "On cultural property transferred to the USSR as a result of World War II and located on the territory of the Russian Federation." It is no coincidence that there are no terms “trophies” or “restitution”. The document was based on the thesis that the Western allies, by the very fact of recognizing the moral right of the USSR to compensatory restitution, gave the Soviet occupation authorities carte blanche to export works of art from East Germany. Therefore, it was perfectly legal! There can be no restitution, and all the valuables imported into the territory of Russia during the hostilities by the official "trophy brigades" become state property. Only three moral exceptions were recognized: property should be returned if it previously belonged to a) countries that themselves fell victims of Hitler's aggression, b) charitable or religious organizations, and c) private individuals who also suffered from the Nazis.

And in April 1995, the Russian parliament - until the adoption of the Law on Restitution - even announced a moratorium on any return of "displaced art." All negotiations with Germany automatically became useless, and the fight against restitution became for the State Duma one of the synonyms for the fight against the Yeltsin administration. The ultra-conservative law was adopted in 1998, and two years later, despite a presidential veto, it entered into force by decision of the Constitutional Court. It is not recognized by the international community, and therefore "displaced masterpieces" do not go to exhibitions abroad. If, according to this law, something is returned to Germany, as, for example, in 2002, the stained-glass windows of the Marienkirche in Frankfurt an der Oder, official Berlin pretends that Russia is fulfilling the 16th article of the 1990 treaty. Meanwhile, inside our country, a dispute continues between the government and the State Duma about which categories of monuments fall under the law and who gives the final "go-ahead" for the return of "displaced art." The Duma insists that any return must be carried out by itself. By the way, it was this claim that was at the heart of the scandal surrounding the government's attempt to return the Bremen drawings to Germany in 2003. After this attempt failed, the then Minister of Culture Mikhail Shvydkoi lost his post, and after that, in December 2004, he also ceased to head the Interdepartmental Council on Cultural Property Displaced as a result of World War II.

The last return to date on the basis of the Restitution Law took place in the spring of 2006, when rare books exported to the USSR in 1945 were transferred to the Sárospatak Reformed College of the Hungarian Reformed Church. After that, in September 2006, the current Minister of Culture and Mass Communications, Alexander Sokolov, stated: "There will be no restitution as the return of cultural property, and this word can be put out of use."

On the trail of restitution
The editors made an attempt to find out what the current state of the issue of the restitution of cultural property in Russia is. Our correspondents contacted both the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography (FAKK), headed by Mikhail Shvydkoy, and the State Duma Committee on Culture and Tourism, whose member Stanislav Govorukhin dealt a lot with restitution issues. However, neither the leaders of these organizations themselves, nor their employees found in their "bins" a single new regulatory document on the return of cultural property, did not provide a single comment. The FACC, they say, does not deal with this problem at all, the Parliamentary Committee on Culture nods at the Committee on Property, in the report on the results of whose work for the spring session of 2006 we find only a declaration: a draft of a law on restitution. Further - silence. The “Legal Portal in the Sphere of Culture” (http://pravo.roskultura.ru/) is silent, the widely advertised Internet project “Restitution” (http://www.lostart.ru) is not functioning. The last official word is the statement of the Minister of Culture Alexander Sokolov in September 2006 about the need to remove the word "restitution" from use.

"Skeletons in the Closet"

In addition to the Russian-German debate about "displaced valuables", a "second front" of the battle for (and against) restitution suddenly opened up in the mid-1990s. It all started with a scandal with the gold of the dead Jews, which, after the war, “due to the lack of customers”, was appropriated by Swiss banks. After the indignant world community forced banks to pay debts to relatives of Holocaust victims, it was the turn of museums.

In 1996, it became known that, according to the “state principle” of the Great Restitution, after the war, France received from the allies 61,000 works of art seized by the Nazis on its territory from private owners: Jews and other “enemies of the Reich”. The Parisian authorities were obliged to return them to their rightful owners. But only 43,000 works made it to their destination. For the rest, according to officials, no applicants were found within the established time frame. Part of the bottom went under the hammer, and the remaining 2,000 went to French museums. And a chain reaction began: it turned out that almost all interested states have their own "skeletons in the closet." In Holland alone, the list of works with a "brown past" amounted to 3,709 "numbers", led by the famous "Poppy Field" by Van Gogh, worth $50 million.

A strange situation has developed in Austria. There, the surviving Jews in the late 1940s-1950s seemed to have returned everything that had once been confiscated. But when they tried to take out the returned paintings and sculptures, they were refused. The basis was the 1918 law on the prohibition of the export of "national treasure". The families of the Rothschilds, Bloch-Bauers and other collectors had to "donate" more than half of their collections to the very museums that robbed them under the Nazis in order to now get permission to export the rest.

Not better “turned out” in America. In the fifty post-war years, wealthy collectors from this country bought and donated to US museums many works "without a past." One by one, facts became available to the press, testifying that among them there is the property of the victims of the Holocaust. The heirs began to state their claims and go to court. From the point of view of the law, as in the case of Swiss gold, museums had the right not to return the paintings: the statute of limitations had expired, there were export laws. But there were times in the yard when the rights of the individual were put above talk of "national treasure" and "public good." A wave of "moral restitution" has risen. Its most important milestone was the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust-era property, which adopted principles that most countries in the world, including Russia, agreed to follow. True, not everyone and not always in a hurry to do this.

The heirs of the Hungarian Jew Herzog never got a decision from the Russian court on the restitution of their paintings. They lost in all instances, and now they have only one left - the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The Association of Museum Directors of America was forced to establish a commission to review their own collections. All information about exhibits with a "dark past" must now be posted on museum websites on the Internet. The same work - with varying success - is being carried out in France, where restitution has already affected such giants as the Louvre and the Pompidou Museum. Meanwhile in Austria, Minister of Culture Elisabeth Gerer says: “Our country has so many artistic treasures that there is no reason to be stingy. Honor is dearer." At the moment, this country has returned not only the masterpieces of the old Italian and Flemish masters from the Rothschild collection, but also the “calling card” of Austrian art itself, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” by Gustav Klimt.

Despite the unusual atmosphere of a new wave of returns, we are talking about the remnants of the "Great Restitution". As one of the experts put it: "We are now doing something that we did not get our hands on in 1945-1955." And how long will the “moral restitution” “last”?.. Some are already talking about the beginning of its crisis, because the returned masterpieces do not remain in the families of the victims, but are immediately sold on the antique market. For the mentioned picture of the same Klimt, his descendants received from the American Ronald Lauder 135 million dollars - a record amount paid for a canvas ever in history! The return of valuables to their rightful owners is turning into a tool for the "black redistribution" of museum collections and a profitable business for lawyers and art dealers. If the public ceases to see in restitution something just in relation to the victims of war and genocide, and sees only a means of profit, it will, of course, stop.

Even in Germany, with its complex of guilt over those who died at the hands of the Nazis, a wave of protests against the "commercialization of restitution" arose. The reason was the return in the summer of 2006 from the Brücke Museum in Berlin of a painting by the expressionist Ludwig Kirchner to the heirs of the Hess Jewish family. The canvas "Street Scene" was not confiscated by the Nazis. It was sold by this family itself in 1936, already when the Hesses managed to get out with their collection to Switzerland. And sold it back to Germany! Opponents of the return claim that the Hesses sold the painting to a collector from Cologne voluntarily and for good money. However, in the 1999 and 2001 declarations adopted by the German government following the Washington Conference, Germany itself, and not the plaintiff, must prove that the sale in the 1930s was fair, and not forced, carried out under pressure from the Gestapo. In the case of the Hesses, there was no evidence that the family received any money for the 1936 deal at all. Painting for 38 million dollars was already sold in November 2006 by the heirs at Christie's auction. After that, German Minister of Culture Berndt Neumann even stated that the Germans, without refusing to restitute the property of Holocaust victims in principle, could revise the rules for its implementation, adopted by them in the declarations of 1999 and 2001.

But for the time being, things are still different: museum workers, shocked by recent events, are afraid of expanding the field of "moral restitution." And what if not only in the Czech Republic, Romania and the Baltic States, but also in Russia and other countries with a communist past, the return of masterpieces nationalized after the revolution to the former owners begins? What if the church insists on the total return of its nationalized wealth? Will the dispute about art between the "divorced" republics of the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other collapsed countries not flare up with renewed vigor? And it will be very difficult for museums if they have to give away the art of the former colonies. What will happen if the Parthenon marbles, taken in the early 19th century by the British from this restless Ottoman province, go back to Greece? ..

The owner himself has not yet submitted official requests, and the Poltava Museum claims that they can only guess what canvases they are talking about.

Identified by photographs

The conflict over art arose back in May, when the director of the Dessau Cultural Foundation announced an amazing find in the German edition of the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. The portraits of members of the Anhalt family that disappeared during the war were found in Ukraine, or rather, in the Poltava Art Museum named after Yaroshenko. Art historians allegedly identified the paintings from photographs on the gallery's website.

Further, this news, like a snowball, was replenished with more and more new details. The Germans found the owner of the paintings - 73-year-old Eduard von Anhalt, the direct heir to the family. They made a complete inventory of the missing person from the family castle and accused Soviet soldiers of stealing, who in the last year of the war reached the city of Dessau.

How should we react to such news? Immediately the Germans spoke about six paintings that are allegedly stored in Poltava, today they are already writing about seven. Maybe they want to take away the entire exposition of Western European art from us? - says the director of the museum Olga Kurchakova, accompanying me to the red hall.

What kind of pictures the Germans are talking about, Poltava residents only have to guess. After all, there are no works with exactly such names in the museum. For example, the alleged "Portrait of Princess Casemira" is signed as "Portrait of a Lady with a Dog". This canvas came to Poltava in the 1950s from the exchange fund as an unnamed one. The same goes for the rest of the work. The "male portrait" of an unknown author is considered by the Germans to be their Frederick II, and the portrait of the sisters of the artist Vladimir Borovikovsky is generally called the double portrait of the daughters of Friedrich von Anhalt, painted by the artist Beck.

The only picture that is definitely related to the Anhalt family is "Portrait of Prince G.B. Anhalt". After all, such an inscription was originally on the canvas. The two-meter canvas was brought to Poltava as unusable, with notes - "copy" and "not subject to restoration."

After the war, Stalin ordered the arts committee to bring paintings to the base in Moscow to replace the lost ones. Each museum calculated the losses, and then received Western European paintings from the exchange fund. Naturally, the masterpieces did not reach the provinces. They gave away what Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kyiv did not take, that is, works by little-known artists. Many works were in a deplorable state. The same "Prince of Ankhal" had to be restored for 30 years. The work was also complicated by the fact that a significant part of the paintings turned out to be nameless, - Svetlana Bocharova, deputy director for research at the Poltava Art Museum, tells the details of the exchange.

One collection was defended, the other was presented

To establish the authenticity of the paintings, an independent examination is required. Independent, not German, says Olga Kurchakova. - You can find fault with every regional museum in Ukraine, because there are a lot of German paintings everywhere.

What will happen to the portraits after the official appeal of the Germans, Poltava can only guess. After all, all the exhibits are part of the National Museum Fund of Ukraine, and its fate will be decided exclusively by the state.

And experience shows that the state disposes of good in different ways. For example, in 2008, the Simferopol Museum managed to defend the right to 80 works from the German collection, and even after the examination confirmed that these paintings were taken out of Germany, the canvases remained in Ukraine. After all, cultural values ​​received as reparations for the war, according to the law, are not subject to return.

However, there were other cases: in 2001, official Kiev gave Germany the trophy archive of Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach - this is previously unknown music, more than five thousand unique musical sheets inscribed by the hand of the great composer and his sons. Leonid Kuchma simply presented them to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

HELP "KP"

Losses of the Poltava Museum during the occupation

During the war, 779 paintings, 1895 icons, 2020 engravings disappeared without a trace from Poltava. Together with bibliographic rarities, the loss of the art museum amounted to 26,000 copies. Only 4,000 small stock paintings were packed into boxes and taken to Ufa and Tyumen.

It was necessary to restore the lists of the lost according to the memory of museum workers, because the Germans, when they retreated, burned all the documents. The amount of losses of the Poltava museum in 1945 was estimated at 13 million 229 thousand rubles, - the director of the museum shows the acts. - Only one painting came back. It can be seen that the Germans left it, and the Poltava residents took it to the market and sold it for a loaf of bread. The last owner in 1977 returned "Morning Prayer" by Jeanne Baptiste Greza to the exposition.

Works of art were carefully selected by the invaders. So, Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories, gathered the best specialists and purposefully took them out of the museums of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio. And finally, the Germans set fire to the Poltava local lore, and shot those who tried to save the good.