The Inter-Allied Declaration against acts of dispossession

On 5 January 1943 the Inter-Allied Declaration against Acts of Dispossession committed in Territories under Enemy Occupation or Control was published in London and simultaneously in Washington. It was signed by seventeen governments – those of the Union of South Africa, the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, Greece, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia – and by the French National Committee of the Free French. It is often described as an agreement of “eighteen countries”; strictly speaking, it was seventeen states and a French committee that was not at the time a recognised government. The signatories warned that they would do everything in their power to defeat the methods of dispossession practised by the Axis powers against the countries and peoples they had invaded and plundered, and to restore property to its rightful owners after the war.

Plunder in occupied Europe

After three years of war the governments-in-exile in London were well aware of the scale of the looting. The Germans took everything: the gold of central banks, foreign currency and securities, industrial plants, raw materials, food, landed estates, works of art and libraries. Some of it was taken openly, as “war booty” or as confiscated property of “enemies of the Reich”; some took on a semblance of legality – forced sales at depressed prices, “trusteeship”, or the acquisition of shareholdings by German concerns paid for with money squeezed out of the occupied country itself as occupation costs.

In the Polish lands annexed to the Reich, the property of Poles and Jews was administered from the autumn of 1939 by the Main Trustee Office East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost), which answered to Hermann Göring as Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan. In the General Government Hans Frank ordered works of art to be “secured”, and the Austrian art historian Kajetan Mühlmann and his men carried off the collections of museums, churches and private owners. As early as October 1939 the Germans dismantled Veit Stoss’s altarpiece in St Mary’s Church in Kraków and took it to Nuremberg.

In the West, collections – Jewish ones above all – were looted by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, ERR), set up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. At the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris the ERR gathered and catalogued the plundered collections of French Jews such as the Rothschilds. According to most studies, Göring went there about twenty times to choose paintings for his residence, Carinhall; in November 1940 he issued an order setting the order of precedence for dividing the spoils – Hitler first, then Göring himself. In the Netherlands he bought up entire collections and gallery stocks, such as that of the firm of the art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who had died while fleeing, on terms that could not be resisted in an occupied country.

Jewish property was looted in a particular way. “Aryanisation” – the forced takeover of Jewish businesses, real estate and bank accounts by “Aryan” trustees or buyers – had begun in Germany long before the war and accelerated after Kristallnacht. After 1939 Germany and its allies extended the system to the occupied countries. In 1942, as Jews were deported to the extermination camps, their homes and possessions were taken over by the occupation authorities; furniture and household goods were shipped to the Reich from the flats of those deported from the Warsaw Ghetto or from Paris. Central bank gold went to the Reichsbank: in 1940–1942 the Vichy government handed over to the Germans nearly 200 tonnes of gold that Belgium had entrusted to the Bank of France in 1940.

What the declaration said

The initiative came from the British government. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, laid the text before Parliament as a Command Paper (Cmd. 6418), together with a statement by His Majesty’s Government and an explanatory memorandum; in Washington the State Department released it to the press the same day. The declaration was short. The signatories reserved “all their rights to declare invalid any transfers of, or dealings with” property, rights and interests situated in territories under enemy occupation or control, or belonging to people living there – whether these had taken the form of “open looting or plunder” or of transactions “apparently legal in form, even when they purport to be voluntarily effected”.

That last phrase was the heart of the document. The German occupiers and their accomplices were fond of using purchase agreements, notarial deeds and entries in registers so that buyers in the Reich and in neutral countries could later plead good faith. The declaration stripped such transactions of that protection in advance. Moreover, it covered not only territory seized directly by Axis forces but also areas under indirect control – the memorandum expressly named the unoccupied zone of France governed from Vichy.

The memorandum explained that dispossession had taken “many forms”: from the theft or forced purchase of works of art to the compulsory transfer of bearer bonds, from gold bars and banknotes to company shares. The signatories set up a committee of experts to examine whether existing law was sufficient to annul such transactions and to gather information on the methods used by enemy governments. They also undertook to assist one another, since many cases would require the cooperation of two or more states.

A warning to the neutrals

The declaration was aimed above all at those outside the warring camps. Its formal warning was addressed “to all concerned, and in particular to persons in neutral countries”. Looted art, securities and gold were flowing onto the markets of Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Argentina, where the Germans turned their spoils into the foreign currency they needed to buy strategic raw materials. The Allies announced a broad press and radio campaign and officially informed neutral governments of the document’s contents. From then on any dealer, bank or collector who bought from the Germans had to reckon with losing the acquisition after the war.

For the governments-in-exile, including the Polish government-in-exile in London, the declaration was a further commitment by the great powers towards the occupied countries – following the St James’s Palace Declaration of January 1942, which promised the punishment of war criminals, and the declaration on the extermination of the Jews of 17 December 1942. In London, Polish art historians led by Karol Estreicher were already compiling lists of cultural property removed from Poland; these were later used in claims for its return.

The limits of the declaration

The document was a legal reservation, not a programme of action. It did not stop a single transport or save a single collection; its effects were to come only after victory. Nor did it mention the Jews, although it was their property that was plundered most systematically, hand in hand with the taking of their lives. It covered the occupied territories, not the Reich itself, so property taken from German Jews through pre-war “Aryanisation” lay outside its scope. Finally, the signatories included the Soviet Union, which had itself nationalised property in the Polish lands it occupied, in the Baltic states and in Bessarabia in 1939–1941 – something nobody in the West then intended to challenge.

Place in the history of the war

The declaration of 5 January 1943 became the foundation of post-war restitution. The Allies built further steps on it: on 22 February 1944 the United States issued – and Britain and the USSR endorsed – the Gold Declaration, announcing that they would not recognise the acquisition of gold looted by Germany; in July 1944 the Bretton Woods conference, which created the post-war monetary system, called on neutral states to hold assets removed from occupied countries. The American authorities launched the Safehaven programme to trace German assets abroad, and the Western armies had officers responsible for monuments, fine arts and archives, later known as the “Monuments Men”.

After Germany’s surrender, the caches of art discovered in salt mines, castles and bunkers were returned to their countries of origin in accordance with the principle set out in the declaration. In 1946 Karol Estreicher brought Veit Stoss’s altarpiece back from Nuremberg to Kraków. From 1946 central bank gold was distributed by the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, which did not complete its work until the late 1990s. In the American zone of occupation a military government law of 1947 also made it possible to return property taken from Jews in Germany itself, going beyond the letter of the 1943 declaration.

Restitution, however, proved incomplete and stretched over decades. Many works disappeared, others passed through the hands of successive buyers, and the Cold War froze the claims of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Only in 1998 did the Washington Conference Principles commit states to tracing looted cultural property and reaching fair solutions with the heirs. Poland is still seeking the return of hundreds of thousands of objects removed during the occupation. All these efforts go back to the idea expressed in London in January 1943: plunder does not become property simply by being dressed up as a contract.