3. Establishing the Facts
The Committee establishes the following facts on the grounds of research in the files RC 1.15 and RC 1.134 and the investigation this case.
The Goudstikker art dealership before and after the German invasion
The Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker was one of the most eminent Dutch art dealers between the wars. He specialized in Dutch, Flemish and Italian old masters. He was born in 1897 and in 1919 he started working in the Goudstikker art gallery in Amsterdam, which had been founded in 1845 by his grandfather and his great-uncle. The art gallery was located at Herengracht 458, in the Golden Bend, from 1927 In 1937 Jacques Goudstikker married the Austrian-Jewish opera singer Désirée (Dési) von Halban-Kurz. The couple lived on the Oostermeer country estate in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel and in 1939 they had a son Eduard, known as Edo. A letter from Goudstikker to a friend living abroad shortly before the war reveals that their domestic happiness was overshadowed at the same time by the political developments in Europe: ‘Things are not looking very good here in old Europe…. It is not unlikely that I will have to leave this country, which as you know I love more than I can describe, as well as everything that I have built up and that I love.’
The moment that Goudstikker feared soon arrived. After the Nazis had invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, he and his family hastened to the port of IJmuiden. They were able to get berths on the steamer S.S. Bodegraven, which was going to make the crossing to England. During the night of 15 to 16 May 1940, however, Goudstikker died while on board the vessel that was supposed to be taking him to safety because he fell into a hold while taking a nighttime stroll. He was buried in England. His widow and son travelled on to Canada and later on settled in New York.
The art gallery in Amsterdam, with a trading stock of 1,113 inventoried works of art, was left behind unsupervised because Goudstikker’s authorized representative, the Jewish accountant Alex Sternheim, died on the day of the German invasion as a result of a heart attack. Two employees, Messrs Arie ten Broek and Jan Dik Sr, took over management of the art dealership, after which Ten Broek was appointed managing director of the company during an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders on 4 June 1940.
Forced sale to Göring and Miedl
Virtually immediately after the capitulation, the German banker and businessman Alois Miedl (1903-1970) became involved in Goudstikker’s enterprise. Miedl took over the actual management and, under an agreement dated 1 July 1940, purchased all the assets of the Goudstikker gallery, including the firm’s trading name. This agreement was reopened shortly afterwards due to the interest of another German entity: the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) member and Reich Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring, who owned a large, partly looted, art collection. On 13 July 1940, two purchase agreements were entered into between the Goudstikker art dealership, represented by Ten Broek, and Miedl and Göring: The transaction with Miedl stipulated that for an amount of 550,000 guilders the latter acquired the co-ownership of the Goudstikker art dealership in the meta-paintings (i.e. paintings that Goudstikker co-owned with others), as well as the right to the trade name ‘J. Goudstikker’ and the real estate; namely the art dealership’s premises on Herengracht, the Oostermeer country house, and Nijenrode Castle in Breukelen, where Goudstikker staged exhibitions. The agreement with Göring stipulated that, for a sum of two million guilders, he acquired the rights to all artworks in so far as they were Goudstikker’s property on 26 June 1940 and were in the Netherlands. Göring acquired a preferential right with regard to the meta-paintings, which he made use of.
Although both agreements stipulated that ‘as accurate a list as possible would be drawn up as soon as possible’ of the items sold, this never happened. The art dealership’s staff jointly received a total of 400,000 guilders for facilitating the sale. In addition, when the agreement was entered into, it was stipulated that Jacques Goudstikker’s mother, Emmy Goudstikker-Sellisberger, who had remained behind in Amsterdam, could count on protection from either Miedl or Göring.
None of these steps – the appointment of Ten Broek as managing director and the sales to Miedl and Göring – took place with permission from the widow Dési Goudstikker who, also on behalf of her son Edo, held a majority (334) of the 600 shares in the Goudstikker art dealership. She stated the following about the sale to Miedl of 1 July 1940 in a post-war hearing of witnesses: ‘Notwithstanding that I was given the prospect that my assets in the Netherlands would be protected if I gave this permission, I refused to comply.’ After the war it was often suggested that Jacques Goudstikker’s mother, Emmy Goudstikker-Sellisberger, who held 50 shares, supported what was taking place. In 1948 Dési Goudstikker referred to the threatening and coercive situation that her mother-in-law found herself in during the war: ‘My mother-in-law Mrs Goudstikker-Sellisberger gave permission for this sale, but in my opinion she did that under duress because she had been given an assurance that if she gave permission, her life and her assets would be spared.’
On 14 September 1940 Alois Miedl founded the company Kunsthandel voorheen J. Goudstikker NV and on 2 October 1940 it was decided to dissolve the original Goudstikker art dealership, as a result of which it went into liquidation. The liquidation of the Goudstikker art dealership was cancelled retroactively on 26 February 1947. Of the purchase price of 2,550,000 guilders that was entailed in the sales to Miedl and Göring, a sum of 1,363,752.33 guilders remained for the Goudstikker art dealership after the war.
Attempted restoration of rights in the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties
After the liberation Dési Goudstikker became involved in protracted restoration of rights proceedings with the Dutch State. She was assisted in these proceedings by, among others, the lawyer Edward von Saher, who she married in 1950. From that moment she called herself Dési von Saher and her son Edo also adopted that last name.
The Netherlands Property Administration Institute (Nederlandse Beheersinstituut, hereinafter referred to as the NBI) acted as the representative of the Dutch State during the negotiations. Previous research revealed that the negotiations proceeded slowly and that the authorities adopted an unfeeling and formalistic stance. The Committee limits itself here to one example. After intensive consultations, the Goudstikker heirs decided to only request restoration of rights in regard to the Miedl transaction. This was due to the material, legal and financial uncertainties surrounding the process of legal redress for the artworks that had ended up in Germany as a result of the Göring transaction. However, the NBI stated in 1951 that it did not consider it correct ‘to single out one of a complex of intertwined wartime transactions … and to settle for amicable legal redress for it solely because this part would be unfavourable for N.V. Goudstikker, while the other transactions, which were beneficial for Goudstikker, are kept outside the amicable restoration of rights settlement‘. According to the Committee, the quotation does not demonstrate insight into the situation in which the Goudstikker heirs found themselves, especially since there was talk of ‘transactions which were beneficial for Goudstikker‘, while Jacques Goudstikker had died in an accident during his flight, a family business had been destroyed and a family had been deprived of its income and uprooted.
The restoration of rights negotiations ultimately led to a settlement in a settlement agreement dated 1 August 1952. This first and foremost provided for the repurchase by Dési von Saher of over three hundred artworks from Miedl’s assets placed under management and the termination of the proceedings initiated by her with the Council for the Restoration of Rights. In this agreement, Von Saher also renounced the rights to the other works of art that had been delivered to Miedl NV during the war:
(Article 1.4) The party of the other part [Dési von Saher] waives, in favour of the parties of the first part [summarized: the State], all rights which it could assert against anyone whatsoever with regard to paintings and works of art and shares in paintings and works of art delivered by GOUDSTIKKER NV to MIEDL NV between May nineteen hundred and forty and May nineteen hundred and forty-five, regardless of whether these have been recovered from abroad in the meantime or are located abroad, as well as the proceeds which, in the event of sale, have taken or will take place.
The artworks that were supplied to Göring during the war are outside the scope of this settlement agreement.
The 1952 settlement signalled the end of Dési von Saher’s struggle for restoration of rights, but it was not to her satisfaction, as is revealed in comments she had incorporated in the settlement.
That the party of the other part only wishes this termination in connection with the time that may be involved with the proceedings; … that the settlement of the affairs of the estate of her late husband, Mr JACQUES GOUDSTIKKER, to which estate the vast majority of the shares of the public limited company of the party of the other part belong, has since nineteen hundred and forty-six made her withdraw from her work in New York and from her family life there; that the complexity of the affairs of the said estate has also placed a claim on the time and effort of her husband, Mr von SAHER, since the year nineteen hundred and fifty; that the said Mrs von SAHER has to recognize to her deep disappointment that, in order to achieve what she considers to be legal redress, she may have to continue to litigate for years, and has now decided, in connection with the foregoing and also in light of the uncertain political situation, to engage in a settlement; that the party of the other part is therefore even prepared to make sacrifices for this purpose which she regards as extremely unreasonable and that she wishes to expressly record that she does not recognize any of the arguments put forward by the other parties in the aforementioned proceedings and that she considers herself to have been greatly disadvantaged.
Staff at the NBI, however, were satisfied with the settlement. On 6 August 1952 an employee stated in a letter to the NBI management that there ‘are in any case reasons for your Institute to be satisfied with the results achieved so far’.
The artworks returned to the Netherlands since the liberation from the Göring collection – which as stated above was not within the scope of the settlement – were in the custody of the Dutch State. Some of them ended up in the government body that looks after the Dutch National Art Collection (currently the RCE) while some were in museum collections.
Attempted restoration of rights in the nineteen-nineties
Dési von Saher died in 1996; her son Edo only a few monrths later. Not long after Edo’s death his widow Marei von Saher-Langenbein received a telephone call from the journalist Pieter den Hollander, who was working on a book about the Goudstikker case. When he told Marei von Saher that the post-war proceedings about her father-in-law’s art dealership had expired, she decided to once again institute proceedings about the case in respect of the Dutch State. On 9 January 1998 she submitted a request to the State Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to release ‘all goods that have been made available to the State from the “Goudstikker Collection”’. The State Secretary rejected Von Saher’s request, judging that the restitution of rights had been dealt with carefully immediately after the war and that he saw no reason for reconsideration. Von Saher lodged an appeal with the Court of Appeal of The Hague (as successor to the restoration of rights court), but the Court declared itself incompetent to rule on the contested decision on appeal. Insofar as the appeal could be regarded as a direct request for restoration of rights, the Court deemed the request inadmissible because the time limit under the post-war regulation had expired on 1 July 1951, meaning the request had been submitted too late. The Court of Appeal also examined whether there were ‘weighty reasons’ for granting ex officio restoration of rights, but it also ruled negatively on this point. This was because the Court reasoned that the documents showed that ‘the Goudstikker art dealership (renamed the Amsterdamse Negotiatie Compagnie NV in 1952) had consciously and deliberately refrained from requesting restoration of rights in respect of the Göring transaction’. In addition, the Court concluded that ‘almost 50 years had passed since the moment at which the last requests for restoration of rights could be submitted’.
The Jan van Goyen painting: two identical photographs
The painting in the Mauritshuis, Fishermen by the Lakeshore, was made in 1651 by the Dutch landscape painter Jan van Goyen. The work is a brunaille, in which the artist has limited himself to shades of brown. It is painted on paper reinforced with canvas and measures 25 x 34 cm. Three figures and a dog are depicted on the shore of a lake, with two large trees to the right. There are two figures in a small boat on the water. The work is monogrammed and dated ‘vG 1651’. Van Goyen painted several comparable scenes in 1651, but they can easily be distinguished from one another.
It can be established with certainty that the Van Goyen was part of the collection of the leading Nazi Hermann Göring. There is a photograph of an artwork that is identical to the Van Goyen in the Mauritshuis in the inventory and photographs of works of art from the ‘Göring Collection’, compiled during the Nazi period and in the possession of the Bundesarchiv Koblenz. It is a photograph card with photograph number 338 on the front; the Göring inventory number ‘RM 360’ is typed to the right of the photograph. This number is also given on the back of the photograph card, as well as the crossed-out designation ‘KG 149’ This last number dates from an earlier inventory of the Göring Collection. The abbreviation KG stands for ‘Kunstsammlung Göring’. On the back of the card there is also the note ‘(in Unterstein?)’.
Documentation in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz also reveals that the Van Goyen became part of the Göring Collection in June 1940 and was acquired via ‘Hofer von Goudst.; Schloss Nyenrode’. Other sources also confirm the Goudstikker provenance, for example a list of art purchases by Göring in the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies-archive and a second inventory of the Göring Collection compiled between 1940 and 1944. This last inventory is an integral part of the 2015 Le catalogue Goering by historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus.
It is striking that the aforementioned date of June 1940 is earlier than the date of the contract of sale of 13 July 1940. Sources that were unearthed during research for case RC 1.15 indicate that a large number of Goudstikker artworks were sent to Germany as early as June 1940.
A photograph was also found in the Jacques Goudstikker photographic archive of an artwork that is identical to the Van Goyen n the Mauritshuis. This photographic archive, which is in the P. de Boer gallery in Amsterdam, contains images of artworks that were owned by the gallery at the time of Goudstikker’s flight, as well as artworks that had been sold earlier. There is a note on the back of the photograph concerned: ‘J. v. Goyen Coll. Goudstikker’ Therer is no reference to a Goudstikker inventory number. There is, however, a clear stamp ‘Bern. F. Eilers. Kunst- en reproductiefotograaf’; a reference to the Amsterdam art and portrait photographer Bernard Eilers. No indications were found during the investigation that the Van Goyen was a meta-painting, or a work that the art dealership had on consignment.
The Van Goyen painting before 1940
The work of art historians Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930) and Hans-Ulrich Beck (1930-2010) offers clues in the quest for the early provenance of the Van Goyen in the Mauritshuis. Hofstede de Groot mentions two works that could refer to the Van Goyen in an overview work about Dutch old masters published in 1923. Regarding the first painting, with the English title River scene with a boat, Hofstede de Groot gives the Jewish German collector Marcus Kappel as the owner from about 1895. With respect to the second work, A river scene with two gnarled oaks, he states that the Scottish industrialist Arthur Kay was the owner in 1903. In 1973 Hans-Ulrich Beck combined these two paintings in his catalogue raisonné about Van Goyen. In his opinion these were the same work, which had been owned by both Arthur Kay and Marcus Kappel. Beck subsequently names Jacques Goudstikker (around 1930), himself (from 1957), art dealer Saam Nijstad (1966-1967) and the Mauritshuis (no date) as owners.
The ECR tried to ascertain how the Van Goyen came into the possession of the Goudstikker art dealership. A pre-war inventory of Goudstikker’s trading stock, kept in the Amsterdam City Archives, provides insight into the art dealership’s acquisitions. The inventory is classified on the basis of year purchased and listed by inventory number. The first part of this inventory was compiled in October 1931 and contains works that had come into the art dealership’s possession before then. This first part, which ends at inventory number 2728, lists a landscape with oak on paper by Van Goyen under number 1797. It is striking that this entry was inserted at a later date and in a different handwriting between the numbers 1796 and 1798. This entry is also accompanied by the abbreviation ‘(B.I.?)’; which in all probability means ‘buiten inventaris’ [‘outside inventory’]. It is not clear what this means. The inventory was subsequently annotated, also after the war, including markings indicating that a particular work had been delivered to Hermann Göring or Alois Miedl. Number 1797 was written in the inventory later than the surrounding numbers, and it is unclear exactly when and by whom. It is therefore not possible to state with certainty that Goudstikker purchased this work before October 1931.
Further on in the same inventory, covering 1935, there is another entry that could relate to the Van Goyen. The work listed there under inventory number 2965 describes a landscape with oak tree by Jan van Goyen. Behind it is a red ‘G’, which according to the legend refers to Göring.
These two inventory numbers, 1797 and 2965, are also referred to in accountant’s reports dated during and after the war. In 1942 the accountant J. Elte prepared a report concerning Miedl’s continuation of the Goudstikker art dealership as the Kunsthandel voorheen J. Goudstikker. Inventory number 2965 is also listed in an appendix to this report entitled ‘Schedule of paintings bought by Reich Field Marshal H. Göring from the “Old” Goudstikker’ and is described as ‘Landscape with oak tree’ by Van Goyen. Inventory number 1797 is not referred to in this report. In 1953, accountants Wolfrat, Entrop and Van Namen wrote a report on the instructions of the re-established art dealership. An appendix to this report refers to a ‘landscape’ by Jan van Goyen with inventory number 1797 in the category ‘Paintings and prints wholly owned by the company, present as at 30 June 1940’ Inventory number 2965 is not referred to in this report.
Goudstikker’s notebook
Inventory number 2965 is also to be found in the black notebook that Goudstikker took with him as he fled from the Netherlands in May 1940. This notebook, which contains a snapshot of the art dealership’s trading stock, list the works by each artist. Nineteen works are listed under the name Jan van Goyen, including number 2965. In terms of dimensions and description, this work has similarities with the Van Goyen in the Mauritshuis:
Jan van Goyen
landscape with oak tree
canvas: 25 ¼ x 35 cm
purchased: g.o.e.s. (Veltman)
The material here is described as ‘canvas’, whereas the work in the Mauritshuis is painted on paper with a canvas support, but only canvas is visible from the back of the painting.
The reference ‘g.o.e.s.’ relates to a price indication used by Goudstikker of 1,295 guilders, as can be deduced from previous research, while ‘Veltman’ most likely refers to the banker and collector Eduard August Veltman (1878-1964), who is mentioned in Goudstikker’s address book. It is not clear how and when the painting came into Veltman’s possession. The ECR did not find any documentation on Veltman’s collection, leaving a gap between the early provenance data collected by Hofstede de Groot and Beck and the name Veltman as owner.
The precisely specified length of 25¼ cm that Goudstikker wrote in his notebook is striking. We also see this length in the reference to a ‘landscape’ by Van Goyen in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Rotterdam Arts Circle (1936-1937), where Goudstikker exhibited a number of works. The painting described in the catalogue closely resembles the Van Goyen in the Mauritshuis, and the format and material are also more or less the same, although the catalogue, like the Goudstikker notebook, does not refer to paper on canvas but only to ‘canvas’
A landscape in grey brown tones. On the left there are two men in a small boat on the river. On the bank there are three men near a gnarled tree trunk. Cloudy sky.
Canvas, 25 ¼ x 35 c.M.
The Van Goyen painting after 1945
In view of the approaching Russian forces, at the beginning of 1945 Göring issued instructions to have his art collection taken from Carinhall, his country house, and his bunker in Berlin and moved to the Bavarian castle Veldenstein. There is an undated list of over seven hundred artworks that were taken to Veldenstein. On it there is the following entry, which includes inventory number 1797 and a reference to Goudstikker:
Jan van Goyen – Small river landscape with two fishermen in a boat, two gnarled trees on the right – Grisaille dated 1651., Goud. 1797.
Veldenstein was not the artworks’ final destination. This is revealed in a 2009 reconstruction by the researcher and Göring Collection expert Nancy Yeide :
… everything in Veldenstein was packed up again, departing by train from the Neuhaus station on 10 April. The next day this train met up with the Sonderzug in Berchtesgaden. The two trains, with Hofer [Walter Hofer; Göring’s art intermediary], were parked in a tunnel. The cars were then divided; eight cars containing furniture, the library and documents remained in the tunnel in Berchtesgaden. Goering then arrived at Obersalzberg, having left Hitler and his more loyal minions in the bunker in Berlin; he was arrested by the SS on 26 April 1945. Hofer began to unload the art into air raid shelters located on the road from Berchtesgaden to Königsee. Paintings that couldn’t fit into the shelters were reloaded and sent back to Unterstein. This was the chaotic situation when the US troops arrived in Berchtesgaden on May 1945.
The ‘Unterstein’ referred to in the quotation is a village in Bavaria. As described above, it is also mentioned on the photograph card of the Van Goyen that was found in the Göring archive, with a question mark next to it. This indicates that the painting was probably in this village around the time of the liberation. Allied documentation in the US National Archives in Washington reveals that paintings were stolen from the ‘Göring train’ at Unterstein station in May 1945. It is possible that the Van Goyen was also stolen from the train, which would explain why the work was not, like other artworks from the Göring Collection, returned to the Netherlands via a Central Collecting Point.
A card with pictorial documentation in the Mauritshuis provides information about happened to the Van Goyen after 1945. The card gives the provenance as ‘G. Sprengel in Berlin, c. 1948’. It is plausible that this name refers to the frame maker Georg Sprengel, who was born in 1905. Archival documents found in the US National Archives name Sprengel as a person who could provide information about the collection of Göring, among others. ‘Sprengel is said to have been frequently in Karinhall ….’ The documentation reveals that he supplied frames to Göring. The relationship between them also emerges from a letter from a female employee of Göring’s to Sprengel in 1941 that has survived. In it she thanks him for a painting that he had given to the Nazi Minister. Sprengel left Germany in the nineteen-fifties and settled in São Paulo, Brazil.
In November 1957 the Painting surfaced in a sale at the Leo Spik gallery in Berlin. It was purchased on 26 November 1957 for 5,000 deutschmarks by the aforementioned art historian and Van Goyen expert Hans-Ulrich Beck. Beck sold the painting on to the Dutch art dealer Saam Nijstad, from whom the Dutch government bought it in January 1967 for 58,000 guilders for the benefit of the Mauritshuis. The publication Verslagen der Rijksverzamelingen van geschiedenis en kunst [Reports about the State history and art collections] (1967) mentions the purchase as follows:
A modest but welcome acquisition is the small painting by Jan van Goyen, paper on canvas, 25 x 34 cm, signed and dated 1651, which was acquired from an art dealer in The Hague.
There is no information about the painting’s provenance.
