3. Establishing the Facts
The Committee establishes the following facts on the grounds of the investigation into the facts in cases RC 1.37, RC 1.145, RC 1.203 and in this case.
The Mogrobi family
Mozes Mogrobi was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on 10 February 1898. He was the elder son of Jacob Meijer Mogrobi and Taube Goldstein, both of Jewish decent. The couple had a further son and six daughters. The couple and their children remained in Vienna until at least 1900. In December 1901 the Mogrobi family was registered as stateless in the Amsterdam aliens register.
On 26 May 1921 Mozes Mogrobi married Zilia Jacobi, who was also Jewish and was born on 13 February 1897 in Dinxperlo. The couple had two children: Alfred Mogrobi (1921-1944) and Sonja Mogrobi (1923-1987). Sonja Mogrobi had four children, namely AA, BB, CC and DD, who jointly submitted the application for restitution of the Cabinet.
Mozes Mogrobi’s gallery
Until 1933 the Mogrobi family lived at Zieseniskade 1 in Amsterdam. They then moved to Spiegelgracht 11 in Amsterdam. Mozes Mogrobi had run the Mozes Mogrobi antiques gallery on Spiegelgracht since 1 May 1921 as owner and sole trader. The gallery had a varied trading stock, comprising glazed pottery, glassware, woodwork, sculptures and precious metal artworks. Mozes Mogrobi was above all a pottery expert.
Mozes Mogrobi was also a collector. He was primarily interested in old Italian ceramics. A range of items from his collection was exhibited in the spring of 1932 in the Lodewijk Schelfhout gallery at Nieuwe Doelenstraat 3 in Amsterdam. A few masterpieces from Mogrobi’s collection were also displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He presented his private collection in his own gallery in October 1934.
The Mogrobi family and the gallery during the first few years of the occupation
Soon after the German occupation of the Netherlands began in May 1940, the German authorities took measures to segregate Jews from Dutch society. Regulation VO 189/40 was promulgated on 22 October 1940. It was aimed at removing Jews from the country’s economic life. As a Jewish proprietor, Mozes Mogrobi was obliged under this regulation to register his antiques business with the companies inspectorate (Wirtschaftsprüfstelle) in The Hague, which was responsible for the Aryanization of the Dutch business community.
On the basis of another regulation (VO 6/1941), from 10 January 1941 people ‘van geheel of gedeeltelijk Joodschen bloede’ [of full or partial Jewish blood] were obliged to register with the mayor of their local authority within one month. Mozes Mogrobi registered himself and his family in accordance with this regulation. On 18 February 1941 he stated on the registration form: ‘Portugees-Israelitische gezindte te zijn en vier joodsche grootouders in den zin van artikel 2 der verordening’ [of Portuguese-Jewish denomination and with four Jewish grandparents within the meaning of article 2 of the regulation]. This resulted in all members of the Mogrobi family being designated as full Jews (Volljuden). In March 1941 ‘J’ was noted on their personal registration card.
On 12 March 1941 regulation VO 48/1941, concerning the removal of Jews from the business community, was promulgated. Under this regulation, from then on the businesses of Jewish proprietors could be either put under the control of and then liquidated by a liquidation trustee (Liquidations-Treuhänder) or purchased or permanently managed by an administrative trustee (Verwaltungs-Treuhänder). At some unknown point after promulgation of this regulation, Mozes Mogrobi’s gallery was sealed by the occupying authorities.
Attempts to change the registration as full Jew
The raids in February 1941, implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in the Netherlands at the end of March 1942, the obligation to wear a yellow Star of David a few months later and the Liro regulations of 8 August 1941 and 21 May 1942 were among the factors that clearly showed the consequences of being registered as a full Jew. A few days after the large-scale raid in Amsterdam in July 1942, Mozes Mogrobi made several attempts to change the registration of himself and his family as full Jews.
For example, he tried to convince the authorities that he had Turkish nationality and that his family was of ‘arabischen Blutes’ [Arab blood]. After an initial rejection and pending his second request, Mozes Mogrobi asked the Turkish authorities to confirm that his father was ‘tatsächlich arabischen Blutes ist.’ [actually of Arab blood.] He also stated that it was urgent ‘da es für mich eine Lebensfrage gilt.’ [because for me it is a question of life and death.]. Mozes Mogrobi furthermore tried to collect all sorts of evidence that supposedly showed that he was not Jewish. For example, he sent the department for administration of the interior (Abteilung innere Verwaltung), part of the general commissariat for administration and justice (Generalkommissariat für Verwaltung und Justiz), an extract from the population register showing that he was registered as having Turkish nationality. He also collected a number of notarized statements by people who had declared under oath that his father was a Turkish subject and therefore his family was ‘of Arab blood’. Mozes Mogrobi moreover sent a copy of a page from a book with a reference to Moghrabi Mosque. This supposedly showed that the name Mogrobi signifies ‘ein rein-arabischer Mohammedanischer ist.’ [a pure Arab Muslim.]. In addition, he had a report prepared by a Dutch doctor and physical anthropologist who concluded that although Mozes Mogrobi’s appearance was ‘Orientalisch’ [Oriental] it was ‘aber bestimmt nicht typisch Jüdisch.’ [definitely not typically Jewish]. Mozes Mogrobi furthermore submitted a 1903 photograph of his father dressed in Arab-looking clothing.
His most far-reaching attempt to prove he was not Jewish was on 22 April 1943 when he served a summons on the Portuguese-Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam and accused the board of the Jewish Congregation of unjustly registering him and his family as members of it. On 6 May 1943 the court decided in Mozes Mogrobi’s favour.
A few days after the rejection Mozes made a final attempt by submitting a request in which he repeated his earlier arguments. Unlike his previous attempts, he now asked for his registration to be changed to GII (quarter-Jew) and those of his children to GI (half-Jew). This attempt also failed.
Liquidation of the gallery and sale at Mak van Waay
It emerged from the investigation that the German occupying forces sealed Mozes Mogrobi’s gallery at some point after the promulgation of regulation 48/1941 on 12 March 1941 concerning the removal of Jews from the business community. It is not known precisely when this happened. It did emerge from the investigation, however, that the last occasion on which the name Mogrobi appears in the buyers books of the Mak van Waay auction house in Amsterdam was on 24 June 1941. It is also known that Mozes Mogrobi sold various artworks to Jan Herman van Heek, director of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe on 1 February 1941 and 27 March 1942. These artworks were the subject of restitution application RC 1.145.
In March 1944 Omnia Treuhandgesellschaft mbH received instructions from the companies inspectorate (Wirtschaftsprüfstelle) to act as liquidation trustee (Liquidationstreuhänder) of Mogrobi’s business. The Committee assumes on the grounds of research that the gallery had been sealed until that moment. Liquidation was initiated at the end of March 1944. The superior court counsel (Kammergerichtsrat) issued instructions to have the gallery’s contents sold at auction. The sale took place on 25 July 1944 at the Mak van Waay auction house.
The catalogue prepared for this public sale, entitled Catalogus van de veiling van oude en moderne schilderijen en antiquiteiten uit verschillend Nederlandsch kunstbezit [Catalogue of Old and Modern Paintings and Antiques from Different Dutch Art Collections], lists 919 lot numbers divided into 18 categories. It is clear from the catalogue that the number of items was large and their nature was also very diverse. The items that went under the hammer included paintings, furniture, precious metal objects, ceramics, East Asian art, and jewellery. The catalogue contains no information about the provenance of the objects put into the sale, so it is not known which of the auctioned goods came from Mozes Mogrobi’s gallery. None of the entries in the catalogue corresponds to the Cabinet.
Fates of the Mogrobi family
According to a post-war statement by Mozes’s wife Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi, Mozes and she they went into hiding during the war in Sloterdijk. It is not known when this period of hiding started. In 1947 Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi stated the following about it:
‘Destijds lag er reeds beslag op onze boedel, welk beslag gelegd was door een of andere Duitse instantie; alles was gezegeld. Wij waren in die tijd ondergedoken’. [At the time, all our possessions had already been seized. The seizure had been organized by some German agency or other. Everything was sealed. We went into hiding during that period.]
Mozes and Zilia Mogrobi were arrested by the security service (Sicherheitsdienst) on 6 July 1944. It emerges from a post-war statement by Zilia that on 12 July 1944 Mozes and she were deported to Westerbork transit camp, and from there they were transported to Auschwitz concentration camp on 3 September 1944.
Before the end of the month Mozes Mogrobi was murdered in Auschwitz. He was 46 years old. His son Alfred Mogrobi, who was 23, was murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp on 1 December 1944. On 26 October 1944 Zilia Mogrobi was taken to the Latvian labour camp Liebau, where she was liberated on 9 May 1945. The couple’s daughter, Sonja Mogrobi, also survived the war.
Mozes Mogrobi’s gallery after the war
Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi continued her husband’s business after she had returned to the Netherlands on 13 June 1945. She submitted a number of compensation claims in order to receive some recompense for the goods lost during the Second World War. These claims primarily concerned the goods that went under the hammer at the Mak van Waay auction house on 25 July 1944 on the instructions of the occupying forces. Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi stated the following about this after the war:
De totaalschade, welke wij gedurende de bezettingstijd door diefstal uit onze zaak enz. enz. geleden hebben, bedraagt circa 50.000 gulden. Verder is onze privé-boedel in veiling gebracht bij de Fa. S. Mak van Waay, hetgeen ongeveer 58.000 gulden heeft opgebracht. [The overall loss we sustained during the occupation because of thefts from our shop etc. etc. amounted to about 50,000 guilders. Furthermore, our personal possessions were auctioned off at the firm of S. Mak van Waay, and the proceeds were approximately 58,000 guilders.]
An accountant’s report reveals that Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi received a total of 17,500 guilders from H.S. Nienhuis, the director of the Mak van Waay auction house. This payment related to the sale organized by Mak van Waay on 25 July 1944. Y. Scholten, who acted as Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi’s authorized representative, wrote about this to O.J.Tj.N. Domela Nieuwenhuis, H.S. Nienhuis’s authorized representative:
Ter voldoening aan de verbintenis, welke Uw client H.S. Nienhuis uit moraal en fatsoen tegenover mijn cliente, Mevrouw Mogrobi gevoelt te hebben ter zake van de door hem, tijdens de bezetting gehouden veiling (dd. 25 Juli 1944), van de goederen van cliente, kwamen wij het navolgende overeen: [In fulfilment of the obligation that my client, Mrs Mogrobi, considers your client, H.S. Nienhuis, to be under on the grounds of ethics and decency in regard to the auction of my client’s goods that was conducted by him during the occupation on 25 July 1944, we have agreed as follows:]
It emerges from the agreements made and the subsequent entries referred to in the accountant’s report that Nienhuis paid the sum of 17,500 guilders in twelve instalments starting on 1 May 1947. The sums received did not benefit the profit and loss account of Mozes Mogrobi’s business but were paid into the personal account. According to the accountant’s report, the fact that the sums received were deposited in the personal account was related to ‘een verbintenis voortvloeiende uit moraal en fatsoen’ [an obligation arising from ethics and decency], and it also aligns with Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi’s statement that ‘onze privé-boedel in veiling [is] gebracht bij de Fa. S. Mak van Waay.’ [our personal possessions were auctioned off at the firm of S. Mak van Waay]. The gallery was liquidated with effect from 1 October 1956 after Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi in her capacity as ‘eigenaresse’ [proprietress] had reported that the business had ceased trading to the commercial register in Amsterdam.
No documents or indications were found in the archives of the Netherlands Art Property Foundation (hereinafter referred to as the SNK) that bear witness to any contact between Zilia Mogrobi-Jacobi and the SNK.
Provenance research into the Cabinet
The restitution application concerns the present NK 260, a seventeenth-century Dutch two-door oak cabinet, maker unknown, with approximate dimensions 123 x 121 x 58 cm. The Cabinet is currently in the RCE’s depot, CollectieCentrum Nederland (Dutch National Collection Centre). A 1999 form completed by the then Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (Instituut Collectie Nederland – one of the forerunners of the RCE) states that the Cabinet was made from old and new parts: ‘(…) nieuw zijn o.a. het bovenblad. De achterstijlen, de achterregel, de rechter onderregel en de 2 linkerdelen v.h. achterschot’ [The new parts include the top, the rear stiles, the rear rail, the right-hand lower rail and the two left-hand parts of the back panel]. The restoration file contained no indications that the Cabinet has been restored since 1945.
In the context of accelerating the investigation into objects in the NK Collection, the RCE subjected the Cabinet to a detailed physical examination. It found the name Mogrobi written in white chalk on the back of one of the two new left-hand parts of the back panel. The documentation unearthed during the investigation does not reveal when this name was put on the Cabinet, by whom and for what purpose.
Recovery of the Cabinet from Stuttgart
On 16 September 1948 the Cabinet was seized by the MFA&A (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) Section of the American army from one Otto Braun of Stuttgart after it had been identified as being Dutch owned. An inventory card completed at the Collecting Point in Wiesbaden states the following about the circumstances in which the Cabinet had ended up in Germany: ‘Acquired by Dr. Valentin, Stuttgart, in Holland during the war’. The Cabinet was returned to the Netherlands in the course of 1948 on the grounds of a claim with the number 1409 submitted by the Dutch authorities at the Collecting Point in Wiesbaden. No underlying documentation concerning this claim was found. The manifest drawn up for the purposes of sending the Cabinet back to the Netherlands refers to the presence of a label with the text ‘no. 29’. There is no mention of the name Mogrobi being written on the Cabinet. On 13 April 1949 the SNK completed an internal declaration form for the Cabinet that had been returned from Wiesbaden. It is stated on this form that the Cabinet’s provenance was not known.
The German art dealer Fritz Valentien
The aforementioned note about ‘Dr. Valentin’ on the inventory card of the Collecting Point in Wiesbaden refers to the German art dealer Fritz C. Valentien (1902-1982), owner of the Valentien gallery in Stuttgart. His name is spelt ‘Valentin’ or ‘Valentien’ in the sources. It emerged from the investigation that Valentien and Mozes Mogrobi maintained a business relationship and that during the occupation Valentien purchased several objects from the Mozes Mogrobi gallery, including furniture.
An inventory was found in the SNK archive with the heading ‘INVENTORY made on 18th November at the home of Mr. VALENTIN’’. The document reveals that the Inventory was compiled over a period of several days in 1947 by the allied recovery authorities. The inventory contains various objects that were purchased by Valentien from Mogrobi during the occupation. The Dutch government claimed all the objects on the list prepared by the recovery authorities in Wiesbaden en bloc under claim number 1405.
Item number 173 of the inventory, which according to the document was added on 20 November 1947, is a cupboard whose description corresponds broadly to that of the Cabinet: ‘Cupboard, Renaissance, oak, [bought from] Mogrobi, [Amsterdam]’. There is no information in the inventory about the dimensions or the date of purchase. The number ‘20243’ is noted in pencil in the margin of the inventory next to the oak cupboard acquired from Mogrobi listed under number 173. That number is a reference to the internal declaration form completed by the SNK in February 1948 concerning, among other things, the aforementioned Mogrobi cupboard. The declaration form contains no new information about the Cabinet and is filed in the SNK archive under the category ‘objects that have not been returned to the Netherlands’.
The SNK between 1948 and 1949
During the course of 1948, the period in which the Cabinet was returned to the Netherlands, the activities of the SNK were seriously disrupted and even largely stopped for a while because the SNK’s records were sealed and seized as part of an investigation into a few employees. It had emerged previously that best practices had not always been applied in the execution of the SNK’s tasks, including the registration of recovered works of art. A major part of the SNK’s documentation that had been sealed or seized was not returned to the organization until 1949, at which point the SNK could resume the full scope of its activities.