Nazi's paintings fund foundation for Jews
BERLIN — When Hilde Schramm inherited several paintings collected by her father, Hitler’s chief architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, she was only sure of one thing: she didn’t want them.
Despite determining they probably hadn’t been looted from Jews during World War II, she wanted their legacy to somehow benefit others.
So she huddled with friends around a rickety green table at her home-office in Berlin and came up with a plan to sell them and use the proceeds to support Jewish women’s creative projects in Germany.
In 1994, that became the Zurueckgeben Foundation, a project for which Schramm received an Obermayer German Jewish History Award on Monday. The honor was established by an American Jewish philanthropist to recognize the efforts of non-Jewish Germans to keep alive their nation’s Jewish cultural past.
The foundation’s name translates as “return” or “give back” but also can mean “restitution,” and Schramm said it was intentionally chosen to emphasize its goal of raising awareness at a time when looted Jewish property and art was a little talked-about issue.
“It was very much our point with this word ‘Zurueckgeben,’ which in a way is a provocation, because in a way nobody really can give back, to raise consciousness about the injury that had been done very broadly in Germany,” she told The Associated Press.
Today, there’s a wider understanding that the Nazis plundered precious artworks and other property from Europe’s Jews, partially because of recent stepped-up German government efforts to identify heirs and organize restitution, and the popular 2014 Hollywood film “The Monuments Men.”
But most of the focus has been on the big-ticket items like precious paintings and sculptures. Schramm’s foundation encourages Germans to take stock of the more mundane items in their households and question where they came from.
In part it’s to fight the cliche perpetrated by the Nazis that all Jews were rich and powerful, and also to dispel the notion that only the Nazi elite profited at the expense of the Jews.
Because it’s almost impossible to determine the original owners of smaller items like cutlery and furniture, donors to the foundation often give a symbolic amount to Zurueckgeben, or sell the items and give the proceeds.
