Inquiry from the HCPO

In 2013 and 2014, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO) submitted inquiries relating to a total of 18 prints which, according to its records, were said to have been bought in 1939 for the Kurpfälzisches Museum Heidelberg (KMH) in an auction held at the Adolf Weinmüller art auction house in Munich. Of the sheets mentioned, only one in the KMH collection holdings could be definitively attributed to the auction purchase. Another could not be directly attributed to it, while the remaining 16 sheets could not be ascertained even after in-depth research in the holdings. This raised the question of whether any prints had already been restituted after the war and precisely which sheets had been acquired for the KMH. The inventory available at the beginning of the project had not been created until the post-war era. It did not offer any information on the sheets that were being queried by the HCPO or on the provenance of the drawing directly related to the inquiry. Therefore, the aim in the course of the project was to seek out and analyze other external sources so that at least the status of the available sheet could be reconstructed.

Initial inquiries to the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues (BADV) in Berlin revealed that a restitution procedure had taken place in 1948/50 and an amicable settlement had apparently been reached. However, the BADV does not have any further information on which sheet/sheets this information relates to. Researchers would attempt to clarify this point in the course of the project. The files of the Office of Restitution in Munich were inspected for this purpose. The hope was that, in the best case scenario, the files would provide an indication of which graphic prints from the Berolzheimer collection were to be found in the KMH’s collection holdings at the end of the war or possibly got lost during the war, which sheets had been the subject of an amicable settlement and which sheets had been restituted at that time, as the case may be.

The result:

The clearly attributable sheet (a pencil drawing by Carl Rottmann), which was the subject of the HCPO restitution claim, had been acquired by the KMH in 1939 from Weinmüller in Munich. In 1948, the lawyers of Dr. W. Schweisheimer (executor of the estate of Dr. M. Berolzheimer) had instituted a restitution procedure against the KMH which was concluded in 1950. “The matter was resolved on June 20, 1950, through a settlement before the Office of Restitution I Obb.” The above-mentioned Rottmann sheet and another drawing remained at the KMH in return for a payment; three further drawings were given back to the heirs of Dr. Berolzheimer in the United States.

The HCPO was promptly informed of the result of the research. It requested its own access to the files in the Staatsarchiv München and had available documents re-examined, which subsequently resulted in it dropping its restitution claim.

For the KMH, the investigations in the Staatsarchiv München and the Bavarian State Archives served to clarify which graphic prints had been acquired in 1939 in Munich and on what terms a settlement had been reached with the heirs of Dr. Berolzheimer in 1950 regarding these prints. Unfortunately, in the course of the research it was not possible to obtain any further findings regarding the whereabouts of the other sheets that were the subject of the HCPO inquiries to the KMH.

(c) Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg