Patricia Kennedy Grimsted (born 1935 in Elkins, West Virginia) is a historian focused on the dispossession and restitution of cultural materials during and after World War II. She is a leading authority on archives in the former Soviet Union and its successor states. [1] [2] [3]
Grimsted is an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies [4] and a senior research associate at the Ukrainian Research Institute, [5] both at Harvard University, and an honorary Fellow of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. [1] Her books have been called "the best guide" to archives of the former Soviet Union. [6]
Her current project is Updated and Expanded guide to archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and fate of its loot, online updated edition, sponsored by the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), ERR Project, and International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam). [4] [7]
Grimsted has taught at several universities, including American University and the University of Maryland near Washington. She is the West's leading authority on archives of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the other ex-Soviet states. Among many fellowships and awards, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2000-2001), and in 2002 she received the Distinguished Contribution to Slavic Studies Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. [8]
Grimsted received an A.B. (1957), M.A. (1959), and Ph.D. (1964) in Russian history from the University of California, Berkeley. [8] [4] [9] Foreign languages -- Russian, French.
Patricia is a daughter of John Aloysius Kennedy (1899-1987), a former Hearst executive and publisher of newspapers including the San Diego Daily Journal, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader [10] and the Exponent Telegram [11] of Clarksburg, West Virginia, [12] and owner of the West Virginia Network of radio stations, [13] who in 1929 as Washington correspondent of the Universal Service, a Hearst-owned news agency, won the Chester DeWitt Pugsley Journalism Award for "a Capital correspondent performing the most noteworthy reporting for 1929" for having uncovered a scandal in the administration of President Warren G. Harding. [14] [15] [16] Patricia married David A. Grimsted of Washington, a professor of American history at the University of Maryland at College Park. [17]
Grimsted is the author of several historical monographs, documentary publications, and a series of directories and many other studies on Soviet-area archives, including the comprehensive Archives of Russia. [8] She has 184 works in 543 publications in 5 languages and 4,579 library holdings. [18]
Nazi plunder was organized stealing of art and other items which occurred as a result of the organized looting of European countries during the time of the Nazi Party in Germany.
Schenker AG is a German logistics company and a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company. Within DB Logistics, the logistics branch of Deutsche Bahn, Schenker is responsible for land, sea, and air transport and contract logistics. Rail transport within DB Logistics is done under the DB Schenker Rail brand.
Nico Gunzburg was a Belgian lawyer, criminologist and centenarian. In 1885, his parents fled from Riga and settled in Antwerp.
The Institute for Research on the Jewish Question was a Nazi Party political institution, founded in April 1939. Conceived as a branch of a projected elite university of the party under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg, it officially opened in Frankfurt am Main in March 1941, during the Second World War, and remained in existence until the end of the war, in 1945.
The Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce was a Nazi Party organization dedicated to appropriating cultural property during the Second World War. It was led by the chief ideologue of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg, from within the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union in the Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Much of the looted material was recovered by the Allies after the war, and returned to rightful owners, but there remains a substantial part that has been lost or remains with the Allied powers.
Seymour Pomrenze was a Jewish-American archivist and records manager. He was the first director of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the primary Allied collection point for books and archival material looted by the Nazis.
The looting of Polish cultural artifacts and industrial infrastructure during World War II was carried out by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union simultaneously after the invasion of Poland of 1939. A significant portion of Poland's cultural heritage, estimated at about half a million art objects, was plundered by the occupying powers. Catalogued pieces are still occasionally recovered elsewhere in the world and returned to Poland.
The United States restitution to the Soviet Union of the cultural treasures looted by Nazi Germany during World War II was part of the massive efforts of the Allies in returning cultural property to the countries of origin. While the Soviet Union embarked on the "compensatory restitution" by removing cultural artifacts from the museums and Nazi caches, US authorities in Germany returned more than half a million displaced cultural treasures and more than a quarter of a million books to the USSR, located in the US occupation zone. However the information about this was suppressed in the Soviet Union. It is still little known in modern Russia even at parliamentary level: in discussions of the laws about displaced cultural treasures a number of politicians stated that nothing was returned from Germany, and furthermore, state that the Nazi loot eventually went to America.
After the Second World War in 1945, issues surrounding wartime loss and compensation started to arise. Cultural valuables were taken from Germany and placed in the Soviet Union. Years later, at the break up of the USSR, the said cultural valuables came to attention as the issue of ownership arose. Following, the debates between the Russian Duma and the Yeltsin government began, with the Duma focusing on compensation to Russia for wartime loss, and Yeltsin focusing on maintaining international relationships and agreements. Arising from the debate, were many struggles, but ultimately the enactment of the Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation.
Dr. Hans Otto Carl Wendland was a German art dealer who was implicated in the trade in art looted by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Among his key contacts were the French industrialist and collaborator Achille Boitel, Hugo Engel, Allen Loebl, Yves Perdoux and others in Paris and Charles Montag, Théodore Fischer, Alexander von Frey and Albert Skira in Switzerland.
Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co. or LiroBank originally a Dutch Jewish bank, was seized and used by Nazis for looting Jewish property during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.
"The Spoils of War—World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property" was an international symposium held in New York City in 1995 to discuss the artworks, cultural property, and historic sites damaged, lost, and plundered as a result of World War II. The three-day event was sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. The conference was organized by Elizabeth Simpson, an archaeologist and professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
The Paper Brigade was the name given to a group of residents of the Vilna Ghetto who hid a large cache of Jewish cultural items from YIVO, saving them from destruction or theft by Nazi Germany. Established in 1942 and led by Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, the group smuggled books, paintings and sculptures past Nazi guards and hid them in various locations in and around the Ghetto. After the Ghetto's liquidation, surviving members of the group fled to join the Jewish partisans, eventually returning to Vilna following its liberation by Soviet forces. Recovered works were used to establish the Vilna Jewish Museum and then smuggled to the United States, where YIVO had re-established itself during the 1940s. Caches of hidden material continued to be discovered in Vilna into the early 1990s. Despite losses during both the Nazi and Soviet eras, 30–40 percent of the YIVO archive was preserved, which now represents "the largest collection of material about Jewish life in Eastern Europe that exists in the world".
Karl Stumpp was a German ethnographer of Black Sea German origin who devoted himself to the study of Germans in Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, especially those from the lands of the former Russian Empire. Starting out as a pre-war academic and teacher, during the German-Soviet portion of World War II, he led Special Command Unit Dr Karl Stumpp, which had been named after him in honour of his prior work on Russian German ethnology. This operation sought to classify the inhabitants of ethnic German and Swedish settlements whom the Nazis favoured. It also classified those of other ethnicities including Ukrainians and Jews. In the postwar period, Stumpp escaped punishment for his wartime service to the Nazi regime. Instead, he returned to teaching and served as the long-time chairman of the Association of Germans from Russia, travelling to North America to visit and lecture to the Russian German diaspora communities there.
Skandinavskii sbornik, also Скандинавский сборник, Skandinaavia kogumik, and Skrifter om Skandinavien, was an annual serial publication of the history and wider humanities in Scandinavia and the Baltic. It was published by the University of Tartu in Estonia between 1956 and 1990 and has been described as the principal forum for scholars of Nordic studies in the Soviet region. It emphasised long-term trends over short-term events and had a philosophy that peaceful coexistence between nations and peoples was the most natural order of things. It ceased publication following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Kurt Freiherr von Behr headed the Nazi art looting organisation, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), in Paris and was involved in the M-Action which looted the home furnishings of French Jews.
Helga Kreuter-Eggemann, née Helga Eggemann, was a German art historian involved in looting art in France during the Nazi occupation.
The M-Aktion, was a Nazi looting organisation. Attached to the "Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg", starting in early 1942 the M-Aktion looted approximately 70,000 homes of French, Belgian, and Dutch Jews who had either fled or had been deported.