Nazi-Looted Painting From Hitler's Home Traced To Jewish Collector

(MENAFN- USA Art News) New research has traced a Nazi-looted painting, which previously hung in Adolf Hitler's Berlin home, back to a Dutch Jewish family. The work, Carl Gottlieb Peschel's 1831 Joseph Sold by His Brothers, depicts the biblical scene of Joseph sold into slavery, according to the Dutch newspaper Het Parool.

The painting belonged to Bob Nijkerk, who died in 1987 and was a scion of a 19th-century family that accumulated wealth in the iron and scrap-metal business. Nijkerk utilized his fortune to build a collection of bibliophile editions, modern Dutch typography, and paintings. He received the Peschel work as a gift from his brother-in-law in 1941. After the Nazis occupied Amsterdam in 1940, they seized his family's company in 1941, where Nijkerk served as managing director.

The Nijkerk family, including Bob, his wife, and their three children, were initially spared from the deportation of over 100,000 Dutch Jews to killing centers, which began in 1942. Willem Sandberg, a curator at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, where Nijkerk had loaned and donated artworks, intervened on their behalf, securing their placement on an exception list of approximately 700 Jewish individuals. In 1940, the two men visited the museum's art bunker together, where Nijkerk likely stored significant works. The family was first taken to De Schaffelaar Castle near Amsterdam, then deported to the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands, and later to Theresienstadt in what is now the Czech Republic. All five family members survived the war, having been transported to Switzerland by train in 1945 with a select group of Theresienstadt prisoners, as reported by Het Parool.

Diederik Oostdijk, a professor of English and American literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, informed Nijkerk's grandson, Willem Nijkerk, about the family's connection to the painting. Willem had known his family included bibliophiles but was unaware of the extent of his grandfather's collection.“I mainly knew about the period during and after the war,” Willem told Het Parool.“Through Oostdijk's research, I was given a glimpse into their prewar life. They lived in relatively grand luxury.” Oostdijk's new book, Overlevingskunst (The Art of Survival), details the stories of“three Jewish families [who] miraculously escaped the Holocaust thanks to their art collections.”

Oostdijk's research confirms that the Peschel painting was at one point in Hitler's Berlin home before being moved to his storage facility in Munich, intended for a planned Führermuseum. It remains uncertain whether Bob Nijkerk sold the painting in late 1941 or early 1942, or if it was confiscated later by German forces or their Dutch collaborators during raids on Jewish homes. After the war, Nijkerk recovered many of his books but never mentioned Peschel's painting. Willem Nijkerk noted,“I don't think he had much of a connection to the painting himself. The painting does not evoke much emotion in me either.”

Nijkerk's seven descendants have not filed a formal restitution claim for the Peschel painting. They also have not claimed three other paintings Oostdijk linked to the Nijkerk collection, two 1633 portraits by Caspar Netscher and a 1673 painting by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, which are currently at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Joseph Sold by His Brothers is now housed in the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg, Germany. Willem stated that if the paintings were ever restituted, the family would likely sell them.“It is a bizarre thought that a painting belonging to my grandparents was in Hitler's residence, one of the most horrific human beings who ever lived, and to think that he found this work so beautiful,” Willem told Het Parool.“I don't necessarily want Peschel's painting on my wall at home. I also find it an unpleasant thought that it lay in Hitler's home.”

Source: ARTnews

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