A FORMER British investment banker claims that thousands of art treasures looted by the Nazis are hidden in bank vaults in Switzerland.
Susan Ronald has been researching the life of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who in 1943 had been ordered to find works for a museum in Austria planned by Hitler. Ronald had spotted his name on paintings on a visit to Zurich bank in 1998.
Recalling the reaction of the bank’s manager when she mentioned Gurlitt, Ronald said: “He screamed that I’d invaded Swiss privacy laws. Later, over lunch, he admitted this was indeed the collection of a Nazi art dealer.”
Intrigued, Ronald spoke to other Swiss bankers whom she knew through her work on projects to restore historic buildings. “A banker in Geneva said, ‘It’s an open secret the Swiss vaults are absolutely filled with art and artefacts that have been stolen’ — ‘illicitly got’ were his words — by Gurlitt and others,” she said.
The claim will feature in Hitler’s Art Thief, a book by Ronald to be published by St Martin’s Press on September 22. It also includes documents unearthed from archives around the world which Ronald claims prove Gurlitt was told to hide artworks for Albert Speer, the armaments minister, and Martin Bormann, chief of the Nazi party chancellery, towards the end of the war to fund their escape.
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The extent of Gurlitt’s involvement with the Nazis emerged in 2012 when more than 1,400 works, including paintings by Matisse and Picasso, were confiscated by customs officials from the Munich flat of Cornelius, his son. A second haul was seized at Cornelius’s home in Austria.
A month before Cornelius Gurlitt’s death in May 2014, the works were returned on condition that he help a team to establish which had been stolen by the Nazis. He left the artworks to a Swiss gallery but they remain in storage after a relative laid claim to them.
Christoph Edel, a lawyer who acted for Cornelius Gurlitt, said experts had found only “eight suspicious pictures” in his former client’s collection. The Swiss Bankers Association said: “It is an often cited myth that assets related to Nazis are stashed in Swiss bank vaults [but] there has never been any proof.”