It’s not often that we are invited to a museum exhibit full of artifacts that everyone knows were stolen. I had that opportunity in 1992 when the Dallas Museum of Art held a special exhibit of the Quedlinburg Treasure. How these artifacts came to north Texas is a sordid tale of greed and official indifference.
The stolen artifacts came from an abbey later converted to a Lutheran church in Quedlinburg, Germany, and some pieces dated to the 10th century. The collection included jewel-encrusted books and reliquaries with ivory inlays.
In the 1920’s and 30’s, the town leaders decided they needed to protect their church’s treasures from the Communists and the Nazis. They photographed each piece, made pencil and ink sketches and wrote detailed descriptions of each artifact. During World War II, they hid their treasure in a nearby salt mine.
American soldiers arrived in the town in 1945. The town leaders asked the Americans to help them protect the treasure during the chaotic days as the war ended. An American officer, who doesn’t deserve to be named, began stealing some of the more portable objects and mailing them home to Texas. Later investigations revealed that enlisted personnel witnessed his thievery, but were unable or unwilling to accuse him of theft.
The town complained of the theft, but the U.S. Army’s “Monuments Men” were more interested in tracking art stolen by the Nazis than their own people. When the Allies split Germany, Quedlinburg was on the East German side of the border where the Communists ignored their complaint since Stalinist Russia was almost as prolific as the Nazis at art theft. And that’s where the case stood until the 1980’s.
In 1989, the two Germanys united and Quedlinburg immediately presented their theft complaint to the new government and to Interpol. One of the stolen pieces had been sold in Switzerland where it was easily identified from the decades-old sketches and photographs. The art dealer sang louder than a canary in hopes of getting a shorter prison sentence and he helpfully pointed the German and Swiss authorities toward north Texas.
By then, the thief had died, and his heirs- his brother and sister- were selling the artifacts. When they were informed that they were dealing in stolen property, they claimed they didn’t know about any theft. Since the thief had kept the artifacts wrapped in quilts stuffed in a closet to be shown only to favored guests, their defense was dubious as best.
The artifacts were taken to the Dallas Museum of Art for an assessment of their condition. Many of the objects needed repairs. Repairing one of a kind art objects is expensive and the museum asked for permission to exhibit the artifacts to defray some of the cost.
Publicizing the exhibit was easy because of the litigation pitting the U.S. and German governments against the thief’s heirs. The heirs demanded millions of dollars to give up their ownership “rights”. The U.S. government countered with criminal charges of dealing in stolen art and extortion, but the case was dropped because the applicable statute of limitations had expired.
The local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, received stacks of letters to the editor most of which supported the thief’s heirs. A typical letter to the editor said that Germany started the war and that meant one of our officers was justified in stealing from a church. The gush of race and ethnic hatred expressed in those letters still haunts me.
But as a history buff, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the treasure. In 1992 I worked in downtown Dallas near the museum so one day some co-workers and I took a long lunch to tour the exhibit. I provided context by giving an overview of politics and religion in the medieval German states. The reliquaries and books were beautiful but they weren’t spectacular like the gold mask of King Tut. My co-workers were a little underwhelmed by the exhibit.
Eventually, the brother and sister were paid a substantial sum of money but less than they demanded to give up their claims to the artifacts. The artifacts were returned to Quedlinburg where they may be seen today.
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