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The 186-page catalogue listing 171 lost paintings and published in an edition of 5000 issues by the French ministry for Foreign Affairs has been the first of its kind regarding Jewish-owned works of art pillaged by the Germans between 1940 and 1944.
The issuing of such catalogue was made possible thanks to the well-documented archives of the Schloss collection which included old master paintings of the 16th ,17th and 18th Century, notably works by or attributed to Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Van Goyen, Cranach, Brueghel, Teniers, Metsu, Van Dyck and also Guardi and Velazquez.

This collection was known as one of the most famous in private hands before World War Two. Eight of the paintings have resurfaced some 45 years after the war including works by Frans Hals, Frans van Mieris, Roestraten, Dirck van Delen and Rembrandt.
The Dirk van Delen painting, a still life, was in the Boymans-Van Beuningen museum of Rotterdam which has accepted to hand it back to its legal owners.

Showing a tulip in a porcelain vase it had been donated by Vitale Bloch, a Jewish expert and collector who played a controversial role during the war.
Bloch was said to have collaborated closely with the Nazis to such a point that he was declared, like art historian Max Friedlaender, a «honourable Aryan» and exempted from wearing the infamous yellow star as a result of services rendered to the Reich.
Bloch and Friedlaender served as advisers to the Germans regarding the setting up of collections resulting from their plunders, notably for Marshal Goering or the founding of Hitler's museum in Linz, Austria.

Bloch assisted Hermann Voss, another well-known art historian who had discovered Georges de la Tour in the 1920's and who was in charge of the Nazi administration of art works. Bloch was notably in Paris when the Nazis selected works from the Schloss collection in 1943 and probably entered in possession of the van Delen painting then.

An inventory of the collection was then made, in the presence of Lefranc who was acting as administrator, an expert named Potsma and two curators of the Louvre Museum, René Huygue and Germain Bazin in August 1943 in the cellars of the Dreyfus bank which had been requisitioned by the Nazis. The Louvre managed to pre-empt 49 paintings for 18,9 million FF, a sum which was never paid to the Germans by the Vichy administration, and the works were returned to the Schloss family after the war.
Out of the 284 remaining paintings 262 were transferred to the Jeu de Paume Museum and eventually sent to Germany. Some 22 works were thus missing from the final shipment, probably seized by Lefranc who sold them to a certain Buittenweg who could have been Bloch himself who was then using an assumed name.
It was believed that a certain number of paintings disappeared from the collection pending its transfer to Germany as Bruno Lohse, head of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) which organised the plundering of Jewish-owned works of art in France, later admitted that he had taken some of these for himself.

Out of the 333 paintings from the collection 162 were recovered after the war and given back to the heirs of Adolphe Schloss who sold several works at auction during the 1950's.
French institutions are now determined to step up the hunt for plundered works after a long period of silence over Jewish-owned pieces seized by the Nazis which was broken recently thanks to several press reports and books referring to that matter.
A hand-written catalogue on restitution claims regarding over 100,000 pieces drawn up after the war is now being rehashed in order to be published in 1999, the Foreign ministry indicated.

There were some 60,000 restitution in the years that followed the end of the war but the most sensitive issue relates to those works which have never been claimed back by their legal owners and which are presently stored in French museums. Already the ministry has opened an internet site showing 650 paintings awaiting to be claimed back (www.culture.fr/culture/bdd/index.htm).
According to the ministry 30% of unclaimed works were seized by the Nazis while the other 70% were sold by collaborationists during the war.
Meanwhile the World Jewish Congress published on November 9th 1998 an exhaustive list of 2000 people, including 400 French citizens, who were suspected of having taken part in the plundering of Jewish-owned art works during the war. Among the names indicated in the list are those of Karl Haberstock, a German who was considered as the main buyer of stolen works of art in Paris, and of Georges Wildenstein, a major dealer whose collection had been confiscated by the Nazis because of his religion.