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New York Times
04-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Hiding ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring' From the Nazis
At first it went to a bomb shelter in the basement of a museum, then an art bunker built into the dunes on the North Sea in the Netherlands. Toward the end of the war it was hidden in a secured cave in Maastricht, a Dutch city near the Belgian border. Starting in 1939, as war in Europe spread and the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands loomed, leaders of the Mauritshuis, the jewel box museum in The Hague, took extraordinary steps to protect Johannes Vermeer's 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' and other works central to its collection. Wilhelm Martin, the museum's director at the time, removed it and other famous works like Rembrandt's 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp' and Carel Fabritius's 'The Goldfinch' before the Germans arrived because he understood that they would be in peril, both from bombardments and from potential Nazi looting afterward. The survival of these works, through strategic planning, diplomatic appeasement and the German affinity with the conquered Dutch as ethnic brethren, is now the subject of an exhibit at the Mauritshuis. 'Facing the Storm: A Museum in Wartime,' which is on view until June 29, coincides with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 and is based on extensive new research. 'It was a balancing act,' said Quentin Buvelot, curator of the exhibition. 'Martin wanted to protect the people who worked there — a relatively skeleton staff — as well as the collection, and the museum building, and so he had to act in a certain way.' The Mauritshuis took a 'diplomatic' and 'ambiguous' path to dealing with the pressures imposed by the Nazi occupiers, said Eelke Muller, a historian at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, which contributed to the research project. At Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the director, Dirk Hannema, helped the Nazis loot work from Jewish collectors. Willem Sandberg, the wartime director of the Stedelijk, Amsterdam's museum of contemporary art and design, on the other hand, helped hide art in bunkers for Jewish families and engaged in other forms of resistance. The Mauritshuis found a middle ground, said Buvelot, in part because it was under the thumb of the Nazi occupation officials in The Hague, who held the purse strings to the museum. It was also physically adjacent to the Binnenhof, the parliamentary seat of power, which was teeming with German soldiers. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the Dutch royal family and top state officials fled to Britain, leaving the country's civil administration to fend for itself. Hitler appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi, to run the occupied Dutch territories. As part of their attempted conquest of Europe, the Nazis looted millions of paintings, sculptures, books and furnishings. Hitler and his second in command, Hermann Goering, were particularly passionate about collecting 17th-century Dutch art, especially Rembrandts and Vermeers. Through outright looting or forced sales, agents acting for the Nazis made off with tens of thousands of artworks from private Dutch-Jewish collectors and dealers, including the Gutmann Collection in Heemstede and the Jacques Goudstikker Gallery in Amsterdam. It would seem that the Mauritshuis's trove of Dutch masters would have been a prime target for Nazi theft as well, but the nation's public art collections were largely spared, said the cultural historian Frank van Vree, emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam. In France, after Hitler's looters robbed French Jews, the Nazis also demanded art from the French national collections. However, Buvelot noted, the Germans never targeted the Dutch national collections in the same manner. That had a lot to do with the Nazis' belief that their Dutch neighbors were 'brudervolk,' part of a Germanic brotherhood, or were 'genetically' kindred spirits who would adopt Nazi worldviews. 'Everything they saw as national property was actually really safe,' van Vree said. The Mauritshuis was required to lend art to Nazi headquarters and offices, Buvelot said, but it never had to relinquish art to Germany. Van Vree said Germany's cultural theory about the Dutch was 'that they were considered to be equals.' 'And they considered the art of the Low Countries, particularly the 17th-century art, as part of the 'lower German cultural area,' which goes back to archaeology and prehistoric times, and this idea of a kind of historical continuity of the Germanic race,' he added. Rather than loot Dutch museums, Hitler's agents in The Hague used the institutions to try to indoctrinate this 'fraternal' public into Nazi ideology, Muller said. 'Culture was a very important element for both their propaganda and for their self-image,' she said. In service of this idea, the Rijksmuseum, the national museum in Amsterdam, staged about 35 propaganda exhibitions throughout the war, van Vree said. In contrast, the director of the municipal art museum in The Hague, Gerard Knuttel, refused to use that institution for propaganda purposes, and was fired and sent to an internment camp for two years. The Mauritshuis hosted five shows of Nazi propaganda, including displays of 'German Books Today,' and amber objects, like gems and jewelry, because Hitler hoped to promote the Baltic Coast's natural resource as 'gold from the sea.' Martin wrote letters of protest but allowed these exhibitions, Buvelot said, because he feared that if the museum was empty during the war, the occupation government would seize the building for its use. Researchers also uncovered evidence that Martin may have allowed Dutch resisters to hide in the building, probably in the attic, Muller said. Martin wrote in a postwar statement that dozens of loaves of bread were delivered to the building each day, she added. To protect the art collection, he created a color-coded priority system, and marked works with triangles in the colors of the Dutch flag: red triangles for national treasures; white for works of slightly less significance; and blue for art that could be replaced. Art with blue triangles remained hanging in the museum, alongside a lot of empty frames. Vermeer's 'Girl With a Pearl Earring,' was marked with a red triangle. Unlike most of the Mauritshuis's other artworks, the 'Girl' remained in its ornate frame because of its priority status, said Abbie Vandivere, a paintings conservator at the Mauritshuis, who led a research project on the painting. After the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, Vermeer's painting was removed from the Maastricht cave where it had spent three years (its final storage spot after departing The Hague in 1939). 'There's no evidence to suggest that the 'Girl' got damaged either during the war or after,' Vandivere said. 'I think that's quite remarkable.' The painting was then transported by truck to the Rijksmuseum for the exhibition 'Reunion With the Masters,' which opened on July 15, 1945, and drew some 167,000 visitors during its run. The display of more than 150 artworks that had been safely retrieved from various depots reassured the Dutch public that the national heritage was safe. 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' was at last returned to the walls of the Mauritshuis in September 1945, four months after the end of World War II, and by November it was joined by the museum's other artworks. 'In the end, there were few losses, and the museum was still there,' Buvelot said. 'It all ended well for the Mauritshuis.'
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Syrian authorities arrest three men with suspected links to notorious Tadamon massacre
Authorities in Damascus have arrested three men they claim were involved in a notorious massacre of civilians by Syrian security forces revealed by the Guardian three years ago. Footage posted online purported to show one of the men, Monzer al-Jazairi, with his hands bound and being led through the heavily damaged streets of Tadamon, the Damascus suburb where nearly 300 people were killed in an atrocity filmed by the perpetrators themselves – and then leaked by a whistleblower to activists in Europe. After his arrest on Monday, Jazairi said the final death toll was even higher. 'About how many were killed?' he was asked by a uniformed man. 'About 500 people,' he replied. A witness in the neighbourhood said that it was stormed by truckloads of security forces on Monday afternoon, who closed off the perimeter of several blocks to prevent anyone escaping. The two others arrested – and pictured sitting in the back of a pickup truck guarded by masked men – were identified as Somer Mohammed al-Mahmoud and Imad Mohammed al-Mahmoud. It is unclear what role the trio played in the events in Tadamon. Their names are understood not to have come up in earlier research into the mass killings, suggesting they were not major players. Over the course of a civil war in which the Bashar al-Assad regime killed at least 300,000 civilians, by one estimate, the massacre at Tadamon has become one of the most infamous for the clarity and detail with which it was documented by regime forces. More than two-dozen videos showed uniformed members of Syrian military intelligence working with pro-Assad militiamen to kill an estimated 288 people, including 12 children. Their bodies were burned and buried using a bulldozer. The footage was dated to April 2013, a period in which the Syrian government and rebels were fighting over neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital. A technician in Damascus discovered the footage on a Syrian government laptop and secretly sent it to activists in Paris, who passed the videos to a pair of researchers in the Netherlands, Annsar Shahhoud and Prof Uğur Ümit Üngör, from the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The face of the massacre became a Syrian military intelligence official named Amjad Yousef, who is still at large. One of the videos showed Yousef, in military fatigues and a green fisherman's hat with a distinctive scar on his eyebrow, leading 11 blindfolded men one-by-one to a pit, taunting several as he shoved them into the hole and murdered them. Üngör and Shahhoud found a Facebook profile belonging to a man who resembled Yousef. The researchers befriended him and – posing as regime supporters – persuaded him to take part in several video calls that they filmed, excerpts from which were later published by the Guardian. After one of the videos was published online, several of the families of the victims came forward saying they had identified their missing loved ones in the footage. The horror it sparked in Syria and among its diaspora led to rare concessions from the Assad regime, including the release of hundreds of prisoners and the appointment of a new defence minister. But Yousef remained free, and two years ago was reportedly working on a military base outside Damascus. A former colleague said that year that Yousef had terrorised the Tadamon neighbourhood for the past decade, regularly snatching women from the streets, many of whom never returned. 'I saw him take women from a bread queue one morning,' the colleague said. 'They were innocent. They had done nothing. They were either raped or killed. Nothing less.' The US government announced it had imposed sanctions on Yousef and his family in 2023. Syrian authorities announced in the days after Assad's fall that they had arrested Yousef's superior, Salih al-Ras. 'We used to bring detainees arrested at checkpoints, put them under the buildings here and execute them, and then after we're done explode the buildings over them,' Jazairi told the Associated Press in a separate interview. It was unclear whether he was speaking under duress or voluntarily. 'Every batch constituted around 25 [people],' he said, adding that 'around one week' passed between one batch and the next. The Damascus Security Chief, Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman al-Dabbagh, corroborated the number, citing additional confessions from those arrested. 'Many of those killed used to be collected at checkpoints and security [detention] centres, brought to Tadamon neighbourhood, where they were executed,' Dabbagh said. 'The operation is ongoing to apprehend all those involved in violations and massacres against Syrians.' Syria's new transitional government, led by the former leader of the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been conducting raids in different cities to arrest remnants of the previous regime and says it is working on a judicial mechanism to hold them to account.
