Our Website editor points out that the irony here is that "Chris Hastings" was the author of the scrurrilous piece aout Germar Rudolf

Widow given hope over Stalin booty

By Chris Hastings

A BRITISH woman has come a step closer to securing the return of valuable works of art stolen from her family by the Nazis following a change of heart by the Russian government.

Gerta Silberberg, 85, has long claimed that a painting by Cézanne on display in St Petersburg was owned by her father-in-law until he was forced to hand it over to the SS. The widow's efforts to reclaim the work have been hampered by Russia's reluctance to return any of the 130,000 valuables it still possesses from among those it removed from occupied Germany at the end of the war.

But now officials in Moscow have agreed to an audit of items stolen by Stalin. The inquiry is seen as the first step in a process that will see paintings restored to their owners. The decision coincides with growing concern that many of the paintings removed by the Russians were not the property of the German government but had been looted from Jewish collections. Many of the artworks stolen by Hitler -- including pieces by the great masters -- are still missing.

Investigators believe that they may be in the vaults of museums such as the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin in Moscow and that other pieces from the Silberberg collection may be among the items which have not seen the light of day for more than 50 years.

The Russians are known to have dozens of SS documents that detail the real owners of paintings removed from Berlin at the end of the war. Mrs Silberberg said: "There is no doubt that the Russians stole a great many paintings from Germany. I have a claim for the Cézanne in St Petersburg and welcome the audit if it means the return of paintings like this. This can be a long and complicated business and we shall have to see what happens next. For a long time the Russians were very unhelpful. We will now have to see how nice they are prepared to be."

Mrs Silberberg fled Germany with her late husband in 1937. Mr Silberberg's collection was regarded as one of the most impressive in pre-war Germany and included works by Van Gogh, Delacroix and Degas.

In 1935 Mr Silberberg, a wealthy industrialist, was forced to sell the collection at an auction rigged to strip Jews of their property. He later died in a concentration camp. His daughter-in-law has successfully traced a number of the missing items, and last year officials at the National Museum in Berlin handed over a Van Gogh. She is also in negotiation with the National Museum of Israel for the return of a Pissarro.

Communist Russia moved more than 1.5 million items from Germany's capital in 1946, regarding them as war reparations. Many were returned to East Germany in 1958 but Moscow has always resisted demands to hand over others. As recently as July the constitutional court upheld a decision by the Russian parliament to block the return of any works.

The change of heart follows intense lobbying by Jewish protest groups. Lord Janner, the chairman of the Holocaust Trust, which brokered the deal, said: "I am delighted that we have managed to secure this breakthrough. I think there can be no doubt that the Russians have valuable clues to the whereabouts of some of the paintings that have gone missing. We have made it clear that we are not interested in those paintings which were moved from Berlin but were the legitimate property of the German government."

Our opinion

 IF Mr Silberberg sold the collection, whether by force or not, it would appear prima facie that Mrs Silberberg has little claim to its former contents. (We would welcome a legal opinion from our readers on this score.) When Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the 1940s, before fleeing for their lives, to our knowledge they were not paid for the property which they were compelled to leave behind.