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Lieut. Col. Stanley Andrews, former Deputy Chief of the Food and Agriculture Branch of the Economics Division, and shepherd, hold Karakoul sheep which were returned to the U.S. S. R. whence they were looted by Nazi armies.

Betwee

etween September, 1939, and May, 1945, when the Wehrmacht roamed from Dunkirk to Stalingrad and from Spitzbergen to Athens, the wealth of a continent lay within the grasp of conquerors who coveted much and scrupled little. They plundered raw materials and industrial machinery for German factories, locomotives and streetcars for German transport, furniture and paintings for German museums and German households. They did not consider sea-going barges too large, nor vials of radium too small, to deserve their attention. Their methods varied from crude pillaging by invading troops to obscure and tangled manipulations of bank deposits and national currencies. They took hundreds of items of incalculable artistic and sentimental value as well as thousands of other items the value of which has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Long before the end of hostilities it was acknowledged throughout the Allied world that the return of this property was dictated by considerations of justice, morale, and economics. Representatives of nations then occupied held the re covery of this property indispensable to the revival of their industry, transportation, and national spirit and urged that property removed from their territory and found in Germany should be returned to them, even though the last German possessor might have acquired it by full and fair payment. The occupying powers agreed, on the basis of the historic principle that stolen property is recoverable by the original owner regardless of the circumstances in which the current possessor has obtained it.

DEFINITION OF THE TERM “RESTITUTION”

1. The question of restitution of property removed by the Germans from Allied countries must be examined, in all cases, in light of the Declaration of January 5th, 1943.

2. Restitution will be limited, in the first instance, to identifiable goods which existed at the time of occupation of the country concerned and which have been taken by the enemy by force from the territory of the country.

Also falling under measures of restitution are identifiable goods produced during the period of occupation and which have been obtained by force.

All other property removed by the enemy is eligible for restitution to the extent consistent with reparations. However, the United Nations retain the right to receive from Germany compensation for this other property removed as reparations.

3. As to goods of a unique character, restitution of which is impossible, a special instruction will fix the categories of goods which will be subject to replacement, the nature of these replacement, and the conditions under which such goods could be replaced by equivalent objects.

4. Relevant transportation expenses within the present German frontier and any repairs necessary for proper transportation including the necessary manpower, material and organization, are to be borne by Germany and are included in restitutions. Expenses outside Germany are borne by the recipient country.

5. The Control of the Country from which such objects were looted.

Article 2 of this definition was later clarified by an official interpretation adopted early in March 1946:

INTERPRETATION OF ARTICLE 2, OF THE DEFINITION

OF THE TERM RESTITUTION

1. In consideration of paragraph 2 of CONL/P(46)3(Revise), it appears that where an article has been removed by force at any time during the occupation of a country, and is identifiable, the right to its recovery is an absolute one. The word "force" covers duress which may occur with or without violence. In this concept are also included looting, theft, larceny and other forms of dispossession whether they were carried out by an order of the German authorities, or by officials of the German civil or military administration, even when there was no order of the German authorities, or by individuals.

Also included are acquisitions carried out as a result of duress, such

as requisitions or other orders or regulations of the military or occupation authorities.

2. In the third sub-paragraph of paragraph 2, it appears that by "all other property removed by the enemy" it was desired to include all property which was removed in any other way. This implies that restitution of property may be claimed whatever may have been the means or the reasons of dispossession.

But the property removed in such manner does not entail an "absolute right" to restitution, which may be granted only within the limits consistent with reparations.

3. These "limits consistent with Reparations" must be understood in the following manner. If property claimed on account of restitution is indispensable for the operation of a whole factory allocated on account of reparations, this property may be retained and not restituted.

The

Restitution will be made only if the removal of the equipment does not seriously diminish the production capacity of the plant and does not destroy the completeness of the equipment to such an extent that when this plant is delivered on account of reparations it loses all value owing to the fact that restitution has been made.

If restitution of the object itself is not granted, the right of the claimant nation is satisfied by means of compensation to be taken from German property in objects of equivalent value, as far as possible by equipment, manufactured goods and raw materials.

NOTE: The U.S. and U.K. delegates agree with the above interpretation provided that:

"Compensation in lieu of restitution must not create additional expenditures by the U.S. and U.K. in support of their respective zones.”

list of nations elegible for restitution has been limited, to date, by all four occupying powers, as follows: "no nation shall be eligible... unless its territory was occupied in whole or in part by the German armed forces or the forces of her allies, and unless it is a United Nation, or shall have been specified by the Allied Control Council." Only eleven nations meet these qualifications: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. (The problem of restoring property to victims of Nazism now or formerly resident in Germany, sometimes loosely called "internal restitution", lies outside the jurisdiction of the Restitution Branch.)

Finally, it should be observed that the occupying powers will not use restitution from Germany to a claimant nation for purposes of bargaining for "reverse restitution" of German property.

Law 52 Promulgated

In September, 1944, soon after United States troops had crossed the German border, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) pro-, mulgated "Law 52", enabling the Allies to take the action envisaged in the London Declaration. Law 52 made all property in Germany subject to seizure and management by military government. The law covered not only property owned or controlled by the German Government but also the property of organizations and clubs dissolved by military government, property of the governments and citizens of any nation at war with the Allies, and property of absentee owners, including the governments and citizens of the United Nations. The law prohibited transactions in cultural materials of value or importance, regardless of ownership, and in property owned or controlled by religious, eleemosynary, educational, cultural, and scientific institutions. Custodians of property covered by the law were ordered to hold it, subject to the direction of military government, and to accept certain responsibilities for custody, preservation, and keeping of records.

Law 52 is thus the foundation of "Property Control", which has provided a most important index of property subject to return to its owners in formerly occupied nations.

The mechanism of such return or restoration, which came to be known as "restitution", was set in motion for the United States forces of occupation by a paragraph in Directive No. 1067 dated 10 May 1945 from the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

"You will carry out in your Zone such programs of reparations and restitution as are embodied in Allied agreements and you will seek agreement in the Control Council on any policies and measures which it may be necessary to apply throughout Germany to ensure the execution of such programs."

It was soon after this that the first restitution was made out of the U.S. Zone. On 22 August 1945 the famous altarpiece of the Adoration of the Lamb, by the brothers Van Eyck, was flown by special plane from Munich to Brussels and delivered to representatives of the Belgian Government. This was followed by restitution of small quantities of other artistic and later industrial property on the basis of interim instructions from the War Department under which the Reparations, Deliveries, and Restitution Division (subsequently the Restitution Branch of the Economics Division) operated, pending the adoption of a quadripartite definition of restitution.

The conditions of restitution had been first outlined at the quadripartite level in Annex XXI to the Basic Preliminary Plan of Allied Control and Occupation of Germany, completed on 29 May 1945. On 6 July 1945, Ambass

ador Pauley circulated a definition of restitution to the Allied Commission on Reparations in Moscow, and representatives of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom presented their views on restitution at Potsdam. In the Berlin Protocol, however, no mention is made of restitution. Late in 1945 the Directorate of Reparations, Deliveries, and Restitution, which had been set up under the Control Council and the Coordinating Committee, discussed and elaborated a quadripartite definition of restitution which was adopted by the Control Council on 21 January 1946 in the following form: Upon the quadripartite adoption of a definition of restitution, United States officials worked out a formal procedure for restitution, based on the unilateral system already in practise in the U.S. Zone under the operating direction of the Restitution Control Branch at Frankfurt-Höchst. While preparing Title 19, "Restitution", of Military Government Regulations, the U.S. Delegate submitted a paper on restitution procedure to the RD&R Directorate, which, after making some changes, approved it on a quadripartite basis in mid-April.

The adoption of the definition also accelerated the filing and processing of actual claims. In the first months of the occupation many specific requests were received from claimant nations and individuals: machine tools from the Fabrique Nationale d'Armes, Belgium; streetcars and sporting rifles from the Netherlands; laboratory equipment from the Carolinen University in Czechoslovakia; gunpowder presses from the National Powder Works, France. In October, 1945, the eleven United Nations concerned had been invited to send consolidated lists of property believed to be in the U.S. Zone of Germany; as soon as property belonging to a claimant nation was actually located, that nation was invited to send a mission of four persons to the Zone to identify

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