Why only now, 50 years after the end of the War, has there been a sudden surge in the restitution of works of art affected by the Holocaust?
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, archives that had long been inaccessible were opened to researchers. A number of archives that held materials that were specifically relevant to provenance research started to be opened in the mid-to- late 1990s, thus allowing scholars, American museums professionals and representatives of heirs of holocaust survivors to conduct new research. American art museums professionals actually started working on restitution in 1943 focusing on the restitution of works of art within Europe that had been looted by the Nazis. These were not works that had ever been in American art museums. Rather, they were works seized from individuals and institutions by the Nazis, primarily as war booty. It is estimated that at least 200,000 works of art were repatriated through these American-led initiatives.
