Poland in Iraq

The losses of cultural property, which Poland sustained from 1939-1945, resulted both from military action – bombardment of churches, palaces, museums or libraries – as well as from looting by soldiers, the occupying power's administration, corrupt marauders following the army, or by local thieves exploiting wartime confusion. The land of the 2nd Republic of Poland saw destruction caused by military action several times over – firstly in 1939, from the 1st September from German army aggression, from 17th September from the Soviet army, then 22nd June 1941 when the Germans attacked the USSR and again from the summer of 1944 to May 1945 when German forces were in retreat from the Red Army.

In 1939, the German army, not meeting much resistance in the cities, captured them without bombardment and didn't cause serious damage (including historical buildings). The exeception was Warsaw, which defended itself for almost a month and the bombardment and artillery fire caused up to 40% of the city to be destroyed. Significant damage was done to the Zamoyski Family Fee Tail Library, the edifice was burnt down and together with it, the Central Military Library. The same happened to the Przedziecki Family Fee Tail Library. The intervention of the Red Army in eastern Polish terrain didn't cause much material damage and Poles gave up their land to the invaders with negligible military resistance.

After the military action of 1939 finished, the German occupying forces divided Polish territory into 2 parts – the General Government (GG) and land incorporated into the Reich. Cultural property in both parts of the country were treated in different ways.
The GG, which was founded upon Hitler's orders and announced by Hans Frank on 26th October 1939, contained towns which were centres of Polish culture – Warsaw, Cracow and also, from 1941, Lviv. Soon after conquering Poland the activities of the occupying forces regarding cultural property was not regulated and the competencies of paerticular civil services or the police had not been established. There was a general conviction that they were ownerless and could be freely disposed of. Essentially, the Wermacht didn't deal with the issue. Only individual officials, certain members of the SS and the police were interested in cultural property. By October 1939, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin had already sent a special unit to Poland, Kommando Paulsen, named after its leader, archaeology professor, Peter Paulson. The unit's task was given by Reischsführera SS, the head of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and was to secure prehistoric excavations and monuments in Poland, as German archaeologists suspected that the Poles were falsifying their research. However, on his first trip (1st October 1939), Paulsen came with a different aim – he was to bring the Wit Stwosz altarpiece to Berlin. He completed his assignemtn at the last moment, because the local German authorities didn't want such a precious work to leave the GG, which, according to them, was evidence of several hundred years of German art in Poland. He next expeditions of the unit were a remarkable act of looting. Like many other thefts in Poland territory, these trips were poorly prepared and often it was only upon arrival that the unit members learned which objects were worth seizing. Kommando Paulsen, made up of archaeologists, requisitioned a variety of artifacts – from the Wit Stwosza altarpiece, to the Codex Suprasliensis (a cyrillic literary monument written in old Slavic canon from the 11th century), as well as 4 stuffed European bison from the Natural History Museum in Warsaw. This random choice of exhibits makes it difficult to recover them. It's difficult to work out where and why a seized object was expedited. The gold medallion of Caesar Jovian, owned by the Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, was taken from Boroczyce by the Kommando and vanished into thin air, with no leads which could direct a search.
The chaos of the first few weeks of the occupation was quickly dealt with. After proclamation of the General Government (GG), Hans Frank established a govenrment and within it a Special Plenipotentiary for Compilation of a List of Works of Art and Cultural Property and their Protection. SS-Standarteführer Kajetan Mühlmann, who had been sent to the General Government by Hermann Göring, was named head of the institution. Mühlmann worked in this role until July 1943 as his main mission had been accomplished. He played a large role in the looting of works of art within the GG, although earlier he had managed to halt the uncontrolled transportation of these works from the area. He also prevented the further activities of the Kommando Paulsen looters in Poland. On 22nd November 1939 he issued a decree, under the orders of Hans Frank, which forbade the transportation of any „artistic and cultural goods" from the terrain of the GG. Thus, this procedure became illegal, which stopped arbitrary activities of both individuals and institutions. On 9th October 1940, Hans Frank went one step further – in the „General Government Journal of Regulations" he entered an edict in which he ordered the return of all goods earlier transported from the terrain of the GG, due to them being the property of that country. GG civil servants cited this law when demanding the return of goods requisitioned in the first months of the occupation, by the Kommando Paulsen among others.

However, what followed was the movement of the GG collections. Paintings, indeed any artistic goods, were taken by civil servants, the police and SS officers, often in order to decorate their offices or private accommodation. Jewish property was stolen with total impunity. Items stolen from the ghetto were mainly looted by the SS, who reserved themselves the right their confiscation. Elements of architectural decoration and property of the Royal Castle in Warsaw: furniture, carpets, tapestries and paintings were taken to the residences of dignitaries and high ranking officials. Hans Frank led by example, hanging in his offices works by Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Raphael from the collection of the Museum of the Czartoryski Princes in Cracow.

Moving such objects on a large scale was permitted by an order given by Hans Frank on 16th December 1939 regarding the confiscation of cultural goods. This concerned both public as well as private and church collections (apart from objects, robes and books used during church services). The confiscations were carried out by the commission constituted by Mühlmann which was divided into 2 groups, north and south. The second group was led by Joseph Mühlmann, (Kajetan's brother) and operated in Warsaw. Both groups searched for and confiscated works of art and gathered them in appropriate depots. In Cracow they were placed in basements in Wawel castle, in the Mining Academy building and in the storerooms of the newly built Jagiellonian Library. In Warsaw the central depot was created in the National Museum. Hans Frank, himself, estimated that by October 1942, 90% of the works of art from the GG had been gathered in the depots.

The confiscations and gathering of moveable cultural goods in a few depots was aimed at inventorising the objects and taking full control of them. What is not clear is the final destination for the works – there were discrepancies in the declarations. One thing is sure: they were to stay in the depots until the end of the war and that is what happened, to a large extent. After the war, when testifying to American soldiers, Kajetan Mühlmann stated that the confiscated objects were to have been incorporated into German collections. This explanation, however, was not convincing. German curators were not interested in taking possession of such a large number of exhibits from Polish collections, partly because they did not value them very highly. Hitler's plenipotentiary, Hans Posse, who searched for works of art (mainly paintings) for the planned Führer's museum in Linz, visited the GG in December 1940 and said that there was nothing in the Polish collections, apart from works that were well known in Germany, that would enrich German museums. The fact that the gathered works were organised into 3 groups might reveal their destination. The first group included world class pieces, which could be added to German museum collections. Examples of works of that class, which, notabene, were to evidence of the reach of German art into Polish territory, were listed by K. Mühlmann in the luxuriously published album Sichergestellte Kunstwerke in Generalgouvernement (Wrocław 1940/1941). Many of the works in the album were described by distinguished German art historians. Many have not been returned and their descriptions are the only documents which can serve their resitution.

The second category included works of lower value, which, after the war, could replenish Polish museums. The third category included objects of decorational nature, which could be passed on to German institutions of individuals. The fitting out of government offices or private residences with works of art which had been confiscated from museums or private collections went on throughout the occupation and did not only happen by an official means.

Different rules were applied by the occupying forces with regards to libraries. Polish books, whether fiction or history books, had neither intellectual nor material value for them. The propaganda machine only created a list of books which were antagonistic to the 3d Reich and Germany. These books were taken out of circulation, from bookshops and private lending libraries, above all.

Public libraries were simply closed and the fortunes of their collections was of no interest to anybody. Some branches shared the fortunes of the institutions they belonged to, e.g. together with the liquidation of central government offices (including ministries) or secondary schools, their libraries also ceased to function. The collections were mostly taken down to cellars or storage space, and because, in general, there was a lack of space, they were liquidated – books were burnt in furnaces or used as waste paper. Sometimes, however, there were institutiojns which wanted to take them or to save them e.g. large scientific libraries in Warsaw.

The collections of scientific libraries were treated somewhat differently – scientific books were taken out of circulation for readers, but whole collections were kept in situ. Only Kommando Paulsen, exploiting the intitial freedom to penetrate Polish collections, confiscated a few „political" libraries, e.g. the Library and Archives of the Sejm (Parliament) and Senate or Jewish libraries. Only a small percentage of these books returned to Poland. Other examples of the transportation of Polish libraries are not known. There were attempts to donate Cracovian incunables and illuminated codexes to German and Austrian libraries, but ultimately these ideas were rejected. Maybe the fact that Hans Frank wanted to create a German University in Cracow was a deciding factor as such an institution should have a valuable library collection. Even during the German evacuation in 1944, the Cracovian cimelium were left in their libraries.

At the beginning of the occupation, scientific libraries were mostly closed to readers. The employees were released, whilst ensuring the security of the building and the collections. On 1st July 1940, the GG authorities together with the respective authorities in the Reich represented by delegates of German libraries, decided to create in the GG 4 national libraries (Staatsbibliotheken): in Cracow, Warsaw, Lviv and Lublin to be centrally run by the Main Library Authority in the GG with its headquarters in Cracow. The collections of scientific libraries from these cities were incorporated into the national libraries. Altogether, in these 4 places, which employed Polish staff, 6 million examples were gathered, which generally survived there until the liberation. However, 400 000 volumes from Warsaw's special libraries were destroyed (including objects regained from Russia under the terms of the Riga Peace treaty), which were gathered in the building of the Krasinski Library which was burnt down in 1944 after the Warsaw Uprising. As a result, after the war, no collection of books was found on German territory, which would require reposession and any historical books from Polish libraries which were found in German libraries appeared there by accident, most commonly thet had been stolen from Polish collections.

The German authorities acted differently with the Polish archives. From October 1939 all of the archives within the GG were managed by the Archive Directorate in Cracow. Interested parties and researchers were denied access, although Polish staff were kept on but without decision making powers. German archivists, as opposed to German librarians, came to Poland with pre-prepared plans for requisition. The first move was to seal the military acts and transport them to the branch of the Military Archives in Potsdam. Next, materials connected with the German past were separated e.g. acts from Prussian or German offices. Large, uncounted numbers of acts, which had been created in areas adopted into the 3rd Reich, were lost to Poland in general. A particularly important loss was the separation of 74 pergamum documents given to the Polish King by the Teutonic knights in 1525, which had been placed in the Crown Archives. These documents were taken from the AGAD (Central Archives of Historical Records) and sent to Krolewiec (Kalingrad). Just before the end of the war, they ended up in the Archives in Berlin-Dahlem, were not returned to Poland and to date are a bone of contention in restitutional negotiations between the 2 countries.

The occupying authorities were able to enforce provisional order in the GG. Works of art were counted and inventorised and almost all were gathered in huge repositories. A similar merging tactic was adopted regarding scientific library collections. Archive stocks, after some of which had been taken by the Germans, were generally saved. This occupational harmony was shaken, however, and then collapsed as the eastern front approached. The German administrational discipline in the GG relaxed and functionaries stopped respecting prohibitions and started looting and transporting works of art on their own initiative. Hans frank himself set an example, when, escaping from Cracow, he took works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Raphael to his estate in Bavaria. All civil servants were stealing and this behaviour carried over to the Wehrmacht. As they moved through Poland, soldiers pocketed portable objects of culture, often found by accident. The conditions after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising were exceptionally conducive to theft. It was a case of total plunder and systematic demolition of successive quarters of the city. The German side undertook action to save some of Warsaw's cultural objects. On 12th August 1944, Adolf Hitler's brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, conveyed an order from Hitler to the head of the German forces in Warsaw, General Erich von dem Bach, regarding the protection of Warsaw's cultural objects. Obeying the Führer's orders, SS Colonel Moritz Arnhardt arrived in Warsaw at the head of a group of SS soldiers. He transported collections from Warsaw's museums and libraries which he regarded as valuable. The workers in Polish cultural institutions were disorientated, but supported Arnhardt's activities, especially as he left the choice of which articles would be evacuated to them. To a large extent they were returned to Warsaw in 1946.

The aim of Arnhardt's actions, undertaken in connection with Hitler's orders to burn the city down, was to save moveable cultural goods from annihilation. The so-called Pruszków Action had the same aim. On the basis of a treaty signed with the Wehrmacht, the Polish side gained the possibility to evacuate some of the cultural items from the city. In November 1944, a team of Polish curators, archivists and librarians, under the leadership of Stanisław Lorentz, started to transport museum, library and archive collections from Warsaw. The action finished in the middle of January 1945. A large part of the collections transported to the Reich returned to Poland in 1945-6. Some of them were captured on German terrain by special Soviet forces which elongated their reclamation processes.

The western and northern parts of Poland, ie the pomorskie, poznańskie and śląskie voivodships, part of the Łódź and Cracow voivodships, almost all of the Mazowiecki Voivodship and the Suwałki voivodship, were incorporated into the Reich. The Polish population in these areas was subjected to a process of absolute Germanisation. Government offices were established to liquidate Polish goods. On 19th October 1939, Herman Göring created the Main Trustee Office for the East (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (HTO)), which coordinated the looting of Polish property. Additionally, on 1st December 1939, the Office of the General Trustee for Securing German Cultural Property in the Eastern Territories was set up alongside the HTO. This organisation was inspired by the SS Reischsführer, and head of the German police, Heinrich Himmler. In the „Reich Legal Gazette" a series of regulations were announced regarding the reach and methods of confiscation of Polish property. Of particular significance was the order signed by Himmler on 1st December 1939 which commanded the confiscation of all cultural property (as wide ranging a meaning as possible) in archives, museums, public and private collections. In accordance with that order, special confiscation squads appeared in occupied terrain. They worked closely with the local police and from their reports (28th March 1941) it can be seen that the exhibits of 15 museums and 5 collections of weapons, a collection of antique vases in Goluch were secured, 1100 paintings from private hands were confiscated, 500 pieces of furniture, 33 crates of religious works of art, hundreds of carpets, 25 crates with objects made of precious metals. The items were mostly stored in the cathedral and other churches in Poznan but also in Lodz and Katowice. The more precious items were sent to the Reich Bank in Berlin and those of lower value were sold (most often in Berlin) and the metal objects remelted. The dispatcher of the confiscated goods was Göring.

The confiscated books from institutes and private homes were segregated. Some were sent for milling, some were stored in depots in 3 Poznan churches. Altogether 4 million volmes were gathered there. Scientific works were made available to the director of the University Library which was founded on 11th November 1939, a few months earlier than the German university in Poznan. Total control of all the stocks collected in the depots, which included several million books stored in disordered fashion, turned out to be impossible. The stocks remained in this state until the liberation.

It is estimated that altogether the losses from libraries within the GG and incorporated lands amounts to about 70% of the pre-war state.

The eastern terrain of the 2nd Republic of Poland (the lwowskie, wileńskie, nowogrodzkie, poleskie, wołyńskie, stanisławowskie and tarnopolskie, białostockie voivodships) after the 17th September 1939 were annexed by the USSR. Cities which had been connected with Polish culture and traditions throughout the ages, like Wilno and Lviv, fell into Russian hands. The first steps of the occupying forces aimed at moving property in such a way as to obliterate their Polish derivation and cultural institutions were forced into propaganda activities. These places were generally given new management made up of Soviet party activists. After the 3rd Reich's attack on the USSR, the Germans joined the west part of Ukraine to the GG with its capital in Lviv. The remaining eastern terrain went under the government of the Reich Ministry of the Conquered Eastern Terrain. Special services were created which wnet about looting cultural property.

In 1944, when the German forces were being forced back by the Red Army, cultural objects were under threat of destruction and looting form both sides. The attacking Red Army most often bombarded cities like Lviv. Marauders from that army looted intensively, especially in the terrain belonging to the Reich, which soon became Poland. On the other hand, the retreating Wehrmacht destroyed, blew up, not only bridges and objects of a military nature, but also cultural buildings like the Raczynski Library in Poznan.

Retreating on the eastern front, the German forces transported cultural property from the conquered terrain. Among the objects there were also Polish monuments, the number of which cannot even be estimated. It is known, however, that some later returned to their original locations, but in the new geopolitical configuration.

After the end of the war, as a result of decisions concluded in the Potsdam treaty of 2nd August 1945, earlier Polish lands in the east ended up in the USSR. We believe that the change of ownership as a result of the moving of national borders, for Poland meant a loss of many works of art, not necessarily due to destruction of cultural property.

Estimation of Polish cultural losses in the eastern terrain is impossible, because after the war Poland never had access to museums, galleries, archives and libraries which previously had been Polish. The Soviet side never never carried out an „initial balance" (for obvious reasons). Thus, it is difficult to specify the losses, since we have neither a thorough inventory of our cultural property from 1939, nor information about the state of the situation after 1945. At best it is possible to note one example aiming at such a balance: Polish librarians prepared the guide „Libraries in the eastern lands of the 2nd Republic" (Warsaw 1998) in which they determined that in 1939, in the eastern part of the 2nd Republic, there were 5056 libraries. They were unable to determine their state in 1945.

 

Andrzej Mężyński