German Painting Hung in Hitler's Berlin Home Traced to Amsterdam Family
A German painting that once hung in Adolf Hitler's Berlin home belonged to an Amsterdam family whose business the Nazis seized, according to new research by Diederik Oostdijk.
Oostdijk is a professor of English and American literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and the author of the book Overlevingskunst (The Art of Survival). His research traces the painting, Joseph Sold by His Brothers (1831), by Carl Gottlieb Peschel. It shows the Bible story of Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt by his own brothers. The painting is now in the Martin von Wagner Museum in Würzburg, Germany.
The work belonged to Bob Nijkerk. His family had made its fortune in the iron and scrap-metal trade in the 19th century. Nijkerk's brother-in-law gave him the painting as a gift in 1941, according to ArtNews, which published Oostdijk's findings.
Nijkerk was a managing director of the family company when Nazi Germany occupied Amsterdam in 1940. The Nazis seized the company in 1941. Oostdijk's research shows that the Peschel painting later spent time in Hitler's Berlin home. It was then moved to a Nazi storage facility in Munich, set up for a planned museum Hitler wanted, the Führermuseum.
What happened to the painting after that is not settled. It is still unclear whether Nijkerk sold it in late 1941 or early 1942, or whether it was later confiscated. Nijkerk died in 1987.
Nijkerk's family suffered directly under the occupation. Nijkerk, his wife and their three children were taken to the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands and then to Theresienstadt, a camp in what is now the Czech Republic. All five survived the war. They were brought to Switzerland by train in 1945.
The restitution process, which returns works taken from owners persecuted by the Nazis, has not yet begun for this painting. Nijkerk's seven descendants have not filed a formal claim for it, according to ArtNews.
Oostdijk also linked three other works to the Nijkerk collection. Two are 1633 portraits by Caspar Netscher. The third, a 1673 painting by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Writing in the Amsterdam newspaper Parool, Oostdijk described Joseph Sold by His Brothers as an important painting for German cultural history.
For the Nijkerk family's descendants, the question is whether the painting can be returned to them. That depends on what happened to it in 1941 and 1942, a chain of events that is not yet fully explained.
