MNR Publication History
The Directory of Stolen Property in France during the War 1939-1945 was published between 1947 and 1949 by the Central Bureau of Restitutions. (BCR)
The BCR, located in Berlin, centralised for the French part the declarations of dispossession made to the Office des Biens et Intérêts Privés (OBIP) and processed the files.
Where the application concerned a property not located, the BCR was intended to collect all relevant information about it, whether from persons who were dispossessed-even, documents made up by the German administration during the spoliation or any other source of information, for example the notes collected by Rose Valland during the passage of the works to the Jeu de Paume; indeed, this former museum located in the Tuileries Garden near the Louvre in Paris, served as a collecting place for the works at the time of the plunder before their departure in Germany; Rose Valland was in charge of conservation there before the war and remained there during the Occupation; she was able to follow all the movements of the works in transit and took many notes that were valuable for the restitution after the war.
In the autumn of 1947, the BCR decided to publish this directory consisting of the information collected. This monumental work includes eight volumes, six supplements (including five independent) and an index of painters. Several translations, in German, English and Russian had been planned but this project was not successful, and finally only the introductions and the presentation of the chapters were translated into these different languages. The purpose of the work is twofold, on the one hand, to disseminate information on objects and works that remain «orphans», for which a photograph is sometimes reproduced, but also to create a repertoire of objects or works that were impossible to trade because of the illegal possession of their holder. For this purpose, the publication has been widely distributed, especially among the major merchants in many countries in Europe and the United States.
It is therefore not a complete catalogue of the works stolen in France by the occupation army but a directory of the objects claimed that were not yet returned at the time of publication. As a result, works from some of the large, looted collections, such as those of the David-Weill family, were not included because they had already been returned.
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