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Nazi’s paintings fund foundation for Jews

By The Associated Press - | Jan 22, 2019

BERLIN (AP) – When Hilde Schramm inherited several paintings collected by her father, Hitler’s chief architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, she was only sure of one thing: she didn’t want them.

Despite determining they probably hadn’t been looted from Jews during World War II, she wanted their legacy to somehow benefit others. So she huddled with friends around a rickety green table at her home-office in Berlin and came up with a plan to sell them and use the proceeds to support Jewish women’s creative projects in Germany.

In 1994, that became the Zurueckgeben foundation, a project for which Schramm received an Obermayer German Jewish History Award on Monday. The honor was established by an American Jewish philanthropist to recognize the efforts of non-Jewish Germans to keep alive their nation’s Jewish cultural past.

Today, there’s a wider understanding that the Nazis plundered precious artworks and other property from Europe’s Jews, partially because of recent stepped-up German government efforts to identify heirs and organize restitution, and the popular 2014 Hollywood film “The Monuments Men.”

But most of the focus has been on the big-ticket items like precious paintings and sculptures. Schramm’s foundation encourages Germans to take stock of the more mundane items in their households and question where they came from.

Because it’s almost impossible to determine the original owners of smaller items like cutlery and furniture, donors to the foundation often give a symbolic amount to Zurueckgeben, or sell the items and give the proceeds.

Since it began, hundreds of Germans have donated and the foundation has been able to pay out some 500,000 euros ($570,000) in grants to support more than 130 Jewish women’s projects. Those include a children’s theater, exhibitions, dance shows, books and films.

“Wherever I went, whatever I did, I saw something which was a blind spot and I took it up,” she said.

Schramm was only 9 when the war ended. Even though she was there at times with her father as he rubbed elbows with Hitler and other top Nazis, she said the persecution of the Jews was not something she was aware of.

“I had no idea,” she said, pausing contemplatively before adding: “But perhaps I didn’t want to have an idea. I don’t know.”

Unlike many other top Nazis, who committed suicide or were executed after the war, Albert Speer served 20 years in a Berlin prison for war crimes after being convicted in the Nuremberg trials. At his trial, Speer, who died in 1981 in London, accepted moral responsibility but insisted he had not known of the Holocaust – a contention that many have questioned.

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