61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

while reassuring to the collector that the works in question would be on loan to
the Swiss museum concerned. When a painting was sold, the import duties were
generally charged to the purchaser, thus relieving the burden on Jewish owners
who were usually short of foreign exchange. By declaring that the item was a
loan, the German collector was exempt not only from import duty but also from
emigration tax or other compulsory taxes and levies as, in formal terms, the
transaction did not constitute a permanent transfer of an asset or a sale abroad.
This made the Swiss museums an extremely attractive option.
In return, the museums – as a result of the influx of flight goods during the
1930s, but especially during the Second World War – had access to a wealth of
exhibition material which was made available to them free of charge. During
the Second World War, when the movement of loaned artefacts became virtually
impossible in Europe, this opportunity to organise exhibitions gained tremendously
in importance. The Kunstmuseum Basel, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the
Kunstmuseum Winterthur alone obtained at least 1,000 paintings and
drawings in this way. Compared with the large number of Jewish-owned
deposits, very few non-Jewish collections were available. These included, for
example, the collection owned by the banker Baron von der Heydt, who had
relocated to Ascona as early as 1930. The figure of around 1,000 deposits is
doubled if the deposits by German artists and collectors who were persecuted
in the purge of «degenerate art» («Aktion Entartete Kunst») are included. On
average, from each of the larger collections (flight assets) deposited in museums,
one to two works were purchased for the museum concerned.
For the Jewish owners who wanted or were forced to sell off their works of art
item by item, the various exhibitions served as useful publicity. By being
displayed in public, the works of art were rated «museum worthy», which
encouraged sales, and they could be promoted to a wider public at the same
time. Often, the exhibitions were followed very quickly by the auctions held by
the Lucerne dealer and gallery-owner Theodor Fischer, who sold a substantial
proportion of these flight assets at his auctions. Between 1933 and 1947,
Fischer organised 47 auctions in total; most of the «emigrant auctions» took
place between 1939 and 1942. By the time the auction took place, most
emigrants had already left Switzerland. Often, the goods had to be offered at
follow-up actions with higher deductions for the auctioneer. Fischer also
purchased art at these auctions; indeed, he was the main buyer. Some of the
cultural assets disposed of through auction, direct resale or exchange found their
way back to Germany; there is documentary evidence of an exchange occurring
after the Lucerne auction of the Julius Freund collection in March 1942.
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