61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

under duress to be between 50 and 100 million Swiss francs. 120 However, by
1952 less than one million Swiss francs had been returned.
6.6 Restitution of Looted Cultural Goods
The entire restitution process in the range of cultural assets was confined to
those objects stipulated by the British art protection officer Douglas Cooper and
placed on a list of 75 items (later increased to 77) which was officially handed
over to the Swiss authorities by the three Western powers in October 1945.
Nineteen objects were originally British-owned, one Dutch-owned, and the
remainder French-owned. With his records, Cooper laid the foundations for
Swiss restitutions after 1945. In view of the evidence available, the implementation
of a «Decree on Looted Assets» could no longer be avoided. The Swiss
Federal Council, however, saw no reason to order a search for further looted
pieces of art on its own initiative. After the war, not a single work was restituted
that had not already been tracked down by Cooper. Moreover, the efforts of the
French art dealer Paul Rosenberg show that in view of the inactivity of the Swiss
authorities, claimants started to act on their own but with the risk that out-ofcourt
settlements would bypass the test cases which the Allies had been striving
for. The Swiss authorities would also have preferred to settle even the major
looted art case involving the Gallerie Fischer «amicably». The Swiss Bankers
Association did not want individual banks to be burdened with conducting
their own investigations, it wanted to wait for concrete enquiries or claims from
abroad:
«The contents of closed deposits are not known to the banks. What is
inside a bank’s vaults is generally packed and sealed, with the result that it
is not possible to provide the accurate description of the item that is
required. Also, bank officials would hardly be suitable for drawing up this
kind of inventory.» 121
As could be expected, the late deployment of the banks’ own clarifications had
an effect on the results of the investigations. In a letter to the Federal Political
Department dated 22 July 1946, the Swiss Clearing Office wrote that it was
quite possible not only for documents but also for objects to have disappeared
from 1943 onwards, especially once Cooper and Rosenberg had begun their
search for looted art in 1945. Objects could be sold abroad illegally, withdrawn
from exhibitions, and hidden in bank safes. The Clearing Office, for example,
had not started its investigations into looted art at the Galerie Fischer until early
472