61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Nathan family, had managed to escape from persecution to Switzerland,
contacted Nathan and they both agreed to donate the painting «as a grateful
reminder of the warm welcome their families received in Switzerland during the
Nazi regime». As Dauberville was closer to the collection in the Kunstmuseum
Basel and Nathan to the one in St. Gallen, these two collections each became
fifty-fifty owners; the painting is exhibited alternately in Basel and in St. Gallen
on a two-year rota. 146
Two further cases are pending, following a problematic change of ownership.
The first case concerns Wassily Kandinsky’s «Improvisation No. 10»,
bequeathed by Sophie Küppers to the Hanover Kunsthalle, confiscated by the
Nazi regime in 1937, acquired by the art dealer Ferdinand Möller in 1939, sold
to Ernst Beyeler in about 1952, who immediately sold it on to a buyer in
Winterthur but bought it back again in 1955 and is now faced with a restitution
claim from Küpper’s son, Jen Lissitzky, and a corresponding action
brought in the Civil Court in Basel. The second case, Ferdinand Hodler’s
«Stockhornkette am Thunersee» also comes from the Silberberg collection, was
auctioned by Graupe in Berlin in 1935, and was presumably brought to
Switzerland via Fritz Nathan. Around 1945, Bern Professor of Medicine
Berhard Walthard bought the painting, thinking it came from the A. Sutter
collection in Oberhofen. In 1985, it showed up in an auction at Bern’s Galerie
Kornfeld and was bought in good faith by Simon Frick, (former) cantonal
government member in St. Gallen.
Even though it is extremely difficult to provide a complete compilation of
provenance especially for the 1930s and 1940s as written documentation is
often lacking or incomplete, the efforts of many museums abroad were
nonetheless successful. It would be very desirable if in Switzerland too, the
forced dissolution of Jewish collections were no longer ignored in the future and
if investigations were conducted into public and private holdings. The results
of such investigations should also be made public.
6.7 Camouflage Operations and Restitution Claims
The camouflaging of companies by the Germans – with the aid of Swiss partners
– when the war broke out or shortly beforehand constituted a conflict-prone
form of transfer of ownership in terms of property law. This was due, on the one
hand, to the complicated structure of many such companies, with whose help the
internationally diversified foreign holdings of German parent companies had
been transferred to new Swiss owners or to seemingly «Swissified» holding
companies. This was compounded by the fundamental ambivalence of the
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