In 2009, soon after the fourth Indiana Jones film came out, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) awarded Harrison Ford with the Bandelier Award for Public Service in Archaeology.

In his speech, Ford expresses his gratitude to the AIA and for the work archaeologists are doing today to “understand and interpret the past to learn from it and enjoy a better future.” But he added, “it is quite disarming to see that the Indiana Jones films have been an inspiration to archaeologists.”

I was thinking about this speech while watching the previews for the latest Indiana Jones film, where Ford takes his last bow as Dr. Jones, the archaeology professor-cum-international treasure hunter. Three decades since 1930s-era Nazis sought to take over the world in Radars of the Lost Ark, they’re back in this fifth installment, The Dial of Destiny, set in the late 1960s, which finds them once more in pursuit of a powerful artifact (this time, a time-traveling device they can use to change the past).

Who better than Indy to save the world again? But if our now-aging hero is deservedly beloved for his penchant for punching Nazis (and his “healthy respect” for snakes), his own exploits also further what Ford recognizes as the dangers of archaeology as a tool of empire.

The real-life Nazis were, of course, infamous for coopting archaeological practices in service of the state. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi-sponsored archaeological digs took place throughout Europe and North Africa to further the racist ideology of the Third Reich and destroy or suppress any material that did not support their imperial doctrine.

One of the Third Reich’s primary endeavors in these expeditions was to find any evidence that would support the myth of an ancient Aryan race, the pseudoscientific theory first popularized in the 18th century by French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, among others, and operated as a central ideology of the Third Reich.

Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth, the head of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, one of the Nazi Party organizations tasked to appropriate and loot cultural property, was explicit about such an agenda:

German archaeology is for me … indigenous, blood-bound Germanic and Indo-Germanic prehistory. Our spadework has the preeminent goal …of illuminating our hitherto neglected indigenous prehistory. Anyone who opposes this effort … is a pernicious threat to the German people and should be fought accordingly.

Such expeditions were also intended to justify the state’s territorial aggression and expansion. For instance, after Hitler invaded Poland in 1940, Wolfram Sievers, the managing director of Ahnenerbe, another SS organization that sought to find evidence to justify Nazi racial superiority, had the idea of sending a representative to Poland to seize any material that would retroactively establish the Nazis’ right to the land and endorse the annexation.

But while the crimes of Nazi archaeology were numerous, as archaeologist Bettina Arnold warns in her study of race and archaeology in Nazi Germany, what the Third Reich was doing was neither a “uniquely German phenomenon nor something we can safely relegate to the past.”

Modern archaeologists are forever disavowing how the Indiana Jones franchise equates Indy’s treasure hunting to serious academic archaeology to distance the fictitious looter from their field. (There’s a great McSweeney’s list that jokes about the many… many reasons Dr. Jones would have been denied tenure as a professor in mid-20th century America.) But Indy’s wont of looting priceless artifacts is also part and parcel of the history of Western colonial plunder conducted under the auspices of archaeological research.

Even Jones’s creator, George Lucas, first described Indy as “a grave robber,” hired by museums “to steal things out of tombs and stuff.” And despite in-movie quips by Indy’s museum director friend in Radars of the Los Arc about how he’s sure that everything Dr. Jones acquired for his museum conformed to the fictional “International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities,” the museum was always more than happy to take the stolen goods Indy procured for it.

This story remains true to the real-life history of acquisitions, even following the landmark 1970 UNESCO convention that pioneered international return and restitution of cultural property.

“When I first entered the world of curators, it was the Wild West, ‘1970’ notwithstanding,” as Gary Vikan, a curator who came up in the 1980s, told the New York Times last year in an essay suggesting that the “Indiana Jones Era Is Over” for U.S. museums. “Curators and museum directors wanted to get important works,” Vikan continued. “You wanted to be the one that gets that icon, that sculpture, that bronze.”

While the repatriation movement to decolonize museums has continued to gain steam leading to the introduction of more legal protections for cultural property, from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects in 1995, countless national treasures—from the Benin Bronzes to the Elgin Marbles—remain separated from their countries of origin. As human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out in his 2019 book, Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure, “mighty ‘encyclopedic’ museums, like the Met and the British Museum” continue to “lock up their precious legacy of other lands, stolen from their people by wars of aggression, theft, and duplicity.”

The latest Indiana Jones movie, interestingly, takes place in 1969, just one year before the watershed 1970 UNESCO convention. But the ethics of looting were already established before Indy came up in the field, as evinced by British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s condemnation of the seizing of treasures from Maqdala in Northern Ethiopia in 1868. Addressing the House of Commons, he said he “deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army.” Going back all the way to 70 CE, Roman magistrate Gaius Verres was already being put on trial for plundering Greek temples during his reign as governor of Sicily.

Indiana Jones’ favorite lament—“That belongs in a museum!”—should ring hollow today. But though the Indy era may be ending at the box office, whether the “Indiana Jones Era” of museum practices is truly over, as the Times crowed, has yet to be seen. That same Times article also included musings by critics who bemoaned the loss of “treasures that showcase a country’s artistic brilliance from an international capital like Washington, where they are much seen, and send them to remote, uncertain settings.” (Whether they mean the metropolises of cities like Cairo, Lagos, and Santiago is unclear.)

It suggests there’s a ways to go before the chapter of pillage and plunder glorified by the Indiana Jones franchise fully closes. But with the new release debuting this holiday weekend, at least we can still enjoy Ford, now 80 years old, continuing to do what he does best: dodge snakes and perform the important public service act of punching Nazis.

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On September 8, 1943, Hans Heinrich Festersen was hanged at Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. Festersen, 35, had been arrested almost a year earlier, on October 12, 1942, for violating Paragraph 175, the German law prohibiting sex between men. He received his death sentence on July 13, 1943.

Though the Nazis had broadened the law and increased its severity, gay men were not usually killed for violating Paragraph 175. So, why was Hans Festersen killed, and how did his letters from prison to his sister Ruth Marie end up in a museum exhibit in Berlin today?

From January 1940 until August 1941, German “health courts” deemed 70,000 disabled persons to be “unworthy of life.” They were murdered in gas chambers as part of the Aktion T4 program. After the program officially ended and until the end of the war, 230,000 more people with disabilities, including infants, were killed by gas and other means, including starvation, medication overdose, and neglect.

Letter from Hans Heinrich Festersen to his sister, written at Plötzensee prison, December 14, 1942. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

Festersen, the son of noted ceramicist Friedrich Festersen, was physically disabled due to cerebral palsy. He used walking aids to get around. The police arrested him along with three other gay disabled men who had been living with Festersen at a Protestant institution for the unemployed and homeless.

Crucial to the case against the four men was the 1933 “Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals,” which allowed indefinite imprisonment and castration of sex offenders. But according to the memorial site at Plötzensee, by 1943 “wartime criminal laws allowed for death sentences for almost any criminal offense.”

The four gay disabled men’s trial records, as historian Andreas Pretzel reports, are filled with biases against, and misrepresentations of, both disability and being gay. The court’s judgment described Festersen and his co-defendants as being “mentally weak” and “not fully sane.” Their sexuality was deemed “unnatural fornication.” Pretzel concludes that their “death sentences were aimed at the destruction of life allegedly unworthy of life.” The phrase “life unworthy of life” was the term the Nazis used when deciding which of the disabled would be killed.

Ultimately, does it matter if Hans Heinrich Festersen was killed because he was gay or because he was disabled or because he was caught up in what the Plötzensee memorial site calls “a reign of judicial terror”?

I know firsthand the challenges of interpreting a life at the intersection of identities—I am both gay and disabled. I’ve written three books with my intersectionality as a focus. I’m also Jewish. Now, living in Berlin, I’ve too often been asked which of my identities is the “most difficult.”

I’m deeply interested in Hans Festersen’s story, which is at the center of “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the exhibit I curated on queer/disability history, activism, and culture, at the Schwules Museum in Berlin through January 30, 2023.

Disability arts and culture scholar Carrie Sandahl coined the phrase on which the exhibit’s title is based in a 2003 essay. “[S]exual minorities and people with disabilities,” she writes, “share a history of injustice: both have been pathologized by medicine; demonized by religion; discriminated against in housing, employment, and education; stereotyped in representation; victimized by hate groups; and isolated socially, often in their families of origin.”

Queer history and disability history, though similar, were not quite parallel. However, with the advent of eugenics, from the late 19th century into the 20th, these histories more often ran together, culminating most dangerously during the Nazi regime in Germany.

Hans Heinrich Festersen and his sister, Ruth Marie. Photo courtesy of the Schwules Museum.

It’s relatively easy to find information on the fates of Jewish people with disabilities under the Nazi Reich. But researching the history of those killed who were both queer and disabled is far more difficult. When I asked Petra Fuchs, an expert on Aktion T4 who worked on the T4 Memorial and Information Center for the Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program in Berlin, if she knew of any, she asked if I had found anyone.

So it was quite a surprise when Birgit Bosold, my co-curator and member of the board of directors at the Schwules Museum, shared with me a 2008 local newspaper article about a commemoration of the murders of Hans Festersen and the men arrested with him. The article alluded to the men being disabled, though it mainly focused on their sexuality and their life at the Protestant institution.

It was even more surprising when, a few weeks later, Birgit informed me that five letters Festersen wrote to his sister from Plötzensee were in the museum archive. In these intimate letters, Festersen talks about his future, wanting to end his “wandering around in institutions” by marrying a “slightly disabled classmate,” whom he calls “Miss Hanna.” In his last letter in the archive, dated May 22, 1943, he wonders if he’ll be sent for sterilization. His letters included rhymed poems for his young nephew, Peter, who, decades later, donated the letters to the museum.

Clearly, amid the most difficult circumstances, Festersen kept his humanity. And when we remember the history—the lives—of those who were both queer and disabled, we humanize those who are too often looked upon as doubly “other,” or whose intersectionality is not recognized or understood.

Many (most?) of us live at the intersection of more than one identity. Exploring the connections between our multiple identities provides a deeper understanding of how our intersectional lives are lived, as well as perceived.

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It may be difficult to appreciate the significance of a book drive held nearly 75 years ago. But this was no ordinary campaign. At the time, books—vehicles for new ideas—were being banned and burned in Europe by the German Army. As the Nazis swept through Europe—occupying Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark—restrictions were placed on the authors and titles that could be read in these conquered territories; books by American, British, and Jewish authors were outlawed. The most severe penalty for being caught with such contraband was death. This threatened punishment produced Germany’s desired effect: Strict compliance with the book bans was the norm.

With this threat across the Atlantic, Americans felt an urgent need to preserve books and all they symbolized. To spread this message, Hollywood celebrities, popular musicians, politicians, and military officials visited the New York Public Library in January 1942 to give speeches and performances that were broadcast nationwide over the radio. Katharine Hepburn, Chico Marx, Benny Goodman, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Wendell Willkie, and Danny Kaye were among the famous who visited the library. They stressed that the best defense against Germany’s war on books was to do the opposite: read and spread information. And so books became a sort of weapon in the war—fighting ignorance, censorship, and boredom.

In 1942, the New York Public Library stressed that the best defense against Germany’s war on books was to do the opposite: read and spread information.

 
The Victory Book Campaigns of 1942 and 1943 enlisted ordinary Americans and their favorite books. Librarians across the United States scattered giant bins in stores, movie theaters, train stations, schools, and other public spaces to collect “Victory Books” for those serving in the Army and Navy. In 1942, 10 million books were collected by the Victory Book Campaign, making it the largest book drive in the world. Another 8 million books were collected the following year.

Most of the donations were hardcover books, a reflection of the American book industry at the time. The majority of American publishers refused to enter the paperback trade, fearful that 25-cent softcovers would ruin the handsome profit margins they earned from hardcover sales. The donated hardcovers were fine for stationary Army camps in the United States and aboard Naval ships, where soldiers did not need to carry all of their belongings on long marches or into battle. When Americans shipped out to North Africa in 1942, they brought Victory Books to pass the long weeks spent sailing to their destination. Lacking any other entertainment, most tucked books into their packs and carried them into the invasion and beyond. But, long marches with aching backs and blistered feet caused many to whittle down the possessions they carried; heavy hardcovers were reluctantly tossed.

American publishers heard of the insatiable demand for books overseas and the plight of the ill-suited hardcovers. They banded together to create books specially designed for American sailors and troops. Scrapping the hardcover, using lightweight paper akin to newsprint, reducing page margins, eliminating blank pages, and shrinking the size of books to as small as 3.5 by 5.5 inches, publishers created volumes sized to fit the pockets of uniforms. These miniature paperbacks were called “Armed Services Editions,” and were sold to the military at cost; they were distributed, free of charge, to Americans serving overseas. Westerns, sports stories, histories, bestsellers, fiction, nonfiction, short stories, books of humor, and poetry—the range of subjects ran the gamut. Soldiers devoured them. Creased covers, loose pages, taped bindings, and dog-eared pages were evidence of their popularity. No matter how worn, the books were passed from one GI to the next. According to one soldier, “To heave one in the garbage is tantamount to striking your grandmother.”

Homesick and lonesome soldiers found solace in books. Surprisingly, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the most popular of them all, despite being a coming-of-age tale from the perspective of Francie Nolan, a young girl. Troops related to Francie’s difficult upbringing, her discovery of comfort and escape in books, and her resolve to beat the odds and achieve her dream of going to college. Smith received over 10,000 letters of gratitude from Americans in uniform. In one letter, a marine described watching his friend’s final moments of life and said a part of him died with his friend. However, two years later, Smith’s book transformed him and his heart “turned over and became alive again.” Another man wrote Smith that her book inspired him during difficult battles, and that he and his wife vowed to name their first-born daughter “Betty Smith,” to honor the author who helped him survive war.

Surprisingly, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the most popular novel among American soldiers.

 
Other books were appreciated for their ability to amuse. Leo Rosten, author of The Education of Hyman Kaplan, received a letter of praise from a unit stationed in the Persian Gulf, whose only other entertainment was “a ping-pong set—with one paddle only.” Rosten’s humorous tales became the hottest commodity on the post; the men assembled each night by campfire and “roared” with laughter as they read one Kaplan story per day—it was their “ration on pleasure.”

Publishers received letters suggesting future titles to be printed. One man explained that the books that were in the highest demand had “at least an essence of—to put it bluntly—sex and a lot of it.” He asked for Forever Amber, Strange Fruit, and Tiffany Thayer’s The Three Musketeers, as they were all endowed with that quality. One man wrote: “For days, I’ve been hunting through our service club, bothering the Red Cross, scanning our library shelves and hunting unrelentlessly through the barracks—for what????” He desperately wanted a copy of H. Allen Smith’s Low Man on a Totem Pole, a popular book of humor. Another soldier summed up the success of the publishers’ Armed Services Editions: “You have no idea how many hours of pleasure your books give to us.”

The German Army, by V-E Day, had burned an estimated 100 million books and destroyed hundreds of libraries, institutes, and rare book collections across Europe. By contrast, American librarians and publishers distributed over 140 million Victory Books and Armed Services Editions to those serving in the U.S. Army and Navy. These books made a lasting impact on the Americans who read them. Thanks to the Armed Services Editions, 12 million veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for paperbacks. Demand was so high that publishers could not ignore this new market. A scant 200,000 paperbacks were printed in the United States in 1939; a staggering 95 million paperbacks were printed in 1947. Publishers realized they could earn a profit off paperbacks after all. In doing so, they printed books that attracted a larger audience of book readers than expensive hardcovers could.

A soldier enjoys a paperback in a flooded camp.

 
Besides revolutionizing the book industry, the provision of books to those in the armed forces also changed attitudes towards higher education. Before the war, most Americans did not dream of going to college; expensive tuition made it a financial impossibility. However, the passage of the GI Bill, which promised a free education on the government’s dime, coupled with a newfound interest in books and learning led many veterans to consider returning to school. After all, they had proven to themselves that they enjoyed the scholarly activity of reading even under the stresses of war. Over 2 million Americans pursued an education under the GI Bill.

The next time you see a tattered paperback, think of the millions of Americans in uniform who cherished them while at war. These Americans not only fought and won a military victory against the Axis powers; the reading habit they gained led to the democratization of higher education and access to books at home.

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All of this must seem like a dream come true for publicists of George Clooney’s upcoming film, The Monuments Men, about the motley Allied crew charged with rescuing art from the Nazis during World War II. But many people were surprised by the flood of revelations, wondering: How can there still be so much stolen art at large 70 years after the war?

For decades, the keepers of Nazi-looted art have been playing hide-and-seek with the world, biding their time until various statues of limitations lapse. They have hidden behind archaic laws that complicate the return of looted works of art to their rightful owners—or they have simply refused to investigate red flags that suggest a dubious provenance for a work in their collection.

A 1997 study estimated that some 100,000 stolen pieces of art were still missing. Newspaper reporters were beginning to investigate the Nazi provenance of prominent art works on their own, embroiling museums in scandal.

In 1998, 44 nations met in Washington, D.C. and agreed to make efforts to find and publicly identify art that might be Nazi loot, and to find a “fair and just solution” for restitution. The agreement called for a central registry of suspect art, open to researchers. The pact was nonbinding, a collective moral pledge to transparency and justice.

Hundreds of artworks have been returned since 1998. But there has been no stampede of museums, auction houses, and collectors eager to comply with the still-unfulfilled commitment to create a central public registry. In much of Europe, laws still tolerate the “gray market” for stolen art. When a family spotted two paintings belonging to them in an auction catalogue in Germany recently, the anonymous sellers simply withdrew the works from sale and disappeared.

However, our hyper-viral media landscape has revealed the discreet shenanigans of the art world to a larger and far less tolerant audience. Social media is shaking up the issue, bringing long-overdue claims into the open—and showing there is a long way to go in complying with the moral obligations of restitution.

Take the case of the paintings and drawings stored in Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment, an astounding cache of more than 1,400 works by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Munch, and Cezanne, some of them reportedly stashed between the canned food in his pantry. From the moment the story of this art cache and its Nazi ties broke in the press in November, it went viral on Facebook and Twitter, sweeping across time zones and diverting attention from celebrity news.

Gurlitt’s artworks were acquired by his father, an art dealer named Hildebrand Gurlitt. Some of that work was pulled down from the walls of German museums in the late ’30s after being deemed “degenerate art”—modern art that Hitler viewed as not projecting Germanic values. Some of the paintings in his cabinet probably belonged to Jewish families.

After the war, Gurlitt repackaged himself—as many did—to deflect accusations of Nazi collaboration. He cast himself as a persecuted victim, claiming that he was dismissed as a museum director because of a Jewish grandmother, and that he lost his livelihood when the modern art he built his business on was deemed “degenerate.” The reality was more complicated: He was employed by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry to help sell “degenerate” paintings seized from museums, as well as other pieces of art confiscated from Jewish families. He was elevated to a position as curator for the “Führermuseum” in Linz, which Hitler intended to be the cultural crown jewel of the Reich.

In the confusion after the war, the real-life Monuments Men returned some of the art they confiscated from Gurlitt. That artwork was inherited by his son, Cornelius, and put in his closet. The drawings and paintings remained there for decades, though Gurlitt sold pieces occasionally for living expenses. German authorities found the art in March 2012 while investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion but remained silent about the discovery until a German magazine, Focus, broke the news in early November 2013.

It became clear that Germany was woefully unprepared to handle the firestorm that ensued. Bavarian authorities told an astonished public that they may have to return the stolen art to Gurlitt because the 30-year criminal statute on theft has expired. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for this statute to be overruled and for such cases to be considered theft in the service of genocide, under the Nuremberg War Crimes framework.

Another curious legalistic impediment to justice cited by German authorities in the Gurlitt case is a 1938 Nazi-era law that is still on the books and provides for the legal seizure of so-called “degenerate art.” Germany should follow the example of post-war Austria and France, which passed laws declaring Nazi-era legal transactions “null and void.”

Restitution is not only judged in a court of law, but also in the court of public opinion, according to Stuart Eizenstat, an expert in Holocaust reparations. In an age of social media, these cases are playing out before a packed courtroom on Twitter, Facebook, and other websites. The rise of social media is amplifying restitution claims that got their first real hearing in the press.

Since the passage of a 1998 art restitution law, Austrian state museums have been forced to return a dozen masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, the country’s most famous painter. Klimt’s most significant portrait models, collectors, and patrons were Jewish modernists from the same milieu that supported psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and other distinguished pioneers of turn-of-century Vienna. When the Nazis arrived in Vienna, they seized Klimt works and persecuted the artist’s Jewish patrons. This set the stage for a seemingly endless stream of contemporary claims that hit the media in the 1990s and continue to this day. Each ugly episode revealed an ugly story.

When a Vienna portrait show opened at London’s National Gallery in September, some people called for the seizure of its premier Klimt portrait of a bare-shouldered Amalie Zuckerkandl, who was murdered with her daughter in a concentration camp. The painting is in the permanent collection of Austria’s national art museum, which claims it has a clean bequest from an art dealer. But Los Angeles art restitution attorney Randol Schoenberg called for the painting to be held in London while the merits of the claim were considered.

In late October, the director of Austria’s Leopold Museum, Tobias Natter, resigned after just two years on the job after a member of his staff joined a new Klimt Foundation to showcase Klimt—and his illegitimate son, the late Gustav Ucicky, a Nazi propaganda filmmaker and art collector. “Ucicky collected in the Nazi era,” Natter told Bloomberg. “Why do we have to get into bed with these people?”

The Klimt Foundation is in discussions with the heirs of Gertrude Loew, whose ethereal 1902 Klimt portrait is among the four paintings and 10 drawings in the Foundation’s collection. The family said the painting was left with a baroness friend for safekeeping when they fled Austria. It is unclear exactly how it ended up with Ucicky, although top Nazis helped him to collect paintings by his late father—some of which had been stolen from Jewish families.

The Klimt Foundation is silent about the fate of another painting that Gustav Ucicky owned, “Water Snakes II.” The painting of sinuous floating women was confiscated in 1938 from Jenny Steiner, a Jewish cousin of Joseph Pulitzer. In 1940, when the painting was about to be sold at auction, Vienna’s Nazi governor intervened so that Ucicky could buy it.

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported in September that Ucicky’s widow, Ursula, had sold “Water Snakes II” to Qatari royals for as much as $120 million. Some of the proceeds went to Steiner’s heirs—and the rest went to Ursula Ucicky, who was setting up the Klimt Foundation and might need to reach a settlement over the portrait of Gertrude Loew, according to Der Standard. No one—including Sotheby’s, which was reported to have brokered the sale—has commented.

There is a good reason for the silence. If this is all true, a foundation for Austria’s finest painter, created with the help of proceeds from Nazi loot, is an outrage that would not be lost on the public. These kinds of messy details are one reason that authorities are reluctant to open the files on collections like the Gurlitt hoard: They know it won’t be pretty.

Yet the ongoing Nazi art theft debacle in Munich may prove to be a “teachable moment,” in the words of Holocaust restitution expert Marc Masurovsky. The whole world is watching. It is still possible for Germany to confront this moral challenge with grace—and set a dignified example for other countries that may be forced to confront belated Nazi art theft restitutions of their own.

The post That Matisse in the Pantry? The Nazis Stole It. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.