The War Over Plunder: Who Owns Art Stolen in War?

... The Swedish queen Christina wanted it all. On her orders, 500 paintings, 370 scientific instruments, 70 bronze statues, thousands of jewels, medals, and curios, and the live lion were loaded onto barges and shipped to Sweden. But most of all she wanted the books. "Do not forget to procure and send me the library and the rarities there in Prague," she told her military commanders. "These, as you know, are all I really care about." The Thirty Years War was all about plunder, and Christina wanted to get one last shipment in before the peace treaty was signed.

Fast-forward 362 years and the Silver Bible is still in Sweden (despite a brief sojourn to the Netherlands in the late 17th century), the most prized volume in the collections of the University of Uppsala and, indeed, the most valuable book in all of Sweden.

And the Czechs want it back.

After the collapse of communism, Czech president Vaclav Havel tried to persuade Sweden to return the Silver Bible and several other objects taken from Bohemia during the Thirty Years War. He was refused, leaving the Czechs despondent. As the director of the Czech National Library later put it, "If Vaclav Havel did not succeed then no one will succeed." Sweden has allowed another manuscript seized from Prague—the Devil's Bible, or Codex Gigas—to be exhibited in the Czech Republic, but has made it clear that the books and everything else their armies seized now belong to them.

Over the past two decades, globalization, changing attitudes, and the spread of both international law and civil lawsuits have emboldened aggrieved nations to demand the return of cultural property seized by enemy forces decades or even centuries ago, and a few holders of these spoils have complied. Five years ago, Japan returned a Korean monument on the centennial of its theft during the Russo-Japanese War; three years before that, Italy returned a 3,000-year-old obelisk taken during Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia.

But more often than not, the plunder has remained with the plunderer, despite near universal condemnation of the practice by some current belligerents. The Swiss canton of St. Gallen lobbied for years to force Zurich canton to return a 16th-century wooden globe seized in a 1712 invasion, but in 2006 had to settle for a replica. Sweden, which hasn't fought a war in two centuries, has been under pressure to return looted cultural items not only to the Czechs but also to Poland, Denmark, Norway, and even its own region of Skåne, which it seized from the Danes in 1658. (As one blogger puts it: "It cannot be acceptable that I should have to take my grandchild in the hand, travel 650 kilometers to [the Swedish town of] Skokloster in order to see and experience our own Scanian history and culture.")

Meanwhile, Germany has been angrily insisting that Russia return a vast trove of art looted at the end of World War II, even as Poland demands billions in compensation for cultural artifacts stolen or destroyed during the Nazi occupation.

Returning plunder to its rightful owner may sound straightforward, but in practice it is extremely difficult, particularly for objects seized in the distant past. Who the "rightful" owner is seems to depend largely on your point of view. After all, for much of human history, armies plundered the vanquished as a matter of course and sometimes went to war solely to do so. Well into the 17th century, armies survived by stealing crops, livestock, and other civilian property, their soldiers pilfering valuables in lieu of a proper salary or disability benefit. Virtually every belligerent participated, causing particular treasures to change hands over and over again, the original "owner" sometimes having been forgotten altogether, occasionally because their civilization had ceased to exist. Spanish conquistadors seized shiploads of Aztec gold artifacts that are now scattered in museums around the world, while European powers and American armies absconded with the cultural heritage of numerous African and Native American peoples by force of arms. In some cases, it is difficult or impossible to establish who would be a legitimate inheritor of these objects, even if the present owners agreed to return them.

Determining the legitimate owner of something as old as the Silver Bible can be a futile task. The Ostrogoths who created it died out centuries ago, and the Czechs weren't in control of Prague when the Swedes arrived in 1648, the city being part of the now extinct Holy Roman Empire. Sure, the bible belonged to German-speaking emperors for 60 years, but nobody knows how they extracted it from the Benedictines. The Swedes have at this point possessed the book six times longer than anyone in Prague ever did, so it is not surprising that they don't feel compelled to hand it over.

The fact is, there is no legal or customary basis to demand the return of anything plundered prior to the turn of the 20th century. Doing so successfully is ultimately a matter of public relations, of convincing whoever possesses the object that giving it back is the right thing to do.

"There's no source of international law that clearly goes back before the late 19th century, and there's no [international] statute of limitations that would get you back to the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries," says Patty Gerstenblith, director of the Center for Art, Mu­seum, and Cultural Heritage Law at the DePaul University College of Law. "There are examples of things being returned from long ago, but they were done on a cooperative or moral basis, not a legal one."

Indeed, moral campaigns can succeed, even when the law is fixed against them. Take the case of the ghost shirt of Glasgow. The sandy brown tunic adorned with eagle feathers was a magical object created in the 19th century by the Lakota (or Sioux) Indians and worn by followers of the Ghost Dance religion. Lakota Ghost Dancers believed the ghost shirts would make them invulnerable to Western weaponry, which, unfortunately for them, was not the case. On December 29, 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry ambushed a band of Lakotas at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, killing between 150 and 300, including women, children, and Ghost Dancers. (The army lost 25 men, most to friendly fire.) The bodies were looted and piled into mass graves. One of the plundered ghost shirts was acquired a month or so later by George Crager, a Lakota-speaking adventurer and journalist, who took it with him when he joined William "Wild Bill" Cody's traveling Wild West Show as a translator for Indian performers. While on tour in Scotland in 1892, Crager donated the bloodstained ghost shirt to the city of Glasgow, where officials placed it in their museum.

A century later, an American tourist of Cherokee descent came across the museum exhibit and was stunned to find something "stolen from a dead body at Wounded Knee." The tourist contacted the Lakota, who were amazed to learn that a ghost shirt from the famous massacre had survived, and began a tenacious letter-writing campaign to have it returned to their reservation. Glasgow's city council was adamant that the celebrated artifact should stay put, its case backed up by a recently passed British law declaring all museum artifacts in the United Kingdom to be British property.

The Lakota had no legal footing, but they sent delegations of tribal members to Glasgow who performed solemn ceremonies to bless the shirt and took their case to the local media. Letters poured in to the museum and to newspapers expressing overwhelming support for the shirt to be returned. The Lakota's tragic story, introduced to the Scots by the wildly successful 1990 film Dances with Wolves, struck a chord in a nation that had itself been brutally subjugated by a more industrialized neighbor. "We as a nation have witnessed our own culture being ravaged and treated with disrespect and contempt," one writer declared. "The shirt should be handed back immediately." When the Lakota delegations returned to city hall in 1998, the city did just that. The ghost shirt is now being held at the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre until the Lakota complete a museum to house it. ...

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