East Germany's Blood Art: No Justice for Victims of Regime's Treasure Hunt

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/how-east-germany-robbed-collectors-of-their-art-a-982739.html



East German officials systematically stole from the country's art collectors and sold their possessions to raise hard currency. Families have sought for years to reclaim the treasures or to obtain compensation. In a rare success, one family in America recently retrieved some of its heirlooms.

East Germany's Blood Art: No Justice for Victims of Regime's Treasure Hunt
By Rainer Erices, Nicola Kuhrt and Peter Wensierski
July 24, 2014 – 05:39 PM

They showed up outside the apartment at 6 a.m. More than a dozen people, including agents from East Germany's feared secret police, the Stasi, tax officials, police officers and public prosecutors, presented the East Berlin doctor and art collector Peter Garcke with a search warrant on suspicion of tax evasion. Seconds later, the men marched through his flat, examining the antique furniture Garcke had in his living room and bedroom. Then, they took him away.

His apartment was completely emptied. "The looting was so extensive that they poured the sugar out of the tin sugar dispenser and removed flowers from the vases. They even took travel souvenirs and small gifts," his wife Rita recalls. "They didn't even leave me a chair to sit on." After that gray February morning in 1978, Rita Garcke never saw her husband again.

"Visit me, visit me! Try everything!" he wrote her from prison. But not long later, she received word of his death, though the cause wasn't included. On April 7, 1978, a Stasi file notes, Peter Gaucke died during pre-trial custody in Berlin's Keibelstrasse, "detention room 235." He allegedly took his own life: "Strangulation in bed" by way of "pajama bottoms twisted together," is how the Stasi described the incident.

Targeting Art Aficionados

It is a particularly ugly chapter in the history of communist East Germany (GDR). Political functionaries from the Communist Party, the SED, seized the property of collectors like Peter Garcke to sell their possessions. The more desperately the country needed hard Western currency, the more often officials targeted East German art aficionados.