Baldin Collection
The ensemble consists of 362 drawings and two paintings by Dürer, van Gogh, Manet, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and other famous artists.
Historically part of the collection at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Baldin group came from a much larger cache of artworks stored by the Germans in a Brandenburg castle to protect it from air raids.
For decades he appealed to senior officials, including Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, to get them returned to Germany.
Today the Collection has been called "of singular importance to the entire issue of trophy art" by the Russians[4] and a "cause célèbre of German-Russian Restitution Politics" by those who support its return.
A set of 50 paintings, 1715 drawings and 3000 prints were moved to Schloss Karnzow, the hunting lodge of Count von Königsmarck, near the small town of Kyritz north of Berlin in the Province of Brandenburg.
[5] Victor Baldin, an Army captain and combat engineer, found opened boxes in the cellar, saw documents trampled on the floor, and observed soldiers lighting their way by using burning papers.
In the late 1990s, eight disputed drawings, including the world-famous Frauenbad ("Women's Bathhouse") by Albrecht Dürer, were seized by United States Customs in an incident of black market trading.
[citation needed] However, that same year nationalist elements in the Russian government hurriedly transferred the collection to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in a cover-up attempt.
[14] In 2000, a group of 101 pieces from another part of Baldin's brigade, including Albrecht Duerers' 1494 watercolor View of a Rock Castle by a River, were returned to the Kunsthalle by Russia.
"[16] The potential return of the collection to Germany began to face increasing opposition from Russian nationalist leaders, including Communist legislator and former Minister of Culture of the USSR, Nikolai Gubenko.
[10] The State Duma, which included Gubenko as a member,[9] passed a non-binding resolution on 12 March 2003 asking President Vladimir Putin to prevent the Ministry of Culture from returning the Baldin Collection.
[17] Russian Minister of Culture, Mikhail Shvydkoy, opposed these moves to keep the collection in Russia; he regarded it as illegal loot based on a 1998 law that protected only those artworks from World War II taken by official Soviet trophy brigades and not private citizens.
[18] Shvydkoy and the German Minister of Culture, Christina Weiss, even signed an agreement that 20 pieces of the Baldin ensemble could remain in Russia.
[19] Shvydkoy later received an official reprimand and was threatened by deputy prosecutor Vladimir Kolsenikov with criminal charges if he attempted to return the rest of the collection to Germany.
[11] In 2005 Aleksandr Sergeyevich Sokolov, Russia's new Minister of Culture, then contradicted previous promises and stated that he opposed the return of the Baldin collection to Germany.
