Looted art

Henry Wager Halleck, a United States Army officer, scholar, and lawyer argued: "No belligerent would be justifiable in destroying temples, tombs, statutes [sic], paintings, or other works of art (except so far as their destruction may be the accidental or necessary result of military operations.)

[20] Some believe that this has been done to 'Turkify' the northern region of the country and erase the characteristics of the Cypriot predecessors, while people like Aydin Dikmen have been working to make money off of cultural heritage artifacts by selling them in international markets.

[22] Also in one of the residences, the authorities found drawings containing information on how to cut out mosaics to keep the faces of the religious figures intact, while still taking the piece away from the original space; this shows how systematic and planned out the looting of the churches and monasteries was for Dikmen and his associates in the northern part of Cyprus.

[16][22] The organization and the intense planning involved brings up the issue of possible aid coming from Turkish authorities in the northern part of Cyprus; there are rumors that the government and military knew about the looting and chose to not do anything about it.

Other estimates focus on German artworks and cultural treasures supposedly secured against bombing in safe places that were looted after World War II, detailing 200,000 works of art, three kilometers of archival material and three million books.

The Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenni Voennyi Arkhiv- RGVA) still contains a large number of files of foreign origin, including papers relating to Jewish organisations.

British troops and the Naval War Trophies Committee also looted artworks from Germany, including several pictures by marine artist Claus Bergen ("Wreath in the North Sea in Memory of the Battle of Jutland", "The Commander U-boat", "Admiral Hipper's Battle Cruiser at Jutland" and "The German Pocket Battleship Admiral Von Scheer Bombarding the Spanish Coast"), Carl Saltzmann ("German Fleet Manoeuvres on the High Seas") and Ehrhard ("Before the Hurricane at Apia Samoa" and "During the Hurricane at Apia").

"[59] At the 1998 conference, Eizenstat was "impressed ... almost overwhelmed" when Boris Yeltsin's government promised "to identify and return art that was looted by the Nazis and then plundered by Stalin's troops as 'reparations' for Germany's wartime assault.

[62] Following the law adopted by the State Duma on 17 April 2002, the Hermitage Museum returned to Frankfurt an der Oder the looted medieval stained-glass windows of the Marienkirche; six of the 117 individual pieces, however, still remain missing.

He was a military intelligence officer of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Georgy Zhukov, participated in the interrogation of German Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus, and translated the message confirming Adolf Hitler's death for Stalin.

Bezymenski brought the looted collection of the Führer's favourite discs to Moscow, where he felt "guilty about his larceny and hid the records in an attic, where his daughter, Alexandra Besymenskaja, discovered them by accident in 1991.

In another high-profile case, Viktor Baldin, a Soviet army captain in World War II and later directed the Shchusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow, took 362 drawings and two small paintings on 29 May 1945 from Karnzow Castle in Brandenburg which had been stored there by the Kunsthalle Bremen.

[85] One of the most valuable artifacts looted during the plunder of the National Museum of Iraq, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was recovered in the United States with the help of Hicham Aboutaam, an art dealer in New York.

A significant number of Met and Getty acquisitions over a period of at least 40 years were everntually shown to have been sourced from a major international illegal antiquities trading network that centred on Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici.

From the late 1960s, Medici rose to become the central figure in a large criminal conspiracy, acting as the middleman between gangs of tombaroli (tomb robbers) - who systematically looted tens of thousands of important artefacts from Italian and other Mediterranean archaeological sites, as well as stealing objects from museums, churches and private collections - and an elite group of American and British dealers who helped Medici to "launder" his contraband and sell it to major buyers like the Met, the Getty and leading American private collectors.

TPC investigations also revealed that Medici used front companies to anonymously sell and then buy back many items, often multiple times, in order to manipulate the market, as well as allowing him to acquire the all-important Sotheby's provenances.

According to the New York Times, the case, "of its kind, perhaps second only to the dispute between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin marbles," "became emblematic of the ethical questions surrounding the acquisition of ancient art by major museums.

He estimates that the overall monetary value of looted art, including Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, West Africa, Central America, Peru, and China, is at least four times the Italian figure.

In 2005 Marion True, former curator of the Getty Museum, and art dealer Robert E. Hecht were placed on trial in Rome; Italy accused them of buying and trafficking stolen and illicit artworks (including the Aphrodite statue).

[110] In 1997, Giacomo Medici was arrested; his operation is believed to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market.

[122] In 1992, a report in The Christian Science Monitor described art experts' concerns about a "rampant degradation of archeological sites and an accelerating trade in stolen artifacts sweeping Southeast Asia" as a consequence of war in Cambodia and instability in the region.

[123] Statues were being stripped from Angkor Wat and other sites by smuggling rings often working in collusion with military and political officials, including a major network in Chiang Mai run by a former government minister.

The museum's director said, "Our research revealed a very real likelihood that it was removed from a site enormously important to the kingdom of Cambodia during a terrible time and its return was completely consistent with the highest legal and fiduciary standards.

[citation needed] Roger Atwood writes in Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World: "Mayan stonework became one of those things that good art museums in America just had to have, and looters in the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala worked overtime to meet the demand.

According to one scholar, the looting of artifacts for "both personal and institutional reasons" became "increasingly important in the process of "othering" Oriental and African societies and was exemplified in the professionalism of exploration and the growth of ethnographic departments in museums, the new 'temples of Empire'."

[160] During World War II, the Nazis set up special departments "for a limited time for the seizure and securing of objects of cultural value",[161] especially in the Occupied Eastern Territories, including the Baltic states, Ukraine, Hungary and Greece.

The legal framework and the language of the instructions used by Germany resembles the Lieber Code, but in the Nuremberg Trial proceedings, the victorious Allied armies applied different standards and sentenced the Nazis involved as war criminals.

One example of such a case study can be provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's reputation which has experienced a series of allegations and lawsuits about its status as an occasional institutional buyer of looted and stolen antiquities.

[175] In the late 1990s, long-running investigations by the Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale (TPC), the art crimes division of the Italian Carabinieri, accused the Metropolitan Museum of acquiring "black market" antiquities.

[179] After a six-year legal battle that reportedly cost the Turkish government UK£25 million[180] the case ended dramatically after it was revealed that the minutes of the Met's own acquisition committee described how a curator had actually visited the looted burial mounds in Turkey to confirm the authenticity of the objects.