Royally Good

From the BBC:
"Dutch royal family to return Nazi looted art"

The Dutch royal family has said it will return a painting from its collection thought to have been looted by the Nazis during World War Two.  The painting, by Joris van der Haagen, had been bought by Queen Juliana from a Dutch art dealer in 1960.  The palace said an investigation looked at tens of thousands of art works in the House of Orange's collection.  Officials have contacted the heirs of the original owner, who was not named, to arrange its return. "A Jewish collector was forced in 1942 to hand over the painting Haagse Bos with view over Huis Ten Bosch Palace by Joris van der Haagen to the (Nazi) bank Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co in Amsterdam," said the report, which was commissioned by the palace in 2012. It said after the war and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands "the painting ended up with a Dutch art dealer where queen Juliana bought it in 1960 without knowing about its history." No further details were given, due to privacy concerns. The inquiry ruled that another painting in the collection, Landscape with St Hubert, whose provenance had been questioned, was not stolen.

 

 

^ The fact that the palace itself started the investigation and is now going to give up one of their legally acquired paintings shows just how the great the Dutch Royal Family is. Survivors and their families have often had to fight decades to have the chance of getting their stolen property back and that is just plain wrong. If a thief comes into your house and takes your TV and the police find that TV then they give it back. Its the same principle here. If the Nazis or their collaborators took any of your property (ie a paining, house, etc) and there's evidence that shows true ownership then it is only legal for that item to be returned to the person it was taken to or their descendants. There are many instances (throughout Europe) of people coming back from concentration camps, death camps, ghettos, labor camps, etc only to not be legally allowed to reclaim their house, apartment, personal items, etc. That makes the local authorities just as guilty as what the Nazis did. That happened to people in the Netherlands too and its good to see that things have changed in Dutch society and the true sign of that change is the Royal Family aiding in this. There is still a huge fight going on around Europe and the rest of the world with the majority of people (especially the Swiss) fighting tooth-and-nail to not give back items that are known to have been stolen by the Nazis and that is a sad point to acknowledge with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War 2 this year. ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32135127