On 10 November 2011, the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (the Central Library of Berlin) published a list of the rightful owners of looted books in its collection identified through signatures, stamps, inscriptions and notes found in the books - all of which have been photographed by the Library. Names in the books include those of the rightful owners, also the names of donors dedications, previous owners from the period before 1933, and, in some cases, the names of the Nazi perpetrators. While many of the books were forcibly stolen by the agencies of the Third Reich or were taken as a result of discriminatory laws, others had to be sold by the persecuted either for their flight or to allow them to survive.A minimum number of 1,920 of the books were acquired by the Library in 1943 from the municipal pawnship and these come exclusively from the private collections of the Jews of Berlin who were deported and murdered. The Library is seeking the rightful owners to that they can return the books to them. The names are searchable on this site. Click here for all details.

Konrad Roethel at the Central Collecting Point Munich 1949

Taken by the Munich-born photographer Johannes Felbermeyer, more than 1,100 prints and negatives record the repatriation of art after World War II, depicting those involved in the process- art-historical and military figures including Edgar Breitenbach, General Lucius D. Clay, Charles Parkhurst, Rodolfo Siviero, and Craig Hugh Smyth and approximately 500 European paintings and sculptures. Available at the Getty Research Institute, these have now been digitised and can be browsed and searched here.

On 16 December Andrew Ellis, the Director of the UK's Public Catalogue Foundation, which is collaborating with the BBC on the Your Paintings project to put all the UK's publicly owned paintings online, announced that a further 40,000 paintings have been added to the initial upload. This brings the total number of paintings from UK public collections now online to 104,000, over half the national collection. It is estimated that the entire national collection of 200,000 paintings, which is held in 3,000 galleries, museums, libraries and public institutions, making it one of the largest and most diverse collections in the world, will be online by the end of 2012.  

Launched in June 2011, Your Paintings now contains the works of over 23,000 artists. The site is interactive and fully searchable by artist, collection and location, and  provides links to the collections themselves.To make the site searchable by subject matter, over 5,000 members of the UK public have signed up as taggers, alongside curators and experts, participating in the task of cataloguing the collection online in a way which will allow searches for a wide range of subject matter across the website.

Country-specific information is available on this site for 48 countries, from Albania to Yugoslavia, in the Information by Country section. Details of important, non country-specific, online resources are available in the International section of the site which contains several categories of information.  For example: 

Case News: provides details of claims and cases ruled on or settled outside the courts with copies of reports and rulings. Full details of a comprehensive range of cases can be found in the News Archive, which is fully searchable by name of family, artwork, museum, city, etc.

Lawsuits: provides details of claims and cases ruled on or being settled in court with copies of court filings and judgements.

Research Resources: provides details of family records, tracing services, texts of post-war reports, and books and publications.

Web Resources: provides details of various online databases of looted paintings, results of provenance research in countries around the world, archival records available online and other research materials.

Seeking Owners of Identified Looted Property: provides lists of names of individuals whose looted property has been identified in institutions in Germany and whose heirs are being sought. 

Other categories of information include Governmental Conferences and Hearings, Laws, Policies and Guidelines, Art Trade, and Press, Television, Radio and Film.  To explore all these sections, click here.

The site is regularly updated with new resources and developments.  To provide details of resources or cases to add to the site, please email info@lootedart.com.