The Depot of Looted Art in the Neue Burg

In September 1938 the Neue Burg was officially designated, with Adolf Hitler’s approval, a location for storing and cataloguing artworks and cultural objects looted by the Nazi authorities. These items were the property of people persecuted as Jews. The so-called Central Depot for Seized Collections was subject to the administrative and technical supervision of the Art Historical Museum, and specifically of its director Fritz Dworschak. There were initial delays in setting up the depot due to shortages of security equipment such as doors and telephones, as well as of personnel to guard and monitor the site. With a total of 15 halls plus side-rooms, the site was on the Burggarten side of the first floor, in the present-day location of the Collection of Historic Musical Instruments and parts of the Imperial Armoury.

Adolf Hitler first visited the “collection”, which had quickly grown to almost 10,000 objects, in autumn 1938 during a tour of the Art Historical Museum and the Neue Burg. The art objects and furniture were subject to the so-called “Führer’s proviso”, under which Hitler secured himself a prior claim to the seized, mainly Jewish, collections. The most valuable objects would go on to form the founding collection of the “Führermuseum” in Linz, but other museums were also allowed to request objects from the Central Depot to supplement their collections. Many objects seized in 1938 and 1939 were used with the approval of the highest authorities for furnishing the Neue Burg, as is shown in the surviving correspondence and inventories. By early 1939, Fritz Dworschak was already making the first requests for the depot to be quickly closed down so that the suite of rooms, which had originally been promised to the Art Historical Museum, could be used for major exhibitions that were being planned. When war broke out, the first art objects were taken out of the Central Depot, and in March 1940 it was possible to open the new galleries of the Art Historical Museum for special exhibitions on the first floor of the Neue Burg. When the Central Depot was finally shut down in May 1941, the significant collections of seized objects were split up. By 1943 they had been scattered all over the territory of the German Reich.

Here you can read more about the artworks, the people persecuted by the Nazi terror regime and their heirs, as well as about how the Republic of Austria today is trying to return these items. On this website you can find all the surviving index cards on which the art objects taken during the persecution were registered for storage in the Central Depot.