Navigate to News section

Big Reveal on German “Antiques Roadshow”

Art was stolen by—and then from—Nazis

by
Allison Hoffman
September 03, 2009

So, if you’re going to go on Antiques Roadshow, you generally want to make sure that you’re not showing off a piece that’s been stolen. The corollary rule, if you’re going on the German version, is to avoid trying to offload stolen Nazi art. But of course, the whole point of the show is that people don’t know what they have, which may be how someone turned up on Kunst und Krempel (Art and Junk) last November asking for an appraisal of a 17th century painting titled Sermon on the Mount, by the Flemish baroque painter Frans Francken the Younger. The painting, it turns out, was worth about $143,000—and it had been stolen from a Jewish family that had bought it at a gallery in Dresden, and was at one point destined for a Nazi museum in Hitler’s Austrian hometown, Linz. The painting disappeared from Hitler’s reception building in Munich sometime after April 1945, according to police. So far, the television network that broadcasts the program is claiming journalistic privilege and refusing to hand over the name of the person who turned up with it.

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.