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Otto Wittmann papers relating to the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the United States Office of Strategic Services
910130
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections
Title: Otto Wittmann papers relating to the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the United States Office of Strategic Services
Creator:
Wittmann, Otto, 1911-2001
Identifier/Call Number: 910130
Physical Description:
3.75 Linear Feet
(9 boxes)
Date (inclusive): 1933-2000, bulk 1945-1946
Abstract: The Otto Wittmann papers relating to the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) of the United States Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) consists of reports prepared by the OSS and by other allied agencies, as well as the work that Wittmann undertook during
his employment with the OSS, and files that attest to his career-long interest in the mission of the OSS.
Physical Location: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
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Language of Material: Collection material is in English.
Otto Wittmann was born on September 1, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a successful businessman who had found a
niche in the newly developing automobile industry. While Wittmann grew up in Kansas City, attending public and then private
schools, he had little exposure to art. No art museum had been opened yet in Kansas City before Wittmann joined Harvard University
as a freshman in 1929. However, during his years at Harvard from 1929 to 1933, Wittmann attended courses at the Fogg Art Museum
and chose to major in art history. He became acquainted with numerous students of Paul Sachs who would become museum and cultural
leaders, such as Perry T. Rathbone (1911-2000), who became a close friend and later became director of the St. Louis Art Museum
and then of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Graduating in the midst of the Great Depression, Wittmann was unable financially to pursue graduate studies. He took on a
position at the Nelson-Atkins Museum (then known as The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and the Mary Atkins Museum
of Fine Arts) in September 1933 while the museum was still under construction and only three months before it opened to the
public. Working under Director Paul Gardner, Wittmann quickly learned numerous practical aspects of museum work, including
gallery installation; how to crate and uncrate objects, and arrange the vaults; registrarial and curatorial work; how to prepare
educational programs, lectures and booklets; and the care and exhibition of the print collection.
In 1937, when many of his peers from Harvard had completed their graduate studies but could boast of only a theoretical understanding
of a career in the arts, Wittmann, armed with an unusual amount of practical experience, became an assistant to Paul Sachs
at the Fogg Museum. This enabled him to attend Sachs's one-year Museum Course at no cost and to gain skills in connoisseurship
and authentication, as well as to develop relationships with collectors and dealers. He was subsequently appointed curator
of the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, a position he held until he was drafted into the army in 1941 due to the
outbreak of World War II. Shortly thereafter, placed on reserve, he briefly took on a position as Assistant Director of the
Portland Art Museum before resuming service following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He joined the
personnel of the Air Transport Command in Washington and then the War Department, rapidly rising through the military ranks
from second lieutenant to major.
On August 3, 1945, Wittmann was transferred to the Art Looting Investigating Unit (ALIU) of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) in the War Department, X2 Branch. Unlike the Army's Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit (MFAA), which focused on
fieldwork and restitution effort, the ALIU of the OSS--one of the early forms of organized intelligence in the US prior to
the creation of the CIA in 1947--was charged with the gathering, analysis and dissemination of intelligence information related
to art looting during the war. The ALIU consisted of two offices: its headquarters in Washington and an Operations Office
in London. Wittmann was appointed head desk of the office in Washington.
The bulk of the reports on Nazi art looting issued by the ALIU had been prepared in 1945 and 1946 by James Sachs Plaut, the
nephew of Paul Sachs, Theodore Rousseau, and S. Lane Faison. They succeeded in exposing the role of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter
Rosenberg (ERR) in France in helping to build Hermann Goering's art collection as well as the Sonderauftrag Linz. Wittmann
traveled to Europe after the ALIU's final report had been issued in May 1946, which highlighted areas that had been insufficiently
investigated. He was sent by the War Department to Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and
Germany to conduct investigations from June to September 1946, and to analyze the role played by Hans Adolf Wendland in relation
to the transfer of artworks from France to the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, which had held auctions of international
standing during the war. In his report on Wendland, Wittmann noted dryly that he wasn't convinced by Wendland's claim that
all of his export papers to travel in and out of countries during the war had been received from German officials for only
"the price of four kilograms of chocolate." He maintained a sense of detachment or moderation and took no position on whether
the United States should have received a trophy in the form of an artwork as compensation for its enormous participation in
the art restitution effort. Wittmann observed that in his case the real trophy of this mission in 1946 was that it allowed
him to develop friendships with European colleagues. This would enable him throughout his career to pull from a network of
art experts for the evaluation of potential acquisitions and to organize extraordinary exhibitions thanks to the rare loans
he could receive from Europe.
In June 1945, Wittmann married Margaret Hill, who would have a profound influence on the development of his career. A graduate
of Radcliffe College, Hill had participated in the archeological digs organized in Greece by the American School of Classical
Studies. Although Hill had not made it on the list of MFAA prepared by Edith Standen, which gathered the names of those that
had assisted with the protection of art during World War II, Hill had also been a member of the OSS. Later she would assist
the institutions that Wittmann worked for in her area of specialization, while also performing important public functions
for them. Shortly after Wittmann's resignation from the OSS on October 6, 1946, the young couple moved to Toledo, where Wittmann
took on the newly created position of assistant director at the Toledo Art Museum. The museum attracted Wittmann for its unusually
ambitious education program--an interest he had developed in Kansas City--and for its community and civic service to the city
of Toledo, a role that his war experience had made him appreciate. The modesty of the museum's collection would become an
opportunity for Wittmann to take an active role in acquisitions, one that he could play with more freedom than his colleagues
at more prestigious institutions on the East Coast could. Although his appointment was planned to be of brief tenure, the
Wittmanns remained in Toledo until 1977, raising a family there and helping propel the museum into one of the most esteemed
collections in the country with the acquisitions of magnificent artworks, such as the
Crowning of Saint Catherine by Rubens, originally thought by another institution to be a later copy.
Wittmann participated in federal initiatives, advocating public funding for art institutions during his tenure as president
of the College Art Association (CAA) and president of the Association of Art Museums (AAM). President Lyndon Johnson appointed
him to the first National Council on the Arts, a precursor to the National Endowment of the Arts, in 1964, and Wittmann served
as advisor for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Upon his retirement from the Toledo Art Museum in 1977, Wittmann moved to Los Angeles shortly after J. Paul Getty passed away.
Wittmann served as a consultant and trustee to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1977 to 1979. Afterwards he served
at the Getty Museum and then the Getty Trust from 1978 until 1994 in roles including consultant, trustee, acting chief curator,
and chair of the Art Acquisitions Committee, helping build the museum's collections, as he had done in Toledo. Wittmann articulated
a vision for the Getty beyond that of the traditional model of the museum: in 1980, he devised a chart for the organization
that incorporated four programs, each with its own director reporting to the president of the Trust: Museum, Education, Research
(which featured a research art library), and a Foundation. Harold Williams would later on devise another chart for the organization.
Wittmann has been credited with fostering the civic duty of the institution, so that its unusually rich resources would not
isolate it from its sister institutions, and not prevent them from also building collections of their own. Upon his retirement,
he and Margaret Wittmann moved to Montecito near Santa Barbara, where he passed away in 2001.
Sources consulted:
- Sally Anne Duncan.
Otto Wittmann : Museum Man for All Seasons. Toledo, OH : Toledo Museum of Art, 2001.
-
The Museum in the Creation of Community : Otto Wittmann / interviewed by Richard Càndida Smith ; Art History Oral Documentation Project compiled under the auspices of the Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995.
- Muchnic, Suzanne. "On the Trails of Spoils of War,"
Los Angeles Times 1995 June 4.
The archive, which consists of 3.75 linear feet (9 boxes) of papers, documents the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) within
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the mission played by one of its staff members, Otto Wittmann. The OSS--created
by President Roosevelt in 1942 with the appointment of William J. Donovan as its director--was one of the early forms of organized
intelligence in the United States prior to the establishment of the CIA in 1947. The ALIU was charged with the analysis, gathering
and dissemination of intelligence information and with serving as a liaison with other agencies within the War Department,
the State Department, the Treasury and the Roberts Commission. It became a repository of intelligence information gathered
by numerous agencies on the topic of art looting. The reports prepared by the ALIU exposed the extent of the theft of artworks
from countries invaded by Germany, to help create Hermann Goering's collection as well as the Museum and Library of Hitler
at Linz. The mission of the ALIU was distinct in nature from that of the field work accomplished by the Monuments, Fine Arts,
and Archives unit (MFAA), whose members were part of the US Army and entered Europe during the war with the Allied invasion
with the responsibility of protecting works of art and monuments.
The archive sheds light on how the OSS operated within a larger group of agencies, and helps understand the day-to-day activities
of one of its members during an intelligence mission in Europe. It testifies through a small lens to the steps taken by a
country in developing secret intelligence on an increasingly large scale. The files gathered by Wittmann reveal the difficulties
in communicating such missions to the public, who also viewed the OSS, not without scorn, as the organization of the "Oh So
Social," "Oh Shush Shush" and "Oh So Secret."
The archive partially duplicates records in the National Archives, where the records of the ALIU were deposited. Upon his
return from his mission in Europe in 1946, Wittmann was the last remaining member of the ALIU, with the other members having
returned to their civilian duties, and he was asked by the OSS to close out the ALIU. Wittmann transferred the records of
the Washington headquarters office of the ALIU to Ardelia Hall at the State Department, who had been charged with the art
records there. Upon Hall's retirement from the State Department, the records of the ALIU were transferred to the National
Archives. In 1990-1991, Wittmann took the initiative to order copies of all the reports produced by the ALIU in the National
Archives, which are included in the present archive. The archive also contains copies of reports which appear from their annotations
to have been Wittmann's personal copies, gathered during his employment with the OSS, and includes reports by agencies in
France and England.
A portion unique to the archive are the personal papers of Otto Wittmann related to his employment with the OSS. Notes in
these papers provide an almost daily account of Wittmann's intelligence mission in France, Switzerland, Germany and England.
Included are Wittmann's agendas, meeting notes and drafts for the examination and analysis of the transfer of artworks from
France to Switzerland. Particularly well-documented is Wittmann's analysis of the role in the transfer played by Hans Adolf
Wendland, who developed a business partnership with Theodor Fischer of Lucerne. Included are clippings and publications that
shed light on art looting during the war, and the restitution efforts undertaken by the United States in collaboration with
England, France, Italy, and other countries. The files also attest to the important principle, espoused by Wittmann, that
works of art are not spoils of war.
The archive is arranged in four series:
Series I. Reports related to art looting during World War II, 1944-1950;
Series II. Personal papers, 1933-1997;
Series III. Publications related to art looting during World War II, 1946-1984;
Series IV. Newspaper clippings, 1941-2000.
Records pertaining to Otto Wittmann's work for the Getty have been transferred to the Getty's Institutional Records and Archives
and are currently closed to the public. For more information please contact the Getty Institutional Archives at archives@getty.edu.
Other related materials include the following:
- Otto Wittmann papers, 1932-1996. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Oral History Interview with Otto Wittmann, 1976 August 19-20. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
- Oral History Interview with Otto Wittmann, 1981 October 25. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
-
The Museum in the Creation of Community : Otto Wittmann / interviewed by Richard Càndida Smith ; Art History Oral Documentation Project compiled under the auspices of the Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995.
- Otto Wittmann, Trustee and Consultant, J. Paul Getty Museum, The J. Paul Getty Trust, 1979-1989 (Consultant until 1994),
An Interview Conducted by Eric Abrahamson, The Prologue Group, September 24, 1999. The J. Paul Getty Trust, ©2000.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Otto Wittmann.
Existence and Location of Copies
The reports in Box 1 and Box 2 are also available as photocopies. See Box 1. Photocopies.
910130 consists of two acquisitions, one made in 1991, and one made in 2001.
Otto Wittmann papers relating to the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the United States Office of Strategic Services, The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 910130.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa910130
Subjects and Indexing Terms
World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war
Art treasures in war -- France
Art treasures in war -- Germany