The family who famously recaptured art from Nazis selling collection of Bibles

A Bible manuscript from Paris, dated 1430 and an illuminated manuscript on vellum, that is being sold April 23, 2021 in the Rosenberg collection at Christie’s. Photo courtesy of Christie’s.

JERUSALEM — The Holocaust wasn’t just about the murder of 6 million Jews. World War II was also the world’s biggest heist of art and property. 

On Friday, April 23, Christie’s in New York will auction the late Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg’s unparalleled collection of 17 illuminated medieval Bible manuscripts and more than 200 incunabula (printed books from before 1501). Alexandre played a leading role in recapturing his family’s looted artwork from the Nazis and later retired in Manhattan where he built his Bible collection with Elaine.

The proceeds for the Renaissance Bible manuscripts and books collection, likely to sell for more than $50 million, will be earmarked for a number of charities including Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

“This is one of the most important collections of its kind ever to come to market,” said Eugenio Donadoni, Christie’s senior specialist in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. “We’re proud to honor Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg’s collecting and philanthropic legacy with this auction.”

The extraordinary compilation comes with a story worthy of a second Hollywood movie.

A scene from the 1964 film “The Train.”

The first blockbuster, the 1964 black and white action movie “The Train”, tells the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story. In August 1944, French Resistance fighters hijacked train no. 40,044 east of Paris. On board was a priceless cargo of 148 crates containing 967 paintings by Braque, Cézanne, Degas, Dufy, Gauguin, Modigliani, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Utrillo “Aryanized” from Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959), one of the world’s leading dealers in modern art, and his competitors Jacques Seligmann and Georges Wildenstein. Ironically, the Nazis loathed those painters for creating “Degenerate Art”. 

The Nazis planned to ship their loot – which included treasures from Parisian museums – to Kogl Castle in Austria and the Nikolsburg depository in Moravia. While some would be sold for cash, after their victory, the Germans intended to display the works in the unrealized Führermuseum to be built in Hitler’s hometown, Linz, Austria. The heist was organized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter für die besetzten Gebiete (The Reich Leader Rosenberg Institute for the Occupied Territories, abbreviated as the EER), named after Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), the Nazi ideologue who orchestrated the grand larceny of art and books across German-occupied Europe.

What “The Train” failed to relate – and which could be the stuff of a second movie called Rosenberg vs. Rosenberg – was that it was Paul Rosenberg's son, Alexandre, a Paris-born lieutenant with the Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, who liberated Train no. 40,044.

Rosenberg Fils (1921-1987) was acting on intel gathered by Rose Antonia Maria Valland (1898-1980). Armed with nothing more than sang froid, the French art historian secretly recorded details of the Nazi plundering from her desk at Paris’ Jeu de Paume Museum, which the EER was using as its central storage and sorting depot before the looted art was shipped to Germany. 

Paul Rosenberg in 1937 with a painting by Henry Matisse. Creative Commons photo.

Valland alerted her fellow partisans about the freight train, which Baron Kurt von Behr, the head of the ERR in France, had stationed at Aubervilliers northeast of Paris. Resistance fighters sabotaged the tracks, leaving the train stranded at Aulany-sous-Bois 14 kilometers northeast of the capital. Two days after Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944 by the Second Armored Division of de Gaulle’s army, a small detachment under the command of Lt. Rosenberg was sent to secure the abandoned train. Opening up some of the crates, Rosenberg was astonished to discover many paintings which he had last seen hanging on the walls of his family's apartment in Paris and in his father’s gallery that he had established at 21 rue La Boétie in 1910. That address was the title of a memoir published in 2013 by Paul Rosenberg’s granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, the French TV journalist and ex-wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Alfred Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946 along with other Nazi war criminals. As a suspected collaborator, Valland narrowly missed the same fate of becoming viande de potence (gallows meat) until her bona fides as a freedom fighter could be established.

But what became of Paul Rosenberg?

Prescient about the catastrophe about to befall Europe, before the Wehrmacht goose-stepped into Paris in June 1940 he had already shipped abroad some of his inventory from his prestigious gallery. He and his family fled south to Bordeaux, where – in violation of orders – the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954) issued thousands of visas to desperate Jews including the Rosenbergs, allowing them to finally reach the United States. But de Sousa Mendes’ humanitarian initiative destroyed his diplomatic career under Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. He spent the rest of his life in penury.

It was not until 1986 that de Sousa Mendes was reinstated posthumously into the diplomatic service. Finally, on June 9, 2020, the parliament in Lisbon recognized its disobedient diplomat with a monument bearing his name in the National Pantheon.

And what about Alexandre Rosenberg?

Alexandre and Elaine Rosenberg. Creative Commons photo.

Demobilized after the war, in 1946 he went to Manhattan to work at The Rosenberg Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which his father had established after fleeing France via Portugal. (Alexandre later moved the gallery to East 79th Street.) There he met Elaine Sobol (1921-2020), the widow of Richard Pinner, an U.S. Air Force B17 pilot who was shot down in the skies above Axis Europe in January 1945. During World War II, she worked as an aircraft riveter in California and then at the Department of Censorship in New York City. The two bibliophiles raised their daughters Elisabeth and Marianne, ran a very successful gallery, and devoted their spare time to collecting rare manuscripts.

But what of the second movie, tentatively called “Rosenberg vs. Rosenberg”? That would be a sequel to the 2015 drama “Woman in Gold”, which details Maria Altman’s decade-long battle to reclaim Gustav Klimt's iconic painting of her aunt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was stolen from her relatives by the Nazis in Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss.

Three generations of the Rosenbergs have been painstakingly searching for the approximately 400 artworks that were looted from their family by their nemesis of the same surname. Thanks to the documentation kept by Paul Rosenberg, today they have retrieved more than 340. One of them is the 1937 painting “Profil Bleu Devant la Cheminée” (“Blue Dress in Ochre Yellow Armchair”) by Henri Matisse, which was returned to the Rosenbergs in 2014 after hanging for 45 years in the Henie Onstad Arts Center near Oslo, Norway. 

“We are not willing to forget, or let it go,” said Marianne Rosenberg, Alexandre Rosenberg’s daughter, a New York lawyer. “I think of it as a crusade.”

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.