Wiesenthal Centre Submits to Irish Prime Minister 165 page Shadow Report on Nazi-related Controversy, Surrounding Hunt Museum Founders: BACKGROUND

On 26 January 2004, the Centre’s Director for International Relations Dr. Shimon Samuels, had written to Irish President, Mary McAleese, urging her to withdraw the “Irish Museum of the Year Award” that she had just bestowed upon the Hunt Museum in Limerick.

The Irish Art Review had alluded to the extensive pre-war connections of John Hunt and Gertrude, his German-born wife. Further sources pointed to:

- the Hunts’ 1940 flight from London to neutral Ireland and suspicions of their alleged espionage activity.

- their personal ties with Adolf Mahr, then Director of the Irish National Museum and head of the Nazi Party (NSDP-AO) in Ireland.

The Centre called on Ireland, to see placed on the Internet the entire Hunt Museum holdings, so that the eventual claimants might scrutinize possible Nazi-looted works of undetermined provenance and, at the same time, to launch a full and independent investigation into the art deals and other activities of the Hunts. Finally, the Centre requested that the President’s Award be suspended until the satisfactory conclusion of the enquiry.

In response, the Irish authorities, on 14 February 2004, established a three-person panel “to investigate the Wiesenthal Centre’s charges”. In January 2005, this group resigned “for lack of funding”.

In May 2005, the prestigious Royal Irish Academy established the Hunt Museum Evaluation Group “to facilitate an exhaustive…investigation of the provenance of the objects in the Hunt Museum in light of the accusations levelled …by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris”.

This research was charged to the Hunt Museum itself, within narrow terms of reference that would not address the Hunts’ alleged Nazi associations.

The Wiesenthal Centre was excluded from this process and, thus, held to his own research as a control factor pending the Final Report of the Evaluation Group.

On 8 August 2007, an eminent American scholar of Nazi wartime art looting, Lynn Nicholas,  presented her Report on the Final report by the Hunt Museum Evaluation Group. Dr. Nicholas, therein, vindicated the Centre, in stating that “an examination of the Hunt Museum Collection was certainly justified both by its lack of provenance records and by the discovery of the Hunts’ relationship with a dealer known to have trafficked in confiscated art”. She added, “the private and professional lives of free-lance dealers such as the Hunts cannot really be separated”.

In January 2008, President Mary McAleese visited the Hunt Museum, where she dismissed the concerns of the Wiesenthal Centre as “base and unfounded allegations” and a “ tissue of lies”. In the aftermath, the Centre received a number of antisemitic emails from Ireland.

The Centre’s 11 December 2008 Shadow Report, presented to the Prime Minister, aims to set the record straight.

In 165 pages, Shimon Samuels and Museum consultant, Erin Gibbons, raise questions and provide documentary evidence from intelligence and archival sources. Investigating alleged connections with : Dublin-based Nazi Chief Adolf Mahr; pro-Hitler aristocrats in the United Kingdom; a series of dealers in looted art; the Allied strategic trans-Atlantic flying-boat station in County Limerick; Jewish art dealers in Germany, desperate to get to neutral Ireland – the study reads like a detective novel.

The findings, however, are serious in their demand for transparency. The Wiesenthal Centre’s Shadow Report provides incontrovertible grounds for Ireland to reopen the enquiry, in order to achieve closure for all parties to this controversy.

For a copy of the Shadow Report contact Shimon Samuels at csweurope@gmail.com