In 1944, as soldiers herded Hungarian Jews into ghettos and onto cattle cars, another army went to work: clerks with pens and rubber stamps.
On typed forms and museum letterhead, they calmly recorded what they were taking: “Munkácsy, oil on canvas . . . 18th-century German oil . . . 843 carpets . . . 4,500-volume library.”
Those records survive on roughly 2,500 pages of microfilm — wartime files from the office of Dr. Dénes Csánky, Hungary’s “government commissioner” for Jewish art assets, and preserved by Holocaust scholar Randolph L. Braham.
For decades, those reels were hard to access and easy to ignore.
This year, with our urging, the World Jewish Restitution Organization funded the work to put the scans online.
My team at the Holocaust Art Recovery Initiative has spent months going through every page and posting the results in a 470-plus-post series on X — complete with names, addresses, artists, dimensions, crate numbers and museum intake notes.
And our research lands just as Washington is forcing the art world to examine its culpability in Nazi-looted art.
This month the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced a bipartisan bill to strengthen the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act and remove its built-in sunset at the end of 2026.
The original HEAR Act, passed in 2016, was supposed to ensure that Holocaust-era art cases are decided on the merits, not thrown out due to technical time limits.
The new bill acknowledges the job is not done — and that time is running out.
Meanwhile, museums and collectors are facing a fresh wave of Nazi-loot stories.
An Italian Old Master portrait spotted in a real-estate listing in Argentina.
Egon Schiele drawings and Claude Monet oils returned to descendants with the help of Manhattan prosecutors.
A Van Gogh sold by the Metropolitan Museum of Art under a legal cloud.
Every few weeks, another “one painting” headline — and the Hungarian microfilms are the equivalent of thousands of those headlines at once.
They show, in the state’s own handwriting and typeface, how Jewish collections were stripped and rerouted into public institutions that still exist.
One file records how the state split the contents of Baroness Hatvany-Deutsch’s home at Lánchíd utca 6 into two streams: weapons and Habsburg imperial portraits to the War Museum in Buda Castle, art collection to the Museum of Fine Arts.
One address. One victim. Two national museums.
Another file catalogs the collection of widow Aladárné Kaszab, including a Jacob Jordaens “Philemon and Baucis,” a Cranach “Last Supper” and more, plus Meissen clocks and Gallé glass.
The best pieces went to the Museum of Fine Arts or the Hopp Museum of East Asian Art, the rest into the finance and auction system.
A Strauss family file lists paintings by Delacroix, Gros, Courbet and others as “Pál Strauss’s pictures,” recorded at the Museum of Fine Arts with dates, dimensions and signatures.
A dossier on the Hatvany family castle in Hatvan lists dozens of works, from Old Masters to Hungarian modernists, measured to the half-centimeter, marked as state property and delivered under guard into Budapest Museum custody.
Again and again, the pattern repeats on a staggering scale.
In Baja, a city museum director compiled inventories for more than 1,000 artworks and valuables from named Jewish homes and proposed keeping them all as “state deposits.”
In Nagyvárad, officials logged more than 1,500 artworks and thousands of books from Jewish palaces and apartments.
In Pécs, a certified report traces the chain of custody as property moved from the ghetto into the municipal museum — carpets sliding down from balconies, statues carried upright, glass flagged as fragile.
This is not rumor, memoir or hindsight.
It is the state’s own paperwork: names of Jewish families and addresses, artists, dimensions, crate numbers, rail routes, even fuel vouchers and the license plate of the commissioner’s Plymouth.
These reels turn moral outrage into hard evidence.
They show not just that Jewish collections were robbed, but where the objects went, who signed for them and which institution received them.
They undercut every “abandoned property” excuse and every provenance that conveniently begins in 1950.
Any museum hanging a Hungarian painting with a helpful chain-of-ownership gap between 1938 and 1948, any collector who bought a “Central European private collection” at a New York sale, or any auction house happy to list items “acquired in Europe after the war” is now on notice: This archive is a time bomb under your wall labels.
It’s like discovering thousands of “Woman in Gold” files all at once.
The HEAR Act was written to give heirs a fair day in court. The new HEAR bill is meant to keep that promise alive beyond 2026.
But no statute can work if museums and market players avert their eyes from the best evidence we have.
Hungary’s microfilms sat in library archives for decades. Now they are online, translated, indexed and impossible to unsee.
Congress is moving. Courts are ruling. Major museums are back under scrutiny.
The excuses just ran out.
Jonathan H. Schwartz is a Detroit-based attorney and co-founder of the Holocaust Art Recovery Initiative.
