The bust was in Germany at the end of the war and was a favourite of Adolf Hitler
Egypt’s attempts to retrieve the bust of Queen Nefertiti from the Nazis after the Second World War were thwarted by the United States, newly uncovered documents show.
The Americans dismissed the request fearing it would set a precedent that would lead to other ancient artefacts being returned and even said it would be following “Nazi principles”, letters shared with media by Egyptologist Monica Hanna reveal.
Dr Hanna is the first researcher to unearth the documents, which have sat in the US National Archive (Nara) since the end of the war, which she has used to shed new light on how Queen Nefertiti’s bust was smuggled out of Egypt to Germany and how it remained there despite the Egyptians’ requests to the victorious Allies.
She has unearthed correspondence by the US Army unit that dealt with the restitution of looted Nazi art, which reveal how they blocked her country’s request to return the bust and served as the inspiration for the Hollywood film The Monuments Men, staring George Clooney amd Matt Damon.
Dr Hanna, associate professor and acting dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport in Egypt, told media that “as soon as I saw the letters, I was truly amazed”.
“It also showed the inherent solid cultural imperialism in the West and how they truly saw the heritage of our country,” she said.
The artwork had been smuggled out of Egypt in 1912 by a German archaeologist and put on display in Berlin in 1923, but the Egyptians have been calling for it to be returned almost from the day when it first appeared in public.
An agreement with the regional government of Prussia to return the 3,300-year-old bust was vetoed by Adolf Hitler, who was said to be “in love with Nefertiti” and it remains on display in Berlin’s Neues Museum. Dr Hanna believes the bust should be treated as looted Nazi art, given Hitler’s role in keeping it in Germany.
At the end of the war, the bust of Queen Nefertiti was rediscovered along with a hoard of looted Nazi art in a salt mine in Wiesbaden, Germany, an episode touched on in The Monuments Men.
The letters were written in 1946 and came after Egypt’s prime minister, Mahmoud Fahmy al-Nokrashy Pasha, wrote to the US State Department stating that “this masterpiece of ancient Egyptian art must return to Egypt, which it should never have left”.
Initially the US appeared positive and suggested the Egyptians needed to make the request to the three other victorious allied powers, the United Kingdom, France and Soviet Union, Dr Hanna’s new research paper Contesting the Lonely Queen reveals.
But while the Soviet Union appeared sympathetic, the Allied military administration told them it did not have the power to send back the bust because it came to Germany before the war.
The real life monuments men also moved to block restitution and Lamont Moore, an officer in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit, as it was formally known, set out his reasons why this should be refused in a letter to Huntington Cairns, the executive officer of the National Gallery of Art.
Moore first dismisses the request from the Egyptians as being made merely on the basis of nationalist sentiment and to satisfy their vanity.
He continues: “To return this item to Egypt now would be to follow the Nazi principle of confiscating works of art by pretence or force to enlarge their own collections.
“I feel that if the Egyptian authorities succeed in their plan, we might be faced with similar problems which might not be easily solved once the Nefertiti precedent has been established.”
In another letter, Coll John H Allen, the chief of the Restitution and Reparations Branch of the Allied military administration of Germany, agreed with the stance.
He wrote that “granting this request might well establish a precedent which would require the return of thousands of art objects and other properties found in Germany”.
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