66.  In early 1998, in the wake of the seizure of two paintings by Egon Schiele that had been loaned to the Museum of Modern Art in New York by a government-supported Austrian foundation, the Austrian federal minister for education and culture, Elisabeth Gehrer (“Gehrer”), opened up the old archives to permit researchers to prove that no looted artworks remained in Austria.

67.  Thereafter, and much to her surprise, an Austrian author and journalist, Hubertus Czernin (“Czernin”), published a series of articles exposing the fact that Austria’s federal museums had profited greatly from the extortion of artworks from exiled Jewish families after the War.  Principal among these artworks were the collections of the Bloch-Bauer, Rothschild and Lederer families.  Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which all the museum publications represented as having been donated to the museum in 1936, was revealed to have been transferred to the museum only in 1941 with a letter from the Nazi lawyer Führer signed “Heil Hitler.” The revelations were devastating.

68.  Gehrer responded by closing the Federal Monument Agency archives and ordering a thorough investigation by a committee of archivists from the various federal museums and headed by the director of the Federal Monument Agency, Ernst Bacher (“Bacher”).  The researchers essentially confirmed Czernin’s stories and reported to Gehrer that indeed many valuable artworks had not been restituted to their owners after the war and in many cases donations were coerced by government officials.  In several instances, such as with the Klimt paintings from the Bloch-Bauer collection, the provenance had been falsified to hide the fact that the paintings had been stolen during the War.