Spoils of war returned : U.S. restitution of nazi-looted cultural treasures to the USSR

Patricia Grimsted Kennedy is an American historian whose studies are focused on the stealing and restitution of cultural materials which occured during and after the Second World War. She is also a leading authority on the archives from the former USSR : she is the one who revealed that the USSR had secretly kept archives stolen by the Nazis from European occupied countries, archives which were captured by the Soviet Army after Germany's surrender in 1945.

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/spring/spoils-of-war-1.html

In her article Spoils of War Returned: U.S. Restitution of Nazi-Looted Cultural Treasures to the USSR, 1945 - 1959, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted evokes the restitution policies of looted cultural materials developped by the United States towards the USSR, and especially those concerning archive  materials. According to documentation available at the US National Archives, nineteen restitutions to the USSR were done between 1945 and 1959. Among those restitutions,  three of them were devoted to archives and documentation.

The first one, returned in september 1945, consisted of about a thousand packages containing archives which were looted by the Germans in 1943 in Novgorod and kept in Berlin. The second transfer included records stolen from Ukraine and Latvia, that were found in may 1945 by US Army stored in a castle and a monastery near Trpísty in Bohemia. These archives were given back to thier rightfully owners in october of the same year. The third transfer consisted of scientific materials, including documentation, taken from Smolensk and restituted to Soviet authorities in December 1945.

Ironically, as points out Mrs Grimsted, while the Unisted States returned a wide part of the cultural materials stolen by the Nazis to their country of origin, the USSR took millions of cultural treasures from German museums and castles (many of them coming from Western countries) in the name of what it called the "compensatory restitution".

The author also writes about the materials that were not returned by the US. Among them were documents seen as documents of interest by US intelligence agencies, namely documents which could have a strategical importance. Indeed at the time, roots of what would be later the Colrd War were appearing : the United States decided to keep archives which could constitute an advantage regarding military and security issues, and which could bring data on the communist system (orgalization, personnel, activities...). An instance of such archives is the archives of the Smolensk Communist Party Archive, which are partly held in the US National Archives. These archives are now a symbol of the international politics of restitution engaged by the states : the US hold of Smolensk archives were indeed used by the Russian Duma as a justification of their keeping their own captured archives.