Several months ago, Dutch art detective Arthur Brand received a call that could only be described as a genealogical horror story: a man had just discovered his family tree had a very rotten branch in the form of Hendrik Seyffardt, a Waffen-SS general and one of the highest-ranking Dutch collaborators. But wait, there's more. The man also learned that a painting by Toon Kelder, looted from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker's collection, was still hanging in a relative's hallway near Utrecht - because apparently, some family heirlooms come with a side of genocide.
The man, who spoke to De Telegraaf with a mixture of "deep shame" and "fury" about the decades of silence, prompted the relative to hand over Kelder's Portrait of a Young Girl to Brand shortly after the story broke on Monday. The owner claimed she inherited the painting from her mother and had no idea Goudstikker's heirs wanted it back. Brand is now in touch with those heirs, presumably to discuss how one politely says, "Thanks for holding onto this for 80 years."
This moral reckoning reflects a growing openness in the Netherlands to confronting its occupation history - a period where three-quarters of the Jewish population was murdered, thousands collaborated, and Jewish property was confiscated like it was going out of style. Since 2020, a policy of "humanity and goodwill" has applied to restitution requests from Dutch national collections, and major auction houses now refuse to sell disputed looted art. Progress!
Emile Schrijver, general director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, noted that younger generations might have enough distance to see injustices clearly, whether those involve a masterpiece or a silver spoon. "A descendant who gets a silver spoon that was used in the Friday night soup for his great-grandfather - that might be more valuable than a painting that he doesn't like," he said. "It has as deep a meaning as a Kandinsky because it's part of the same system: the eradication of a culture."
Gert-Jan van den Bergh, a legal expert in art restitution, has seen a shift from viewing these cases as private property matters to ethical questions about memory and identity. Meanwhile, Dutch journalist Sheila Sitalsing, who won an award for her book on discovering her grandfather's collaboration, observed that new generations can be both more forgiving and sharper: "On one hand, they are more detached and sometimes more forgiving. On the other, they can also be crystal clear ('Nazi? Wrong!')."
So why are so many stolen objects still unreturned eight decades after liberation? Blame het zwijgen - "the silence" - a loaded omertà around wartime actions, plus a legal system that struggles with historic theft. An archive of legal dossiers on 425,000 people formally investigated after 1945 remains not fully open. As Anne Marthe van der Bles of the ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre put it, "The war always sat at the dining table."
Younger Dutch appear less weighed down and more compelled to right past wrongs - but experts warn they don't have forever. Thousands of stolen pieces risk being lost to fading memory and fragmented archives. Schrijver urged understanding: all he has of his great-grandparents is a brick in a commemorative wall and a "stumbling" stone. "Before these two things were there, I had nothing," he said. "It's almost never the monetary value. It's the connection."