The article contrasts long-suppressed details of German art seizures during the Second World War from Ukrainian state museums and Western Jewish dealers, ordered to Königsberg by Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine. While most of the art from Kyiv was destroyed by retreating Germans when the Red Army arrived (February 1945), here we investigate “survivors.” Initial provenance findings about the collection Koch evacuated to Weimar in February 1945 reveal some paintings from Kyiv. More, however, were seized from Dutch and French Holocaust victims by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and his cohorts, including Jewish dealers Jacques Goudstikker (Amsterdam) and Georges Wildenstein (Paris). Many paintings deposited in Weimar disappeared west; others seized by Soviet authorities were transported to the Hermitage. These initial findings draw attention to hitherto overlooked contrasting examples of patterns of Nazi art looting and destruction in the East and West, and the pan-European dispersal of important works of art.

In the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi forces prosecuted a mass campaign of pillage and destruction. Under the coordinated direction of Iraqi curators who were well acquainted with Kuwait’s cultural treasures, occupying Iraqi troops plundered thousands of cultural objects from museums, libraries, and archives. Among the pillaged cultural spoils were Kuwait’s national archives, comprising the emirate’s historical memory. Until recently, Iraq was beholden to UN sanctions demanding the return of missing persons and property, including Kuwait’s archives. Although the United Nations Security Council for many years has facilitated efforts to search for the lost archives, these efforts have proved futile. This article explores the plausibility of the two most likely scenarios surrounding the cold case of Kuwait’s missing archives: 1) that the current search for the archives has overlooked the possibility that they were unknowingly seized by US forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are currently being held by the Pentagon; and 2) that the archives may have been intentionally destroyed as part of Saddam Hussein’s aim to obliterate Kuwait’s national identity and annex the emirate as Iraq’s nineteenth province.

The development of the urban space of Ground Zero has been a long and difficult process, resulting in the removal of almost all of its material history. The material objects formerly present on the site had an important part and significant agency in the struggle between different stakeholders of Ground Zero. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Larry Silverstein, owner and leaseholder of the sixteen acres that held the Twin Towers, intended to rebuild the ten million square feet of office space that was destroyed on 9/11. This force of production asserted itself over possible modes of consumption of the space, each championed and represented by overlapping groups of people. Some wished to see the space redeveloped as a site of mourning, others as a site fit for touristic consumption, as a space for residence, or as a site representing a material past older than 9/11. It shall be argued that for these consumer groups the symbolic complexity of the site, and its potential power in political performances, was intricately connected to space and the material agency of objects remaining on Ground Zero post 2001.

During the seventies, archaeological looting, of both land and underwater sites, not only was widespread in Spain, but also went unpunished. This situation stemmed from a lack of effective administrative and criminal legislation, human resources to combat the plague, and educational policies warning of how harmful such practices were, in spite of damning reports in the media and the social alarm raised in certain professional and political fields. The new political and social phase that began with the Constitution of 1978 has enabled the country to overcome this situation in three ways: first, by passing new, more appropriate administrative and criminal laws to help combat looting and illicit trade; second, through the creation of new regional governments (the autonomous communities) able to enforce these laws, and which have hired archaeologists specializing in cultural heritage management. The fight against the criminal aspect of looting and the illicit trade of antiquities has also been intensified by the creation of police and prosecuting bodies dedicated to the area of cultural heritage, among others. Last, educational policies have been put in place to help increase social awareness of the importance of our cultural heritage and the global loss its destruction represents. In this article we will present the first two points that have improved the initial situation as regards archaeological looting and the illicit trade of looted goods.

Article 12 of the Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003, provides that the States Parties are under obligation at the national level to draw up one or more inventories of the intangible cultural heritage present in their respective territories. Indonesia has been a State Party to the Convention since 2007, but until now, no specific law on intangible cultural heritage has been enacted. In 2010, the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, jointly with UNESCO, published the Practical Handbook for Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Indonesia. With the legal vacuum, the Handbook became a source for guidelines on the implementation of the inventory obligation in Indonesia; it provides that there shall be a manual inventory and an online inventory. However, in practice, there are two web sites functioning as online inventories, and the contents of the two web sites do not seem to reflect one of the Convention’s purposes, which is awareness. This article scrutinizes the contents of the publicly accessible online inventories and finds that the absence of statutory regulation has resulted in difficulties for those inventories to fulfill the purpose of awareness as mandated by the Convention.