Swiss former president tackles Nazi-era and colonial loot in museums

Former Federal Councillor Simonetta Sommaruga speaks during a press conference held by the newly-created Commission for Cultural Heritage with a Problematic Past, of which she is the president. Bern, September 30, 2026. Keystone / Anthony Anex

A new Swiss commission, led by former president Simonetta Sommaruga, is now accepting claims for Nazi-looted art and colonial-era cultural property. It will review disputed cases and issue recommendations. Sommaruga spoke to Swissinfo about its mission and priorities.

Almost three decades after endorsing an international agreement on handling Nazi-looted art in public collections, Switzerland now has a commission to adjudicate claims. The Commission for Historically Problematic Cultural Heritage announced in September that it is ready to accept requestsExternal link from the victims of spoliation and their heirs seeking to recover stolen cultural property in Swiss museums. 

Back in 1998, Switzerland, along with 43 other countries and organisations, endorsed the non-binding Washington PrinciplesExternal link. These call on governments to create national structures to facilitate the restitution of Nazi-looted art. Switzerland joins a small group of countries to have done so – Austria, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom all introduced commissions to evaluate claims more than two decades ago. 

“In Switzerland, things sometimes take a little longer,” said Sommaruga, the president of the new commission. “But that does not mean that nothing has happened in the country over the years. Some museums have taken a very progressive approach in recent years and decades.” 

Sommaruga named the Bern Museum of Fine Arts as one example. In 2014, the museum inherited the troubled collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer who had bought art in occupied France for Adolf Hitler’s planned “Führermuseum”.

The way the museum handled this tainted legacy – conducting provenance research and restituting art that had been looted from Jews or sold under duress – “set international standards,” Sommaruga said. 

“In my view, the fundamental issue is that Switzerland must take responsibility as a state,” she said. “During the Second World War, as today, Switzerland was an important marketplace for art and cultural property.”

Outgoing director of the Bern Fine Arts Museum Nina Zimmer poses with Henri Matisse’s painting ‘The Blue Blouse’, donated by the Swiss-Brazilian collector Georges F. Keller. The museum’s provenance researcher came across an archive document linking Keller to Etienne Bignou, a man now considered a ‘red-flag’ dealer because he traded art with Germans in Nazi-occupied Paris. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP

Tainted collections

The impetus for the new commission arose in part because of a number of high-profile disputes in Switzerland. In particular, the Bührle Foundation’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces, which went on display in a new extension at the Zurich Fine Arts Museum in 2021, has drawn widespread criticism and concern.

Emil Bührle, a Swiss industrialist who built his fortune by selling the anti-aircraft cannons his factories produced to Nazi Germany. He is also known to have bought paintings that were looted from Jewish owners. 

Switzerland’s commission differs from its counterparts in other European countries in that it will also address claims for objects removed from former colonies. Other countries have introduced separate commissions for colonial-era acquisitions: no other national commission handles both kinds of dispute. 

“Although Switzerland never had any colonies of its own, Swiss people were involved in colonial contexts in various ways, including through trade, missionary work and research,” Sommaruga said. “Parliament has created a legal framework that is unique in its kind, as well as bold and forward-looking.” The commission’s broad scope also demands a wide range of expertise: it comprises specialists in law, art history, ethics, museology and both colonial and 20^th-century history.

Claude Monet’s painting ‘L’Homme à l’ombrelle’ on exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2024. The museum is now selling the artwork after reaching an agreement with the heirs of a Jewish collector who had been forced to sell the work while fleeing the Nazi regime. Keystone / Michael Buholzer

A signature of authority

Some Swiss museums have already seized the initiative in returning objects removed from colonies. Earlier this year, the ethnographic museums of Geneva and the University of Zurich and the Rietberg Museum in Zurich agreed to return to NigeriaExternal link 18 “Benin bronzes” that were probably looted by British troops in a raid in 1897. Under the terms of the agreement with the Nigerian government, ten further objects, also with questionable provenance, will stay in the Swiss museums on loan, although their ownership has been transferred to Nigeria. 

Sommaruga says such creative agreements may offer potential solutions for the commission, which can also act as a mediator in disputes.

From left: Chief Nosakhare Nelson Agbonifi, the Ebagua of Benin, Olugbile Holloway, Director General Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM), Babatunde Adebiyi (NCMM) and Chief Osas Gabriel Edebor-Asuen, the Obazughanwen of Benin, pose with some of the Benin objects during the ceremony of their transfer of ownership in the townhall in Zurich, March 20, 2026. Keystone / Claudio Thoma

“I think that, in the spirit of the Washington Principles, restitution need not always be the only just and fair response or solution,” she said. “Other options are possible, and the commission deliberately wants to leave open the forms that a just and fair solution might take in each individual case.” 

Having twice served as president, Sommaruga is a prominent figure in Swiss public life and lends the new commission authority.  She has navigated similarly sensitive unresolved historical issues in the past.   

As justice minister, she commissioned the first report into child labour practices in Switzerland: tens of thousands of children were taken from their families and put to work on farms, part of a harsh foster care system that continued until as late as the 1980s. In 2013, she issued an official apology to the victims.

Still popular and close to her constituency after leaving the government: Simonetta Sommaruga, on the right, at a national demonstration against violence against women in Bern (November 2024). Keystone / Peter Klaunzer

Look back, don’t look away 

“I have always maintained that a country must confront its own history and must not look away, particularly when dealing with difficult or painful issues,” she said.   

Sommaruga described the issue of human remains in Swiss collections as a “highly sensitive” one “that raises particularly difficult ethical questions.” The commission has made addressing these a priority and plans to create an inventory of remains and their places of origin.  

Here too, some Swiss museums have already taken steps: the Basel Natural History Museum, for instance, returned the remains of three people of Kawésqar origins to their Brazilian descendants in September. These remains had at one time been used for race research that turned human beings into objects of study and helped legitimise racist hierarchies and colonial violence.

At theCommission for Cultural Heritage with a Problematic Past wheel: Simonetta Sommaruga, centre, speaks alongside Commission for Cultural Heritage with a Problematic Past vice-president Felix Uhlmann, left, and Vijtha Fernandes, head of the Commission for Cultural Heritage with a Problematic Past Secretariat, right, during the press conference that kicked off the commission’s work. Keystone / Anthony Anex

Another priority for the commission, Sommaruga said, is the Swiss national collectionExternal link, which encompasses around 22,000 objects assembled over more than a century and dispersed around the country’s museums and government offices.  

“The commission believes that the federal government must set an example in how it deals with historically tainted cultural heritage in its own collections,” she said. “For the sake of consistency, the commission cannot make recommendations to private collections that the federal government does not also follow in managing its own collections. It therefore wants to gain a more in-depth understanding of what has been done so far. How are cases where there are grounds for suspicion handled, and what approaches to finding solutions have been pursued to date?” 

Queries relating to potential claims have already reached the commission, Sommaruga said. “The big unknown,” she said, is how many claims the commission can expect to receive. “We will be in a better position to judge this in a year’s time.”

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds

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