Replies

Speaking of Joseph Korbel a couple of interesting articles:

1.) London Times < "Art Theft": Joseph Korbel Steals Jewish
Art Treasures at the End of WW II, Flees to the U.S.

2.) Washington Post < Lavish praise for Joseph Korbel
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1.) ART THEFT
UNITED STATES
In the London Times
Albright's father
'took war loot to America'
by Matthew Campbell, Washington

March 30, 1999 - A WEALTHY Austrian family is threatening legal action
against Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, in an
acrimonious row over a priceless collection of paintings and antiques that
has its roots in the chaotic aftermath of the second world war.
In a hitherto unpublicised dispute, descendants of Karl Nebrich, an Austrian
industrialist, claim that Albright's father, Josef Korbel, a former Czech
foreign ministry official who was Jewish, stole millions of dollars' worth
of art and furniture from them, then fled with it and his family to America
at the end of the war.
Tired of endless brush-offs from an American lawyer acting for John Korbel,
Albright's brother, Nebrich's heirs are considering legal proceedings to
reclaim the property - including a collection of old masters - in what risks
becoming an embarrassing distraction for America's first female secretary of
state.
"I cannot believe the American secretary of state enjoys eating with my
family's silver," Philip Harmer, a great-grandson of Nebrich, said last
week. "These things must be handed over to my family."
Albright fled from Nazism and then Stalinism as a child and has cited these
events as having shaped her world view. After escaping to London when the
Germans marched into Prague in 1939, her family returned to the Czech
capital in 1945, when Albright was eight. They found that several of the
family's Jewish relatives who had stayed behind had died in concentration
camps. A luxurious first-floor flat at 11 Hradsanke Street in Prague was
assigned to Albright's father as a reward for his services to the Czech
foreign ministry. It had been expropriated from the Nebriches, who, although
not members of the Nazi party, had lived comfortably as citizens of the
Reich during the war but then found themselves out of favour with the Czech
authorities when the war ended.
The Nebriches allege that Korbel took possession of paintings, silver and
antique furniture, though these were not included in the expropriation
order. "He took the lot, even the nails from the wall," said Doris Renner, a
daughter of Nebrich. When Korbel was appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia, he
moved his family - and, allegedly, the treasure trove of art - to Belgrade.
Three years later, however, Czechoslovakia's communists staged a coup and
Korbel, an opponent of the communists, was in danger. The family fled to
America, where he became a professor at the University of Denver.
The Nebrich family tried for decades to track a "Dr Korbel" in America. But
it was not until 1996, when Albright - then America's ambassador to the
United Nations - revisited her childhood home in Prague and spoke of her
happy memories, that the Nebrich family realised she was Korbel's daughter.
Harmer, acting for Nebrich's two surviving children - Renner, his
great-aunt, and Ruth Harmer, his grandmother - began bombarding Albright's
office with faxes, letters and lists of items allegedly taken by Korbel.
Among them were 20 paintings - including one by Tintoretto, the Venetian
master, and one by Andrea del Sarto, another of the most important artists
of the 16th century.
"You lived in our flat as an eight-year-old child and I am sure you will
remember some of the paintings mentioned on the attached list," Harmer wrote
to Albright in February 1997. He suggested a meeting. The response was not
promising. "You may wish to raise this matter with the government of the
Czech Republic," a State Department official wrote back.
After more faxes from Harmer, Albright handed the file to John Korbel, her
younger brother. Michael Jaffe, his lawyer, wrote to Harmer in October,
1997, saying: "There is no basis whatever for thinking that any artworks of
the late Ambassador Korbel came to him improperly."
Undeterred, Harmer flew to Washington last year to see the lawyer.
"Essentially he said we have no case and warned us not to make a noise since
this powerful woman is involved," Harmer alleged.
The lawyer declined to discuss the case last week and Korbel, who works for
the accounting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers in Arlington, Virginia, was
unavailable for comment.
Harmer is considering taking Albright, Korbel and their sister, Kathy, to
court. He was heartened recently by Korbel's reported acknowledgment to a
journalist writing a biography of Albright that at least some works on the
Nebrich list belong either to him or to Kathy. None of the paintings is
believed to be hanging in Albright's home in Georgetown, Washington.
Harmer said the family believed that Korbel Sr might have sold some of the
paintings to finance his start in America. "We accept that Josef Korbel's
children are not responsible for their father's activities," he wrote in
another fax to Korbel's lawyer last week. "However," "we definitely expected
them to list any items honestly and to hand them over."
Renner says she recalls Josef Korbel arguing that he was entitled to take
the Nebriches' belongings as compensation for having lost everything to the
Nazis.
"All his relatives died in concentration camps," she said last week from her
home on the shores of Lake Wolfgang near Salzburg. "That is very sad. But it
doesn't justify him taking everything from us."
To verify, go to www.the-times.co.uk/back issues/March28/1999/world.
back
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2.) Josef Korbel's Enduring Foreign Policy Legacy

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2000; Page A26

As a junior at the University of Denver, Condoleezza Rice was all set to
pursue a career in music, helping children appreciate Mozart and Beethoven.
Then the future national security adviser to President-elect Bush took a
course in international politics under a professor named Josef Korbel.
Suddenly, almost overnight, she found her vocation. "It was like love at
first sight," she recalls. Prodded by Korbel, a refugee from communism, she
became fascinated by the Soviet Union, and eventually decided to teach
international relations herself. She describes her old professor as "one of
the most central figures in my life, next to my parents."
There are few better examples of continuity in American foreign policy than
the obscure international relations professor who was at once the mentor of
the incoming national security adviser and the father of the outgoing
secretary of state. Like Rice, Madeleine K. Albright depicts Korbel, who
died in 1977, as the guiding intellectual influence on her life. "A good
deal of what I did," she once told an interviewer, "I did because I wanted
to be like my father."
On the surface, it is difficult to imagine two more different women than
Rice and Albright, the first female national security adviser and the first
female secretary of state. Rice is a Republican, Albright a Democrat. Rice
is the granddaughter of an Alabama cotton farmer, Albright the granddaughter
of a Czech Jewish businessman who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Rice
was born in Alabama in 1954, just as the Supreme Court was desegregating
American education. Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, shortly
before the country's dismemberment by the Nazis.
But although they belong to different generations and different political
parties, Rice and Albright seem to share a similar "Korbelian" view of the
world. Like their mentor, they see America as a moral beacon to the rest of
the world "the indispensable country," in Albright's words. At the same
time, their ideology is tempered by pragmatism. In a 1998 interview, Rice
described Korbel as a "moderate conservative" in foreign policy, a
description that could apply to Albright or herself.
Under Korbel's guidance, both Albright and Rice made Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union their principal field of study, almost to the exclusion of
other important regions, such as the Middle East and China. Both wrote books
inspired by, and dedicated to, Korbel. Albright wrote her doctoral
dissertation on the role of the press in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia;
Rice studied the relationship between the Soviet and Czechoslovak armies.
As both women have testified, Korbel was a remarkable teacher, with a gift
for communicating his enthusiasm to others. But he was also an
extraordinarily complicated personality: a man of great moral principle who
felt it necessary to hide his Jewish background, an exuberant character
forever struggling with an ingrained European pessimism, a naturally
gregarious man who could be rude and high-handed.
Not the least of Korbel's contradictions was his attitude toward women
wanting to make a career in foreign policy. The founder of a graduate school
for international studies at the University of Denver, Korbel initially was
reluctant to accept female students and professors. Over time, however, he
became a champion of women such as Rice, whose father was a member of the
university's faculty.
"He was nothing but supportive and insistent, even pushy, about me going
into this field," said Rice, recalling how Korbel dissuaded her from
becoming a lawyer and insisted she take a course in comparative communism.
It was the same way with Albright, who became a foreign policy aide to Sen.
Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) at the time that Rice was studying under her
father. "He was as proud of her, and as aggressive about her prospects, as
he was about me," Rice added.
Former associates say that Korbel's attitudes about women reflected the
spirit of the times and his own difficulty in adjusting to American
egalitarian ideas. According to his former graduate school deputy, Arthur
Gilbert, Korbel at first was reluctant to take female graduate students
because he thought "the women would not get jobs and it would not redound to
the credit of the school he was trying to build." By the late '60s, however,
Korbel had changed his mind. "It was like that with everything. He would
take stands, and then he adjusted," Gilbert said.
A former diplomat forced to flee Czechoslovakia after the 1939 Nazi
takeover, Korbel spent the war years in London, as an adviser to Eduard
Benes, the exiled Czechoslovak president. His early writings suggest that he
was sympathetic to left-wing, socialist ideas but, as he later put it, "I
lost my faith" as a result of the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
When the Czechoslovak Communists staged a coup in 1948, toppling a
democratic government, Korbel was serving as his country's ambassador to
Yugoslavia. This time, he and his family found refuge in America. They ended
up in Denver, where Korbel set about trying to build an international
relations school capable of competing with East Coast institutions such as
Columbia, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.
Despite his background, Korbel had little time for emigre» politics. "He was
not a traditional anti-communist hard-liner," recalled a University of
Denver colleague, Karen Feste. "He was skeptical and hardheaded, but he was
also in favor of the policy of detente [with the Soviet Union]. He was not
an ideologue."
Granted U.S. citizenship in 1957, Korbel was fiercely loyal to his adopted
country and was reluctant to criticize U.S. foreign policy, even when it was
being assailed from all sides. He supported American intervention in Vietnam
until the 1968 Tet offensive, when together with his daughter Madeleine
he reluctantly concluded that it was time for U.S. troops to leave.
"He really saw America as a bastion of freedom in the world, in an
unvarnished, very patriotic, almost unquestioning way," said Rice. She
recalled Korbel's dismay on seeing television images of delegates to the
1976 Republican National Convention walking around with elephant headgear.
"That kind of thing was a great embarrassment to him. He thought it beneath
the dignity of a great country."
While Korbel inspired loyalty from students and associates, he also
antagonized some people. One former Denver professor, Vince Davis, described
him as a "control freak." Another, Ron Krieger, thought of Korbel as "very
off-putting, very unctuous."
"He was obsequious to his superiors and authoritarian to his inferiors, of
whom I was certainly one," Krieger said.
Rice, by contrast, has only praise for her former mentor, although she
describes him as "probably more liberal on domestic politics than I was."
"He was a wonderful storyteller and very attentive to his students. It was
that attentiveness, plus his ability to weave larger conceptual issues
around very interesting stories, that made him such a powerful teacher," she
said.
Although Korbel never really achieved his ambition of creating a world-class
international relations institute in the American West, his influence lives
on through his two star pupils, who set out to follow in his footsteps. When
Albright arrived at the United Nations as U.S. ambassador, practically the
first thing she did was to take out a framed portrait of her father as a
member of a U.N. mission to Kashmir in 1948 and set it up on her desk.
As for Rice, she said she might never have pursued a career in international
relations had it not been for Korbel. After abandoning her plans to become a
concert pianist and earning a master's degree at Notre Dame, she thought
about law school. But Korbel took her aside and told her, "You are very
talented, you have to become a professor."
"When I think back on that moment, I don't know if it was a subliminal
message," she said, "but I had such respect and admiration for him that I
took the idea seriously for the first time."