The Washington Principles à rebours: Explaining Poland’s current restitution policy

This article inquiries into Poland’s current approach to the implementation of the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. It argues that it is more focused on the recovery of national heritage than on providing justice to Holocaust victims and their heirs. First, it discusses the outputs of the Expert Group established in 2009 to implement provenance research in line with the Washington Principles’s recommendations. It explains the failure of this initiative by bringing into focus the wider context of the inheritance of the war-time displacements and splitting of collections. It argues that Holocaust victims’ assets are one of many problematic items in Polish memory institutions and that the unresolved issue of post-war nationalizations are often perceived as an argument that hinders the Washington Principles’s implementation. It outlines the notions of “Polish war losses” and “national cultural goods” and discusses in detail the Polish provenance research databases. It notices that restitution in Poland is increasingly considered as an important national identity-building tool and analyzes several recent educational and branding initiatives of this kind.