Each year, his efforts help about a dozen families recover art looted by Nazi plunderers during the Holocaust, treasures that give back to its victims a piece of history lost when loved ones were sent to their deaths in German labor camps.

As images of that astonishing chapter surface in various books and in photos collected by Professor Jonathan Petropoulos, the audacity of their subject matter is plain: German hands sifting through crates of gold wedding bands that belonged to Jews; American soldiers recovering a Monet canvas hidden in a salt mine by Nazis; Hitler in a private moment, appearing to pat the hand of an art dealer enlisted by the Third Reich to keep stolen art under Nazi control.

While Petropoulos, the John V. Croul Professor of Modern European History and Claremont McKenna College’s answer to Indiana Jones, hasn’t dodged poison-dart-blowing tribesmen to recover golden idols in South American jungles, his service as the art and cultural property research director for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States is helping heirs get back what is rightfully theirs. The 21-member commission was formed under President Clinton’s authority in 1998 with the prerogative that Americans be aware of how their government deals with assets illegally acquired during the Nazi era.

The commission was chaired by former Seagram president and CEO Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., while Petropoulos oversaw a staff of six in Washington, D.C., compiling a history of cultural property that came into the hands of the United States government during and after World War II.

“A number of scholars worked together to put this topic on the table---to have people understand that all artworks were not returned after war’s end,” Petropoulos said.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets concluded its work with a report titled Plunder and Restitution: The U.S. and Holocaust Victims’ Assets, submitted to President Clinton in January 2002, just days before he left office. Petropoulos meanwhile returned to campus last fall after a year’s sabbatical in Augsburg and Munich---a trip that helped him transition from one area of research to another. “It’s time to evolve and move on,” he said of his studies.

He described the sabbatical as time spent between reading scholarly literature on aristocrats during the Third Reich, and a personal study of royal houses in 20th century Germany, specifically examining the 19 royal families still in Germany after World War I. The research is for a third book by Petropoulos: Royals and the Reich: The House of Hessen in Nazi Germany, set for publication in 2004 by Oxford University Press.

During his sabbatical, Petropoulos also gave various lectures on looted art and collaborated on the making of a show for Bavarian Television based on his book, The Faustian Bargain. He also served as visiting professor and Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Augsburg and later met in Washington with documentary filmmakers who are producing a movie on plundered art. He also participated in Euromeet gatherings with CMC students and alumni in England and Austria before returning home.

Having invested almost 20 years in the study of Nazi plundering, by comparison Petropoulos’ work in art reclamation is fairly recent, having been triggered by a 1998 visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he recognized Monet’s Water Lilies, 1904. Taken from French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, whose gallery, Paul Rosenberg & Company, represented major masters of the School of Paris, the painting was part of a collection amassed for Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1941. The Monet had been registered in a French museum as an unclaimed stolen work and traveled to the U.S. as part of a special exhibition, Monet in the 20th Century. Art Loss Register, a private company that researches and recovers looted art, confirmed the identity of the painting using a Rosenberg family photograph.

Rosenberg’s family was “sincerely, genuinely overjoyed to get it back,” Petropoulos said. While some authors contend that one-third of all privately owned art in France fell into Nazi hands, Petropoulos has said that the scope of the art theft defies quantification. Still, “It constitutes the greatest looting operation in history,” he said.

Petropoulos and his two sisters grew up in Pacific Palisades, Calif., listening to stories told by their father about Nazi-occupied Greece, which involved food shortages that forced the family and the three Greek Jews they sheltered to survive for months eating only black-eyed peas, in everything from bread to soup. “This war,” he said, “was very vivid in my imagination.”

While working on a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of California, Los Angeles, Petropoulos’ interest in European history was piqued by a year of study at the University of London. He then earned a master’s degree and doctorate in modern European history at Harvard University, where studies drew his attention to the cultural aspirations of the Nazi regime. He was intrigued by philosophical issues surrounding the Nazi looting of Europe, an event he describes as “the nexus of culture and barbarism.” While theoretically developing themselves as men of refinement, he said, Nazis robbed European Jews of myriad artworks and cultural pieces.

Jonathan Petropoulos and his faithful companion track down the grave of Nazi sculptor Josef Thorak in St. Peter's Cemetary in Salzburg.