Goering

by Roger Manvell

  The following year, 1942, Goering had to defend Rosenberg’s unit from charges of irregular art dealing. He wrote Rosenberg a personal letter of appreciation on May 30.

  MY DEAR PARTY COMRADE ROSENBERG:

  Your unit for the acquisition of cultural treasures in Paris has, I believe, been quite wrongly suspected recently of indulging in art dealing, and to some extent this misunderstanding may be due to me. I personally both know and appreciate the work of the unit very well, and I want to state that there is hardly any other unit that deserves so much praise for continuous good work, and that applies to all the members of the unit.

  As for this recent suspicion that the unit has been conducting art deals on its own account, I think that I have inadvertently given cause to that rumor’s getting about, the reason being that I have repeatedly asked officers of the unit to remember me and my interests whenever, either in Paris or elsewhere in France, they happen to hear about certain art treasures which may be of interest for my own collection that they may find in the hands of dealers or private persons. Since this has happened quite frequently, I have once again asked those officers to do me the favor of acquiring these items, and I have always kept a certain account available for them to draw on for this purpose. So when these officers were particularly keen on making contacts with art dealers, they did it solely as a personal favor to me in helping me to build up my collection. . . .

  On the other hand, of course, I personally support the work of your unit quite considerably and wherever I find an opportunity to do so; undoubtedly many of the cultural treasures collected by your unit are due to the fact that I personally and my own various units have done their best to help yours.

  On June 18 Rosenberg wrote a reply that had evidently been carefully thought out.

  It was very kind of you, Herr Reich Marshal, to express your appreciation of the work done by my unit in France, and it goes without saying that all my colleagues remain at your disposal always and will serve you to the best of their ability. . . .

  With a view to the historical importance of the unit’s work, and in order to clear the officers concerned, I have ordered a thorough investigation into whatever has been done so far in securing art treasures. This check is now being made, and it seems all the more necessary since in certain circles, as you kindly informed me, my unit has been suspected of indulging in art dealing. . . . Since you have made special accounts available for the art treasures already acquired by you, I should like to be told how you want to dispose of these funds. . . . I do hope you will not resent or misinterpret this question, but I hope you will agree with me that the work of my unit would be impossible but for the successful struggle of our party. Moreover, the Party Treasurer has provided generous funds for carrying out those tasks. I hope you will agree with me that art treasures confiscated from former Jewish property should be considered secured in favor of the party. It would seem to be only fair that great art treasures secured from such sources should one day become the property of the party. Needless to say, the final decision on this must rest with the Führer, but since it was the party that financed the twenty years’ struggle against Jewry, it certainly would seem that this is a fair decision.10

  As we have seen, Goering had many private and State accounts from which he could pay for works of art that did not come to him through gift or confiscation. He was in the habit of acquiring what he needed in the occupied territories by means of loans against his various State accounts, as this note of December 6, 1940, an internal memorandum within Goering’s household office, clearly reveals:

  Lieutenant Colonel Veltjens of the Staff of the Army Commander in the Netherlands, General Christiansen, called at this office today with regard to the reimbursement to the Army Commander in the Netherlands of one million guilders (M.1,333,000) advanced to the Herr Reich Marshal for private purchases. By agreement with Herr Lieutenant General Bodenschatz, I have instructed the Prussian State Bank to remit M.530,000 from the Sonderkonto to the credit of General Christiansen in Amsterdam. Because of this payment, the Sonderkonto, which was recently brought up to M.3,100,000, is exhausted, and fresh funds will be required so as to remit the balance of the amount due to General Christiansen.11

  The Sonderkonto was a special account which had to be replenished from time to time from State funds. Goering’s deals were often on a very large scale, as the case of the Goudsticker property reveals. Jacques Goudsticker was one of the most important of the Dutch art dealers and Goering acquired the whole of his art properties, which were valued at some five million dollars, for a sum considerably less than this; the contract was dated July 13, 1940, and the purchase price two million guilders. The owner was said to be away ill. The pictures Goering wanted from this collection went by train to Carinhall; the rest were left on sale to provide money for other works.12

  Goering spent many millions of public money in acquiring the masterpieces that covered the walls of Carinhall, Mauterndorf, Veldenstein and his residences in Berlin. He regarded himself as the privileged trustee of the German nation, a trustee who was able to enjoy in private the beauty of those works which would eventually be displayed to the nation at the Hermann Goering Museum. Although he was the kind of man who loved to bargain and had an intense dislike of being duped by astute dealers, he was well aware, as he said later at Nuremberg, that prices tended to rise the moment he or his agents were seen approaching. But money became less real to him as his craving for the possession of art grew greater, and the large sums he authorized, borrowed or acquired were in the end only so many entries on paper to be recorded by his staff. The pictures, the statues, the tapestries and the plate were real.

  The Dutch art dealer de Boer has described how Goering and his agents would conduct their deals.13 Goering, dressed in civilian clothes, visited de Boer’s gallery twice with his aides. On the first occasion he merely took a fleeting glance at the pictures and said he would come back soon to make some purchases. Before he returned, de Boer put away some of his more valuable works, but Goering (whose considerable knowledge of Dutch art could not be denied) remembered exactly what he had seen on the previous visit and inquired where the missing pictures were. He bought some twenty or so works, none of them particularly valuable. Then he saw a painting by Jan Steen that he seemed to like particularly. It was quite expensive—somewhere around 80,000 or 100,000 guilders, de Boer remembers; Goering said it was too expensive, more than he wanted to spend, much as he liked the picture. Then he turned to Hofer, who was with him, mentioned one of his own Jan Steen paintings and suggested an exchange. Hofer insisted that the Herr Reich Marshal’s piece was more valuable. But Goering replied that he liked the painting here and that he would gladly exchange his own for it. De Boer was still unhappy at making this deal, but Hofer came back alone and made veiled threats that if the Reich Marshal was annoyed it might become unpleasant for certain Jewish relations of Madame de Boer. Goering is described by de Boer as remarkably interested in pictures; the way he became absorbed in them, the dealer has said, one might have thought he had nothing else to think about.

  Goering was among those who bought one of the celebrated forgeries painted by van Meegeren.14 Since these forgeries for a period had deceived the most expert eyes, Goering can hardly be blamed for buying what seemed to be a picture by the hand of Vermeer. The genuine purchase of art treasures, the acquisition of them through looting and confiscation, and the preservation of them from the Allied air raids and other hazards of war all led to the continual flow of works from the occupied countries to Germany, many in crates marked “A.H.” for Hitler or “H.G.” for Goering. So great was the desire to sell to Goering that even his servants received presents from dealers anxious to establish goodwill in the right place. Robert Kropp recalls how a dealer in Amsterdam gave him a small but valuable picture merely because he had admired it. Kropp was astonished, but took the picture and later asked Goering whether he had been right to accept it. Goering laughed. “Of course you must keep it,” he said,
but when he saw it he wanted it for himself. He gave Kropp a larger but quite valueless view of Carinhall in exchange and did not hide his pleasure at acquiring another small treasure in this way.

  Some of the sales to Goering may well have been conducted under pressure. This was said to be the case by M. Renders, whose valuable collection of some thirty paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish school was bought by Goering and then reclaimed by their owner after the war. Shortly after the occupation of southern Germany by the American forces, Major Anderson, American Military Government officer with the 101st Airborne Division, traced these pictures to the castle of Zell am See, in Austria, where Emmy Goering remained for a while after her husband’s capture. She wept when the paintings were taken from her. Edda’s nurse herself gave the Americans a canvas wrapped in a package which Goering had left with her, telling her to look after it carefully, as it was of very great value. It turned out to be van Meegeren’s “Vermeer.”

  Apart from the ruthless confiscation of works of art from helpless Jewish owners, Goering was normally careful to study appearances when acquiring famous works from abroad. He experienced most trouble in his relations with Italy. In surviving confidential documents of considerable length,15 Hans Georg von Mackensen, the German ambassador in Rome, complains bitterly (if diplomatically) about the trouble and humiliation he was caused due to the acquisition of art treasures for Goering’s collection. He had, he writes, unpleasant interviews with the Italian Minister of Education, and even with Mussolini and Ciano. Eventually, in May 1942, he was forced to make public denial of the rumors that important Italian works of art had been sent to Germany, and he announced that in any case the export of masterpieces from Italy would be stopped by law. Nevertheless, Goering continued to buy or acquire Italian pictures; they were stored in crates and kept in an annex to the German embassy in Rome while waiting transport to Germany. He acquired Memling’s Portrait of a Man from the Corsini family for 6,900,000 lire, and he paid over ten million for the Spiridon Leda, a picture attributed to Leonardo—though this painting he had to relinquish to Hitler. He bought furniture and tapestries from Bellini, an art dealer in Florence, and in June 1941 Hofer paid Count Contini in Florence six million lire for a valuable collection of Renaissance paintings.16

  The incident that embarrassed Goering most in his uneasy relations with the Italians was the precious birthday present sent him by the Hermann Goering Division after it had taken possession of Monte Cassino. The monastery had been used by the Italian government in 1943 as a repository for art treasures that came principally from the Museum of Naples and included pictures by Titian, Vandyke and Raphael and antique bronzes from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Nearly two hundred cases of paintings and other works of art were deposited there, and arrangements were made to send them to the Vatican for safekeeping—less some fifteen cases which members of the Hermann Goering Division stole and sent to Goering for his birthday in January 1944. Goering was horrified and issued a reprimand. But the paintings did not go straight back to Italy; they were sent to the caverns of the Alt Aussee for safekeeping while they waited for official transport back to Italy.17

  In all these varied ways the great art collection with its center at Carinhall was gradually massed together ready for permanent exhibition after the war in the Hermann Goering Museum. It remained to the end in the charge of Andreas Hofer, and Gisela Limberger acted as librarian and confidential secretary responsible for the endless correspondence involved in Goering’s deals and acquisitions. 18 The photographic record they compiled of the collection filled 217 large albums which came into the possession of the American authorities after the war.19 Eventually the Carinhall portion of Goering’s art collection (he had seven art-filled residences in all) had to be packed and sent south for safekeeping. The Americans confiscated the final load, which included twenty-seven cases of books, four cases of glassware, seven of porcelain, eight of gold and silver plate, and six of rugs. This was, of course, only a fraction of the truckloads and trainloads of precious things that had been sent from the north during the weeks preceding the final evacuation of Carinhall in April 1945.

  Goering collected everything of interest and value, including Oriental weapons, alabaster vases and Renaissance sundials. He had a writing desk which had once been the property of Cardinal Mazarin. He had fine examples of eighteenth-century Beauvais tapestries and some Gothic tapestries which had been carefully chosen as companion pieces to certain Tournai hunting scenes he had bought for the bargain price of twenty million francs at a forced sale of the Sèze collection in France. He owned several altarpieces, such as a French Passion and Crucifixion of the fifteenth century; the latter had been confiscated from the art dealer Seligmann in Paris. The most important of his altarpieces, by the Master of the Holy Kinship, an artist of the Cologne school of the fifteenth century, he acquired on the basis of an exchange with the Louvre. Also from the Louvre he acquired the life-size statue of the Magdalene known as La Belle Allemande, carved in wood, the work of the sixteenth-century Swabian sculptor Gregor Erhardt. The statue was thought by the Americans to bear some resemblance to Goering’s wife. Among the pictures he took a special pride in owning were five portraits by Rembrandt, including the Bearded Man, the Man with Turban, and portraits of his wife, her sister and her son, a Velázquez Infanta, Rubens’ Resurrection of Lazarus, Chardin’s Joueuse de Volant, Fragonard’s Young Girl with Chinese Figure, David’s Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, paintings by Frans Hals, Vandyke, van Eyck, Boucher and Goya, and his special collection of work by the two Lucas Cranachs, the elder and the younger.

  The final destination for the last great consignment of Goering’s collection was Berchtesgaden. When it was located by the American experts sent to survey art looting, this consignment was discovered packed in the Luftwaffe’s rest house at Unterstein, three kilometers south of Berchtesgaden. The paintings filled forty rooms, the sculptures were jammed into four rooms and a corridor, and another room was piled high with tapestries. Two rooms were filled with rugs and another two rooms with hundreds of empty picture frames. Further rooms were piled with boxes and trunks and barrels full of porcelain. A chapel attached to the rest house was stacked with fine furniture of the Italian Renaissance. All this represented one single trainload, which Goering had ordered his men to store in a large bunker near his property in Berchtesgaden. But the Allied armies had reached the district before this could be done, and American soldiers had found most of the collection still stacked in the nine coaches of Goering’s train; Goering’s men had apparently been more interested in emptying two compartments filled with bottles of champagne and whiskey that Goering could not bear to leave behind for the Russians who overran Carinhall. 20 The American soldiers in the end stacked the collection in the rest house. This train represented Goering’s final stripping of the contents of Carinhall. The process of removal to the south had been continuous during the weeks preceding, and various consignments had been dispersed in different places. His valuable collection of weapons, for example, was found in the possession of Fritz Görnnert, a member of Goering’s staff.

  Goering was to the end the most assiduous collector of art among the Nazi leaders. Hitler, obsessed with war, left his great possessions in store unseen. Gradually the treasures looted by Rosenberg found their way into various centers, such as the cool tunnels of the salt mines of the Alt Aussee, where the Americans found six thousand paintings and vast collections of sculpture, furniture and tapestries, as well as valuable books and manuscripts. The whole area of Berchtesgaden was found to be full of art treasures, more or less hidden from the Allies. The chaos represented by the mixture of private looting and genuine removal of valuable objects to places of safety to avoid destruction by bombing was to mean months of checking by the investigating units set up to trace and catalogue the tens of thousands of missing works which their owners wanted returned to them after the war. Many works were irretrievably lost, many were damaged, and some no doubt are still to be found in the
places where they have remained hidden. This was another martyrdom that Nazi Germany inflicted: the stealing and displacing of thousands of the masterpieces of European art until they finally came to rest in mine shafts, railway sidings, bunkers and storerooms, or were snatched from the nervous hands of petty agents still trying to steal the precious remnants of their masters’ plunder.

  IX

  Eclipse

  THE TWELVE MONTHS preceding the Allied landings in Normandy on D Day, June 6, 1944, saw Germany’s empire contract on every front. Mussolini, who had been urging Hitler in vain to make peace with Russia, fell from power in July 1943; by September the Allies were in southern Italy, an Italian armistice had been signed with the Allies, and Hitler had stolen the captive Mussolini from Badoglio—an operation carried out from the air by Himmler’s and not Goering’s men. In Russia the German forces, after an unsuccessful July offensive, were in retreat during the remainder of the summer, while in Germany itself the great Anglo-American air offensive from Britain grew to devastating proportions, depressing deeply though it did not break the morale of the German people. The network of conspiracy within Germany against Hitler failed time and again to achieve effective action, culminating in the brave but unsuccessful attempt on the Führer’s life made by the hostile generals on July 20, 1944. Meanwhile the Allied foothold in Normandy had become an established invasion, and the great Russian offensive had pushed the eastern front back into Poland.