The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  However, one aspect of that day, and of the days that followed, I find hard to imagine. Almost every contemporary account notes that the skies over Bosbeek and the rest of western Holland were clear and blue, that it was an unusually beautiful spring morning. I know, rationally, that even under the Nazis there surely were sunny days; I just can’t see it. Whenever I think of my grandparents during the Nazi nightmare, I envision them only in the monochromatic shades of World War II newsreels, under clouds of SS black and skies of Wehrmacht gray.

  For the Dutch, the struggle against the invading German army was all quite hopeless, a David and Goliath contest in which the giant soon carried the day. For their offensive on the Western Front, the Germans had a modern army and air force with Stuka dive-bombers and hundreds of tanks. The Dutch air force consisted mainly of biplanes, its armored forces comprised exactly thirty-nine armored cars, one tank, which was out of service, and five diminutive tankettes. The Dutch defense certainly showed instances of heroism. The Dutch army actually staged a successful counterattack the next day—the German attack on The Hague ended in failure. To the south, though, the battle of Rotterdam raged. Again German ground troops did not achieve immediate supremacy. Then on the fifth day, Göring unleashed the Luftwaffe. Almost a hundred bombers flattened central Rotterdam in hours. Soon after, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Battle of the Netherlands was over in five days.

  Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch royal family fled to England with the Crown Jewels packed in a cardboard box. Thousands of panicked Dutch civilians tried to escape by going south to Belgium, including many Dutch Jews and German Jewish refugees who knew all too well what the Nazis were like. Unfortunately, Belgium was also under German attack, so most of them were turned back. Thousands of others fled westward in cars, on bicycles, or on foot, hoping to escape by sea. A few made it, including Fritz and Louise’s friends the art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, his wife, Desi, and their infant son. The Goudstikkers had made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon their fairy-tale castle, the art gallery, and their enormous art collection (over twelve hundred pieces). They secured passage on the last ship to leave the port of Ijmuiden, the SS Bodegraven. Tragically, Goudstikker went on deck during the night to get some fresh air, but when he tried to get back to his cabin, he opened the wrong door. He fell through an open hatch and broke his neck. Several hundred other refugees climbed aboard fishing boats, or any small vessel, and set out into the North Sea for England. While many were forced back by high seas or sunk by mines or German attacks, some successfully made their escape.

  Fritz and Louise could have been among them. Later, during the war, my father’s cousin Luca, Herbert’s son, met a German Jewish refugee—his name is lost—who had known Fritz in Holland. As the invasion rolled over the country, the man had offered to try to get Fritz and Louise passage with him on a fishing boat to England. Fritz declined, the story went, and told Luca’s acquaintance, “Thank you, but no; nothing can happen to us. We are Dutch citizens.”

  My noble grandfather still thought that the rules of civilized behavior would apply, even with the Nazis. It was a common enough self-delusion in the Netherlands. For every Dutch civilian who tried to flee the Nazi onslaught, thousands of others simply settled down to wait it out, unwilling or unable to abandon their homes to attempt the dangerous and uncertain path of refugees. Certainly some in the Netherlands despaired, particularly the thirty thousand Jewish refugees from Germany. They had already fled the Nazis once; now they found themselves once more at the mercy of their persecutors. Reports were that suicides in Amsterdam increased threefold immediately after the invasion, mostly among the Jewish refugees.

  The writing was on the wall, but most of the Dutch people, Jews and non-Jews alike, simply hoped for the best. At first it seemed those hopes might not be misguided. The brutal measures by the Germans against the civilian population in Poland and other eastern territories contrasted dramatically with the comparatively benign way the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began. The moment the Germans marched into Poland, thousands of ordinary civilians, both Jews and non-Jews, were executed daily. Polish POWs of Jewish origin were routinely selected and shot on the spot.

  Under the Nazi racial policies, the Dutch, along with the Danes and the Norwegians, were considered to be fellow “Nordics,” “racially pure Aryans,” closely tied by culture and blood to their German occupiers. Hitler thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the Dutch could therefore easily be converted to National Socialism and the Netherlands incorporated into the greater German Reich. Even Dutch Jews were buoyed by the Nazis’ initial assurances that Dutch citizens would not be treated badly.

  Early in the occupation, the Nazis’ true intentions regarding Holland’s Jewish population had not yet been revealed. Their promises could still be taken at face value. For the moment, Jews still remained legal citizens. Soon after, German Jews were ordered to leave The Hague and other coastal towns and submit to registration. The illusion of Nazi benevolence did not last long.

  Meanwhile, the guns had barely fallen silent over Holland before a swarm of Nazi agents and art dealers descended on the country to plunder the nation’s vast treasure trove of art. In theory, they were seeking to “repatriate” art of German origin and liberate “Christian” art from unworthy Jewish collectors. In practice, they were commissioned to stock the museum Hitler was building in his hometown of Linz and to furnish the private art collections of Hermann Göring and other top Nazis. While pursuing this twisted mind-set, the Nazi art vultures were eager to make a fortune.

  On May 15, 1940, immediately following the surrender of Holland, Kajetan Mühlmann arrived in The Hague and established the Dienststelle Mühlmann, which became—under the Nazi Governor Seyss-Inquart—the central agency for all matters concerning Dutch and Belgian art properties.

  Mühlmann was an Austrian-born art historian and SS Gruppenführer. Earlier, he had served in Poland as Special Commissioner for the Protection of Works of Art in the Occupied Territories—protection and safeguarding being common Nazi euphemisms for “looting.” His stated task was to identify, evaluate, and acquire Holland’s premier artworks and collections. Dienststelle Mühlmann shared offices with the Gestapo, which was available to intervene should the owners of any desired artworks raise a fuss.

  Mühlmann’s chief assistant was Eduard Plietzsch, a German art historian and a specialist in Dutch and Flemish paintings. Before the war, Dr. Plietzsch had handled one of Fritz Gutmann’s major art deals and was thoroughly familiar with the best private collections in Holland, Fritz’s included.

  A report on Dutch collections compiled for Hitler and Göring, authored by Plietzsch and Mühlmann, ominously noted that several “important works by German masters can be found in the possession of Fritz Gutmann: portraits by Cranach, Burgkmair and Baldung . . .”

  Soon they were knocking on Fritz’s door. However, just a month after the Dutch surrender, the first Nazi agent to arrive, unannounced, at Bosbeek was a beady-eyed art dealer from Berlin named Walter Andreas Hofer. With him was Alois Miedl, another profiteer. They were particularly interested in the Gutmann silver collection. Hofer, with his brother-in-law Kurt Bachstitz in The Hague, had actually been authorized to sell several minor pieces from the collection in the 1920s. Miedl, who had moved to Holland in 1932 with his Jewish wife, had actually been present for one of the rare prewar showings of the silver collection, normally locked in Bosbeek’s strong room.

  Miedl and Hofer assured Fritz that, if he wished to leave the country, they would use their influence with their superiors. The two dealers were, in fact, special agents for none other than Hermann Göring. They pointed out that it was unwise to disappoint the Reichsmarschall. Frighteningly, it dawned on Fritz that he was Hofer’s very first call since his return to Holland. Fritz realized that he had little choice.

  However, Fritz was determined, at all costs, to protect the family legacy for which he was custodian. Instead, he agreed, albeit grudgingly, to part with seve
ral magnificent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, silver-gilt pieces from his personal collection, including the Johannes Lencker ewer in the shape of a triton, the Horse and Rider by Hans Ludwig Kienle, and a pair of silver-gilt wedding cups by Hans Petzolt. A payment was made that was far below the real value of the art pieces. Additionally, the payment went into a bank account that would soon be frozen. The Nazis always insisted on covering up extortion with a veneer of strict “legality.” Hofer assured Fritz that his cooperation would be remembered, and no doubt rewarded. Fritz wanted very much to believe him.

  Early on, a few threatened collectors and dealers in Holland did manage to turn the Nazis’ hunger for art into some kind of advantage. Fritz and Louise’s friend and neighbor Catalina von Pannwitz arranged through Hofer to sell Göring a Rembrandt and four other paintings from her Hartekamp collection in return for an exit visa to Switzerland, which Göring actually delivered as promised. In another case, Dutch Jewish art dealer Nathan Katz used his control over the collection of the late Dr. Otto Lanz to secure exit visas for himself and several other members of his family.

  So perhaps Fritz was not naive to believe that he was still in a position to negotiate—that somehow his cooperation could get his family out of Holland. Unfortunately, as time went on and as the Nazi grip tightened, the true value of Nazi promises would become all too apparent.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, pro-German quislings from the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) were quickly inserted into positions of authority. The civilian bureaucracy and police took no time in implementing the new order. Soon enough, the new masters began the systematic intimidation and persecution of Jews, which would eventually lead to genocide.

  In November 1940, Dutch Jews were banned from civil service positions, including teaching. By January 1941, Jews were required to register as such with local police and receive identity papers stamped with a J. Soon all public parks, beaches, museums, and trams were off-limits to them. Cafés, stores, and cinemas posted signs saying VOOR JODEN VERBODEN or “Forbidden for Jews.”

  In March 1942, Jewish businesses were required to have an Aryan administrator. Then on April 29, all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star, with the word Jood across it. In June, Jews had to surrender their bank accounts. Later that same month, the order went out for all Jews to surrender their jewelry and art. One of the last anti-Jewish regulations prohibited the use of public phones. Authorities also disconnected the telephones of all Jewish subscribers. During this bureaucratic nightmare, the Nazis even found time to pass Decree Number 140, which banned Jews from owning pigeons.

  Dutch Jews reacted to this tightening noose of restrictions in various ways. Most continued to comply because, like their non-Jewish countrymen, they were accustomed to abiding by the law, no matter how absurd. In many cases the Amsterdam-based Jewish Council actually encouraged compliance, fearing that resistance would prompt still harsher measures.

  Jews by the hundreds, and then the thousands, were rounded up and transferred to the Westerbork detention camp. Starting in 1942, the deportees were “relocated” to the east, supposedly to “labor camps.” Their homes were seized and their possessions stolen, down to the last spoon and teacup. What was not kept by Dutch collaborators was shipped to Germany.

  A few Jews joined the Resistance, obtaining counterfeit identification documents and staying, the lucky ones at least, one step ahead of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled local police. Thousands of others, such as Anne Frank and her family, became onderduikers, or literally “underdivers.” They went into hiding, usually with the help of sympathetic and brave non-Jewish friends or neighbors. Like the Franks, they spent months, even years, in attics and barns or concealed spaces in homes, trembling with fear when the Nazis and Dutch “Jew hunters” came looking. In her famous diary, Anne described watching from her attic hiding place in Amsterdam as “night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there. If so, the whole family is taken away . . . . They often go around with lists, knocking only on those doors where they know there’s a big haul to be made. They frequently offer a bounty, so much per head.”

  Twenty-five thousand Jews in Holland went into hiding; of those, some nine thousand, Anne Frank among them, were caught or betrayed. All the same, those who went into hiding stood a better chance of surviving than those who did not. A grim example is that Anne Frank and her family avoided Auschwitz for almost a year longer than her friend (and our cousin) Susi Ledermann and her family.

  In Bosbeek, Louise’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, Thekla, died of natural causes shortly after the German invasion, compounded, no doubt, by sheer dread. Going into hiding had not been an option. The Gutmann–Von Landaus were too prominent, too well-known, too closely watched. For them, the early days of the German occupation were not a case of police cars racing through the streets and hard men pounding on their doors, but rather a slow shrinking of the world they had known.

  As the occupation progressed, Fritz’s company, Firma F. B. Gutmann, was, like all Jewish businesses, “Aryanized” and placed under control of a non-Jewish administrator. Its assets were liquidated at a fraction of their value, of which Fritz never saw a guilder. The Gutmanns’ cars were requisitioned by the German army—Jews were prohibited from owning or driving automobiles—and the household staff at Bosbeek began to dwindle. The gardeners and chauffeurs were drafted into labor battalions or went into hiding. The Dutch maids and cooks were prohibited by Nazi decree from working in a “non-Aryan” home. Soon only Piet, the butler, was left. Jews were next forbidden to travel, except to Amsterdam and the ghetto, which left Fritz and Louise confined to Bosbeek in a form of house arrest. Life descended into genteel shabbiness. Fritz’s old friend Franz Koenigs recalled going to dinner at Bosbeek at the end of April in 1941. The Gutmanns had secured a rare Dutch delicacy, the last of that season’s kievit eggs—which Fritz, luckily, had found on the estate. Just one week later, Koenigs was in Cologne, where, in mysterious circumstances, he died under a train in the railway station.

  The Gutmanns’ friends were disappearing fast. In a letter written in 1942 and smuggled to my aunt in Italy, Fritz described the creeping terror that was enveloping the country, how people they had known had been taken away, held as hostages, or gone into hiding. Others simply vanished.

  “Poor Maisels has already become a victim, and if we will ever see him again only the gods know,” Fritz wrote to Lili. Rikard Maisels was originally from Vienna and Fritz’s business partner and friend. They never did see him again. Maisels perished in Auschwitz soon after Fritz wrote his letter.

  From the same smuggled letter: “Reni and Egon [two of Lili’s childhood friends] have disappeared without a trace, supposedly they are safe, but I do not know . . . . Your nice professor from Leiden [one of Lili’s high school teachers] is being held as a hostage, of whom five have already been shot . . . and so many, many more that had to leave, never to return. It is a horrible misery!”

  Yet, for all his despair, Fritz still held out hope.

  • • •

  From throughout the art world, the rapacious opportunists numbered in the hundreds. Chief among them were representatives of Adolf Hitler and his second-in-command, the corpulent Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

  Hitler, a failed artist of pre–World War I Vienna, still fancied himself an art connoisseur. His tastes, however, were limited to works consistent with National Socialist ideals. Even Rembrandt was deemed “too Jewish” by many Nazis. Works that did fit into this narrow range included most old masters, usually German, and works considered to be Teutonic. Significantly, much of Fritz’s collection fell under these headings. (Hitler also collected kitsch paintings of German peasants and heroic war scenes of the type that might be found on 1930s propaganda posters.)

  Following the 1938 annexation of Austria, Hitler made plans to build the self-styled Führermuseum in Linz, where he had grown up as a boy.
It was to be a monument to himself and Nazism that would be stocked with thousands of paintings and other objets d’art amassed (by his minions) from museums and private collections throughout Europe. The Special Linz Commission, under the direction of art historian and museum director Hans Posse, was created to acquire works for the planned Führermuseum.

  Göring, meanwhile, was a collector of virtually kleptomaniacal proportions. He stocked his palatial hunting lodge Carinhall (and other residences) with more than four thousand artworks, including some fifty paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and thirty by Peter Paul Rubens. With typical Göring taste, these were displayed side by side with a few fakes and such lesser masterpieces as a watercolor by one Adolf Hitler, not to mention countless stuffed stag heads. Although Göring publicly toed the Nazi line against “degenerate” art, he also accumulated modern paintings by the hundreds, using them frequently as a kind of currency to trade for more acceptable works.

  Julius Böhler, a Munich-based art dealer, often advised Hitler and Göring on art matters. He was also acquainted with Fritz and had even sold some paintings to him during the 1920s. Now he was also advising the Dienststelle Mühlmann. Holland was not, however, the exclusive domain of this official agency. Numerous freelancers also popped in regularly to snatch up coveted pieces for their Nazi patrons before someone else got them first. Competition among the top Nazi collectors was often fierce, sometimes even pitting Göring and Hitler against each other for possession of a particularly coveted work—although in the end Hitler always won.