The show’s patron, Baldur von Schirach, the top Nazi leader, sipped wine and mingled with the guests, taking a break from duties that included overseeing the deportation of Vienna Jews.
Schirach was hungrier than ever for prestige. Until recently, the blandly handsome, boyish Schirach had basked in the glow of Hitler’s approval. He had joined the Nazi Party at eighteen in 1925, and begun to compose fanciful poetry to his Führer, “this genius grazing the stars.” At twenty-nine, he was named head of Hitler Youth, a paramilitary organization for future “Aryan supermen” that would indoctrinate 5 million German boys and girls in anti-Semitism. In 1940 he became the Gauleiter, or governor, of the Vienna Reichsgau, where he was involved in the creation of a labyrinth of secret underground fortifications, including one in the Vienna Woods that would be known as the “Schirach-bunker.”
But in Vienna, things had gone terribly wrong. Schirach had sponsored an exhibition, Young Art in the German Reich, with the kind of abstract art that had disturbed Hitler in his youth. Hitler himself had ordered the show closed.
It was an enormous blow to Schirach’s career. Now he was struggling to make a comeback. This show had to be a success.
Schirach had no idea of the true significance of the Klimt show. He was presiding over the largest retrospective ever of Klimt’s works. Some of these Klimt masterpieces would be exhibited here for the last time. This show would be the last glimpse ever of the full sweep of Klimt’s work.
Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi governor of Vienna, an aesthete who wrote poetry to “my Führer” and posed for photos that resembled Hollywood glamour shots, ca. 1934. (Illustration Credit 47.1)
For Schirach, the show would be an impressive display of Germanic culture that could compete with anything in Berlin, justifying the enormous expense in a time of wartime scarcity, when even the paper used to print the catalogue required special permission to obtain.
The philo-Semitic leanings of Klimt were, for the moment, forgotten. For the purposes of this show, Klimt was an Übermensch, a “master man,” compatible with Nazi ideals of Germanic masculinity.
Schirach had never taken Nazi art dictates too literally. Like other top Nazis, he had snapped up for a song art purged as too modern, amassing a sizable collection. Schirach bought works directly from the Belvedere-based art procurer Kajetan Mühlmann. Some offices at the Belvedere answered directly to Schirach.
As the show opened, Carl Moll, Alma’s stepfather, strode in and greeted the Nazi governor. Moll owed his career to the patronage of Jewish families, but now he was sipping wine in a roomful of paintings stolen from them. Moll entertained Nazi officials, flaunting his close friendship with Klimt and telling anecdotes about his exploits with the famous artist.
Fritz Novotny, a promising young curator at the Austrian Gallery and organizer of the show, was on hand to provide a whiff of academic respectability. Novotny could not have said he was unaware of what was happening to the Jews. The elderly Jewish parents of one of his closest friends, the exiled painter Gerhart Frankl, had written a poignant letter to Novotny, to say they were “very sad, that you stayed to face such unpleasant things” just before their deportation in 1942.
Novotny would later say he feared that leaving the Reich would endanger his infirm mother and sister. Whatever his rationale, Novotny thanked the “owners of the Klimt works for making this exhibition—and others as well—possible.”
The owners of the paintings were in no position to give permission. They were on the run or dead. Schirach had sent an official telegram to notify Hitler: “My Führer, I report to you that Vienna has been cleansed of Jews.”
So there was no need to ask the Lederers. The Lederers did not consent to exhibit Philosophy and Jurisprudence, acquired to free Klimt from officialdom in his journey to modernism. Erich Lederer would have treated any pretense to “borrow” the Beethoven Frieze to a salty-tongued diatribe. The panel of the Frieze’s muscular nude man and woman embracing—Klimt’s Kiss to the Whole World—bore its alternate, biblical title, My Kingdom Is Not of This World, which now found a serendipitous use for Reich, the German word for “kingdom.”
Ferdinand was trying to recover his Apple Tree. Yet it too was in the show. It hung near Schloss Kammer am Attersee, having been donated by Ferdinand to the Belvedere in perpetuity—yet sold by the museum to Gustav Ucicky.
Now, as Vienna was disavowing, even murdering, the Jewish agents of its cultural brilliance, Nazi art historians omitted their names in order to use their paintings as symbols. Their creations were reduced to stolen baubles, as anonymously valuable as Adele’s diamond necklace. Klimt’s brilliant portraits of Jewish women were each given a generic title: Portrait of a Lady.
The shimmering gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was a centerpiece of the show.
The Nazis had smashed Adele’s world like a mirror. But Vienna still saw itself reflected in its shards. Even the Nazis were forced to locate the Viennese essence of femininity in the face of a Jewish woman. To admit this would undermine the greater deceit of Aryan racial superiority. So the gold portrait of Adele became Portrait of a Lady with Gold Background.
A counterfeit of this magnitude was an odd act for a profession said to be motivated by a love of art. They really had no choice. How could they invoke a respected family that had so recently flourished a short walk down the Ringstrasse? How could a symbol of Vienna’s belle époque, however iconic, be revealed as a Jewish woman?
Any clue to Adele’s identity would unmask their terrible lie. They needed this icon. A month after the show, Belvedere director Bruno Grimschitz bought the second Klimt portrait of Adele, from Erich Führer, for 7,500 reichsmarks, and this too was hung as an anonymous portrait of a lady.
Nelly
As the Nazi elite admired Adele’s portrait, her family in Yugoslavia was in grave danger. Their only bargaining chip was the shares of the timber company, held in banks abroad.
In May 1942, Croatian Jews had been declared stateless. Among the few exceptions were those designated “honorary Aryans,” most of them wealthy Jews who had contributed to the “Croat cause” by handing over valuable property. Some were forced to pledge their loyalty to the Ustasha regime.
Authorities were growing impatient with their attempts to gain control over the Gutmann family lumber fortune, and its assets held in banks abroad. They ordered Viktor to travel to Switzerland and to transfer the assets there to Croatian control. Viktor would later say he foiled the plan. But soon they ordered him abroad again. They knew he would come back. They were watching his wife and children in Yugoslavia.
The anti-Nazi guerrilla partisans, commanded by Josip Broz Tito, sent an emissary to meet with Viktor. The partisan emissary urged Viktor to join them. He considered it seriously. But what would become of his family?
By July, thousands of Jews in the Osijek area had been ordered to a makeshift village in nearby Tenje. The Gutmanns were arrested and threatened with deportation. Viktor promised to hand over some company shares, and they were freed, at least for the moment, though Viktor would say he eventually foiled the share transfer. In late August, the makeshift village at Tenje was suddenly deserted. The people had been sent to Jasenovac and Auschwitz.
Now Luise and Viktor woke up every morning to a macabre world in which anything seemed possible. They heard terrible stories. The Ustasha announced that Serbs could save their lives by reporting to a regional church to convert to Roman Catholicism. Families crowded in. Ustasha officers barred the doors and set the church on fire. Luise tried to keep these stories from her children. But it was becoming more difficult. The world was closing in on them.
Brave Nelly, a highly intelligent child surrounded by danger, was too young to fully understand the ordeals of her mother and father; shown here ca. 1940. (Illustration Credit 48.1)
One sunny morning, as poppies carpeted the meadows and sunflowers raised their enormous yellow heads, Nelly heard a troop truck roar into Belisce. At the Gypsy village, it screeched to a ha
lt. Gypsy men were saddling their horses and chopping wood. Women were cooking and hanging laundry in the sun.
Soldiers shouted at the Gypsies to move to the common. The soldiers moved from house to house, yanking the arms of mothers who were still holding babies and dish towels. They pushed out grandfathers, trailed by small frightened grandchildren, shoving stragglers with rifle butts. Finally the Gypsies stood together apprehensively, blinking in the bright sun.
Then the shooting began. Nelly could hear the crackle of automatic weapon fire, and the screams. Oh my God, she thought, her heart pounding.
It seemed to last an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Then the truck roared away, toward Osijek.
There was a terrible silence. Then the town came alive. Crowds of men and woman swarmed into the Gypsy village. They helped themselves to clothes, silverware, jewelry, tables, and chairs. They haggled over goats, sheep, cows, and the Gypsies’ beautiful horses.
A couple of days later, Nelly wandered into the settlement. She ventured between the houses, eerily abandoned, their doors ajar. There was a trench of fresh earth, and village children pointed to it. That was where the Gypsies were buried. The other children skipped away. Nelly stood alone in the stillness.
Then Nelly heard a plaintive cheeping. She followed the noise to a passageway between two houses. There she spotted a speck of fluff, no bigger than a cotton boll. It was a tiny chick. The chick huddled against the house. Nelly cupped it in her hands and walked home carefully, whispering to the little orphan not to be afraid.
She called her chick Myra, and made her a nest in a small bucket so she wouldn’t get stepped on. She fed Myra by hand, petting her gently, hoping she would grow up and lay lots of eggs. But Myra grew into a cocky rooster, with a luminescent, silky tail. He came when Nelly called. This pleased her, because Nelly now had little to do.
Her world was growing smaller.
Nelly only knew bits and pieces of her parents’ desperate struggle to survive. Soldiers would show up at the house, and her parents would quietly tell her and her brother to go upstairs. Once the soldiers casually strafed a cabinet filled with antique porcelain. After they had gone, her mother knelt down and picked up all the shards of early European porcelain and stored them as carefully as if they were delicate crystal goblets.
One night in early May 1943, just before midnight, Nelly was awoken by a truck full of soldiers who arrived at the Gutmann manor. Nelly heard Luise speaking to them outside, in her pleasant melodic Viennese German. Luise called Nelly and Franz to come at once, and they all boarded the truck. They wouldn’t let Nelly take Myra. They led away her beautiful filly Baba.
Nelly and her family spent the night in a municipal office. The next morning they were taken to a police headquarters at Osijek. There they were herded, with dozens of other people, into a local school gymnasium. Mothers and fathers were huddled on the floor, with frail grandparents, children, and wide-eyed babies.
The Gutmanns were ordered to crouch down with them. They were told to keep their eyes on the floor. For what seemed like hours, Nelly stared at shoes: the lace-up boots of little children, the heels of women, the heavy men’s boots. Her muscles ached. When people involuntarily moved, or fell over, the guards shouted or kicked them.
From her parents’ whispered conversations with adults near them, Nelly learned the Ustasha was going to hand them over to the Germans. The Germans would take them to Auschwitz. People who went to Auschwitz never returned.
——
A friend of Luise’s ran to plead with the local Gestapo chief, who had seen the vivacious young baroness around town. Just a few years ago, a man of his background would never have stood a chance with a beautiful, stylish aristocrat like Luise. Things were different now. “I will help your friend,” the Gestapo officer told Luise’s friend. “But will she be nice to me afterward?”
In the gymnasium, the guards ordered the prisoners to line up to buy their train tickets to Auschwitz. Just then a door opened, and an Ustasha officer ordered the Gutmanns to get up. Nelly silently filed out of the gymnasium with her family. The other prisoners followed them with their eyes, not knowing if the Gutmanns were fortunate or doomed.
Nelly believed the friend of her mother saved their lives.
But Luise told another story. She was escorted to a majestic old place in Osijek that had once been a convent. There she was shown into an apartment with elegant furnishings and liquor. Here Luise was expected to wait for the Gestapo officer.
There were other things Luise tried to keep from her children. One day she had opened the door to a cluster of gruff German officers with alcohol on their breath. They pushed past her. Luise ordered Nelly and Franz to play downstairs.
Luise set about being the good hostess she was raised to be, making pleasant conversation in her cultivated Viennese, which they answered in homespun country German. Their conversation deteriorated into off-color jokes, conspiratorial guffaws, leering smiles. One reached for Luise, and his comrades roared with approval.
As Luise endured her drunken rapists, a young, pink-cheeked soldier hung back, clearly shocked by the animal carnality of the scene. He was goaded into taking his turn. When he finished, he looked ashamed. “Did you like me just a little bit?” he asked Luise hopefully.
Luise knew other women suffered terrifying fates. Roving soldiers locked women—Jews, Serbs, Gypsies—into military quarters where they conveniently ignored their doctrine of racial purity. When they finished with these women, they marched them into the woods and shot them.
As the alluring golden Adele was admired by strangers in Vienna, the niece of this glamorous daughter of Vienna was at the mercy of passing soldiers.
This was war, and women were the spoils.
The Immendorf Castle
It was a warm, blustery day in the spring of 1943 when the youngest baron of Schloss Immendorf, Johannes von Freudenthal, looked out of one of the castle’s glorious towers and watched trucks pull into the courtyard.
At ten, Johannes, the inquisitive pet of the family, wasn’t much of a baron yet. He still played hide-and-seek with his four brothers and sisters in the nooks and crannies of the castle turrets, imagining himself a dragon-slaying knight in one of the family’s old suits of armor.
The eagle’s-nest view of the castle took in the mountains northwest of Vienna, the Danubian river valley wine country, and one of Austria’s oldest inhabited regions. By 1943, the Schloss Immendorf had long passed its days of feudal glory, though the little baron’s father and his young wife had restored the gracefully turreted marvel. Outside were war, scarcity, and other terrible things, but Schloss Immendorf remained the family refuge.
On this cloudy day, Johannes had wandered upstairs, looking for his favorite kitten, when he heard motors outside.
The lovely Schloss Immendorf, which had just been restored, was commandeered to shelter the most important single Klimt collection from Allied bombings. 1936. (Illustration Credit 49.1)
Most strangers came in uniform. Castles were commandeered to house Nazi leaders or SS officers. His father, Baron Rudolf Freudenthal, was an officer in the Wehrmacht. A succession of German officers lived under his roof. Some were gruff and aloof. Others were kind to Johannes and played the piano with pleasure, filling the house with Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, while Johannes’s mother set a place for them.
But the strangers downstairs that day wore dark suits, not uniforms. Their workmen brought enormous boxes and panels into the timber-beamed entry hall and carried them up the spiral stairs. Johannes watched them wrestle an enormous rolled-up tapestry into the attic. The men uncoiled a long rope and hoisted wooden crates up the stairs, and Johannes jumped out of the way as they struggled, balancing paintings and stacking them, one by one, against the wall in the tower.
They disappeared downstairs. Johannes examined the paintings. The one in front was as large as Johannes: an enormous tree in bloom, set against a riot of flowers. Nothing as e
xciting as his father’s paintings of men on horses, raising their swords in battle with Napoleon.
Another painting had some naked women in it. Johannes began to pull the other canvases away from it so he could see. But they were heavy, and the whole stack began to slide. The little baron hung on, trying to prevent the paintings from falling down.
A big hand reached down from above and steadied the paintings. Johannes looked up. His father.
These are important paintings, not toys, his father told him sternly. They were painted by a great Austrian artist, Gustav Klimt. His father told Johannes to leave them alone.
The paintings were in the castle to protect them from air raids. The paintings had been in a big exhibition in Vienna. Baron Freudenthal had been given a choice: either store the paintings or house “war refugees,” which could mean unruly SS officers pushed back at Stalingrad.
The baron chose the art.
There were other eyes watching the comings and goings at Immendorf. At nearby Hollabrunn, a large and infamous SS detachment imprisoned Jewish slave laborers. They sent the prisoners to Immendorf to grow food. One of them was Anna Lenji, from Hungary. To Anna, Baron Freudenthal “was very human and tried to do whatever he could, but of course he also was under the supervision of the Nazi superintendent,” so “his power of help was very limited.”
But he was not like the leaders of the two previous camps, who had made her march naked in public with her husband and the other prisoners, “which I thought was horrible.” At Schloss Immendorf, the baron sent books to the tiny unheated hut Lenji shared with twelve prisoners, which “meant so much to us because it was a testimony to the fact that we’re still humans and not only beasts as we were treated there.”
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