Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  The German declaration of Kriegesgefahr (danger of war) followed on July 30. At noon the following day, the German ultimatum to Russia expired without response. The German ambassador to Russia was instructed to declare war on the country by five o’clock that afternoon. Yet the kaiser, who had been building a war economy with a fleet to rival Britain’s, suddenly became “sick as a Tom-cat” at the prospect of a general all-out war.* Wilhelm II wanted the laurels of winning a war without its battles—the pleasure of saber rattling without drawing blood. Now that war had nearly arrived, so did the bluster against the British in the marginalia of his telegrams: “Aha! The common cheat” and “Rot!” and “Mr Grey is a false dog”† and even “The rascal is crazy or an idiot!”11 The kaiser suspected the British of duplicity.

  Owing to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s habitual avoidance of straight talk, his written communiqué to the German ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, was misunderstood. The most earnest of Anglophiles, Lichnowsky had, more than most, a willingness to believe that the British wished to avert war. He erroneously signaled that the British wanted peace.12

  Nonetheless, militarily, it was too late. Mobilization had begun and could not be altered. German troops were advancing toward Luxembourg. A telegram wafting the prospect of peace at the British was drafted, guaranteeing that troops would not cross the border before August 3 at 7:00 p.m.

  In France, French general Joseph Joffre was incandescent with rage. Recall the soldiers from their harvest furloughs; deploy more troops at the frontiers; assure the cooperation of the British, he fulminated. Still, the cabinet—the tenth in five years—was slow to react. War broke out on Monday, August 3, on the western front.

  * * *

  The European war, however, remained remote to most Americans. The liberal internationalist president Woodrow Wilson was just old enough to recall the devastation caused by America’s Civil War, and like many, saw the death of thousands of young men as a fruitless abomination. Worse still, he felt powerless to stop a European war, believing that the arrogance of the Europeans was hardwired into them. For Wilson, it was this arrogance that led to the unremitting quest for power between nations and wars in Europe. Militarism was, in his opinion, a danger to democracy. If war came, it ought to have nothing to do with America.

  As in Europe, many Americans went about their daily business, oblivious of the dangers that lay only days ahead. Nellie Bly, William Randolph Hearst’s New York World former star reporter, boarded the RMS Oceanic and set sail from New York on August 1, bound for Vienna via Southampton and Le Havre. Her mission had little to do with journalism, and everything to do with saving herself from bankruptcy.13

  Oskar Bondy, whose heirs would later become victims of Hildebrand’s thieving cousin Wolfgang, was Nellie’s good friend. Bondy was a Jewish Viennese businessman who had made his fortune in the sugar trade and had already agreed to pay off Bly’s $10,000 mortgage on her 15 West Thirty-seventh Street home. Meanwhile, Nellie tried to recover from being swindled by the manager of the steel-barrel company she’d inherited from her husband.14 Her intention was to meet Bondy in Vienna and agree on further financing for her Iron Clad Company, then return to New York within the month. That Austria had declared war on Serbia, and Germany was poised to invade Luxembourg four days before her departure, hadn’t figured remotely in her calculations. War, obviously, did not hold the same fear for her as bankruptcy.

  When it was rumored aboard ship that the Germans would attack and steal the $4 million in gold in the cargo hold, “I hope they do” was Nellie’s reply. “It will be a fine experience.”15

  * * *

  With the declaration of war against Serbia, Cornelia’s lover Anton Kolig knew he had to return to Austria-Hungary at once. Whether it was his determination to leave Paris first or Hildebrand’s pleading with Cornelia that ended their affair, we shall never know. Nonetheless, by July 29 Kolig and his wife were on a train to Vienna, while Hildebrand and Cornelia made their way back across a beleaguered Belgium to Cologne, and on to Dresden. The Gurlitt siblings were potentially in the gravest danger, as German troops were already advancing on the Belgian border. On Tuesday, August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The final diplomatic panic of five days to avert war probably saved Cornelia and Hildebrand from disaster. They had arrived back safely in Dresden. The question was, as a good Pan-Germanist would Hildebrand enlist?

  * * *

  Each European city greeted the war with its own brand of euphoria. “Overpowered by stormy enthusiasm,” Hitler wrote, “I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to live at this time.”16 In Berlin, a special edition of the newspaper carried the headline “The Blessing of Arms.” According to the editorial, “It is a joy to be alive.… The sword which has been forced into our hand will not be sheathed until our aims are won.” Others who were left of center persuasion, however, were depressed, fearing huge losses of German and international workers.17

  One hour after the German invasion of Belgium, the Belgian royal family rode through Brussels. Houses lining the streets were decorated with garlands of flowers and Belgian flags. People flocked outdoors to cheer. Strangers greeted one another as old friends. The people cried “Down with the Germans! Death to the assassins! Vive la Belgique indépendante!” The Austrian ambassador watched the royal procession from the parliament’s windows, wiping the tears from his eyes.18

  The scene in Paris varied only in the color of the uniforms saluted. French soldiers in their full-dress red trousers and dark blue tunics chanted as they marched: “c’est l’Alsace et la Lorraine, c’est l’Alsace qu’il nous faut, oh, oh, oh, OH!” At 6:15 p.m., Myron Herrick, the American ambassador in Paris, telephoned Premier Viviani to tell him, in a cracking voice, that he had just received a request to hoist the American flag over the German embassy. He would accept the charge, but must refuse to raise the flag.19

  In London, the mood was more somber. Britain was a nation that was deeply divided by class, often visibly discerned by the type of hat you wore to determine your social status. Those who wore cloth caps or bonnets were likely to be living in ramshackle terrace houses or dark brick tenements if they lived in towns or cities, laboring down coal mines or in deafening factories. The lucky ones lived in farmworkers’ accommodations on country estates, working for masters who sported boaters, bowlers, or toppers. As in France and Germany, the British working classes were clamoring for better wages and living standards. After all, most working-class men lived only to the age of forty-nine, women to the age of fifty-three. Many were malnourished, had rickets, or had lungs that rattled loudly with tuberculosis.20

  The cabinet was no less divided. Two ministers—Lord Morley and John Burns—had resigned, while that dominant Welsh force of nature David Lloyd George havered. Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, recalled watching the mantel clock in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street until 11:00 p.m. on August 3. Deeply troubled, she left shortly after midnight and mounted the stairs. The last image she saw was a smiling Winston Churchill bounding toward the double doors of the Cabinet Room.21

  When the kaiser heard that Britain had declared war, he moaned disingenuously, “If only someone had told me beforehand that England would take up arms against us!”22 The greatest pity of it all was that both sides firmly believed, and told their people, that the soldiers would all be home for Christmas.

  * * *

  Within days, although too late to see the first Great Retreat of the Allies from Mons on August 23, 1914, and the invasion of France, Wilibald Gurlitt was attached as an officer to the List Company of the Hundredth Regiment of the Twenty-Third Reserve Division, Twelfth (Royal Saxon) Reserve Corps of the Fourth Army.23 Hildebrand had enrolled at University of Frankfurt as planned, but during the first semester was assessed and conscripted into the army in Dresden. By 1915, he joined his brother, but in the Seventh Company of the same Hundredth Regiment, as a fresh-faced lieutenant.24
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br />   On the eastern front, in early September, the Russian army had been defeated at Tannenberg near East Prussia by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff’s Eighth Army.25 Within the week, the massacre of Russia’s First Army occurred in East Prussia at the Masurian Lakes.* Over 170,000 Russians were killed, wounded, missing, or prisoners of war out of a total Russian contingent of 490,000 men.

  September was a terrible month for Cornelia, too. She had heard that her special friend Rolf Donandt had fallen at the Battle of the Marne on the first day. Most likely realizing the enormity of the losses Germany might sustain during the war, and how she could possibly lose both of her brothers, Cornelia felt she, too, should enter the fray. Again to some parental dismay, Cornelia volunteered for training as a Red Cross nurse, before being posted to the bloodiest theater of the war, the eastern front at Vilna.*

  By October, Germany had persuaded the decaying Ottoman Empire to enter as an ally in the hope of depriving Russia of its longed-for warm-water port. Meanwhile Germany planned to invade India.26 Though no longer the scourge of Europe, the Ottoman Empire was a gigantic region spanning the entire Middle East, including vast swaths of Saudi Arabia to the Caucasus Mountains of Russia and ancient Mesopotamia and into what is today modern Iraq.

  By the third month of the war, the trench had become every soldier’s home or stinking, muddy cold coffin. Those who still believed that they would be home for Christmas knew instinctively that this was a war of attrition. When the First Battle of Artois began, on December 17, 1914, Cornelia wrote to Wilibald, not knowing where he was or how he and Hildebrand were coping. Naturally, soldiers’ letters were censored, for fear that they might reveal some crucial information about the combat or reinforcements. She had no way of knowing that her brothers were at Artois the day she wrote. The letter showed a much calmer Cornelia, dedicated to her fourteen-or-fifteen-hour days, perhaps with only three hours off between shifts. She claimed she painted when possible. She feared that her letter would not reach Wilibald before Christmas, but immediately stated, without emotion, that she would be missing Christmas Eve herself, and that this Christmas sharply contrasted with the past. Then she thought of those who were in trenches, “wet and hungry and tired and so brave and pleased to be simply alive,” and begged Wilibald to take care of himself in this “hostile land” and have the “best, most German Christmas celebration ever, and perhaps with lights and music.”27

  The last thing she wrote was “I have had a very personal letter from our Putz [Hildebrand] wondering why men, like him, like his comrades and his superiors, have to come out for the first time [into battle] and find the best way instinctively and with ease to apply themselves to their vocations. I am only sad that you are not with him.”28

  * * *

  That same month, the stranded Nellie Bly’s articles from the Austrian front appeared in the New York World. The return to her old job was down to her former boss and Hearst’s right-hand man, Arthur Brisbane. While Brisbane wanted to be helpful, having a reliable eyewitness account of the carnage was irresistible. After all, both he and Hearst learned during the Spanish-American War that war sells newspapers, and despite the president’s reticence to become involved, Americans of European origin were mightily interested in the outcome.29

  Bly was lucky with her Viennese connections. Her benefactor Oskar Bondy introduced her into Austrian high society, and soon the US ambassador to Austria, Frederic C. Penfield, found himself vouching for Bly to Ritter Oskar von Montlong, press department chief of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry.30 Writing from the front near the fortress town of Przemyśl at the Polish-Czech border, Bly portrayed a penned-in garrison of 150,000 Austrian soldiers whose deprivation and misery were beyond imagining. The constant cannonading, horses bleeding to death among the human corpses, assailed her senses. The stench of death and utter filth at the front line rocked her back. “I write for the sake of humanity,” Bly stated.31

  * * *

  New Year’s Day 1915 came and went without any sign of the fighting abating. Nineteen fourteen had seen Mons, the First Battle of the Marne, the First Battle of Ypres, the British entering Basra, and high-seas battles as far afield as the Falkland Islands. The news pages of the London papers reflected a troubled nation at home and abroad. News from the home front was dominated by strikes, news from abroad by death and destruction. On January 19, the first zeppelin attack hit Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn in Norfolk, killing five civilians. It was the first airborne attack on British soil.

  The Gurlitt family had worrying news, too. Cholera had broken out in the Hundredth Regiment, and two soldiers were already dead. Worse was still to come. Wilibald had been wounded, and according to the first notice was on the island fortress of Château d’Oléron, off the coast of France in the Atlantic. Their distress was soon relieved, when a “correction” to the earlier telegram came through in the lists of February 15 that Wilibald was mistakenly reported as a prisoner. Yet until he was finally sent home, over a month later, they understandably fretted about which report to believe. For his parents, the waiting seemed nearly intolerable. Though Wilibald had obviously been through hell, Cornelius and Marie were relieved that he had been only “lightly” wounded in the leg.32

  * * *

  Still, the war pulverized millions of fighting men. President Woodrow Wilson remained adamant that the United States must maintain its policy of neutrality; he had sought the personal assurances of the kaiser that Germany would halt the use of unrestricted warfare against neutral shipping. The kaiser was happy to comply. It came as a shock, therefore, to the president when the Cunard liner Lusitania, bound for Liverpool, was sunk on May 7.

  On September 25, Hildebrand Gurlitt took part against the “great allied offensive” at the Second Battle of Champagne, ten days after his twentieth birthday. The offensive was quickly bogged down in the face of a determined and better-equipped enemy. According to the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, there were undiminished and furious bombardments in Champagne on the twenty-fourth and in Flanders on September 25. The “great allied offensive” produced no definitive advance, and the credit, according to Falkenhayn, belonged to the German soldiers. “It must not be forgotten that the German soldier on the Western Front is entitled to most of the credit for the fact that the reinforcements from the East came up in time. His marvelous resistance in the pitifully shattered positions … Not content with that, he attacked with magnificent self-sacrifice the enemy masses surging over and around him.”33

  Less than a month later, on October 15, 1915, Nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a firing squad in Brussels for having aided the escape of stranded British soldiers. Under the strict letter of military law, the Germans felt justified in ordering her execution. They were unprepared, however, for the outcry and revulsion that followed. Franz von Rintelen, a German prisoner of war at Donington Hall in England, then used as a prison camp, wrote, “The news of the, shall I call it, grotesque, [sic] execution of Nurse Cavell seemed most revolting … [German] officers openly expressed themselves that they would have flatly refused, had they been called upon, to order a firing squad to shoot a woman; others, like myself were grieved as well on the gross miscalculation of the British spirit.”34

  Nurse Cavell could well have been the patriotic Cornelia Gurlitt.

  6

  GURLITT’S STRUGGLE

  There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one’s self on lies and fables.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Many who fought in the Great War were scarred, not only by their injuries, but also by the emotional and mental trials they were made to endure. The sight of such wholesale slaughter to gain a few feet of land, to be bogged down in a congealed aspic of blood and guts and mud without any idea of when or how their ordeal would end, twisted many minds and made it impossible for even time to heal their wounds.

  Adolf Hitler was the exception. A fanatical believer in the Pan-German ideal, he would never
waver from his absolute faith in German superiority. He was already twisted with lethal racial hatred and a warped worldview.The Great War was simply the making of him and the beginning of his struggle. He proclaimed during a speech in 1934 that the Great War created a “stupendous impression … upon me … the greatest of all experiences.”1 It also kindled his appreciation of politics—although initially as a Communist, according to a fellow dispatch rider, Hans Mend.2 The interest was naturally short-lived, as Hitler was seeking to create a new political reality to reflect his personal convictions.

  Hitler volunteered and enrolled in the First Company of the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, known as the List Regiment. His comrades included Rudolf Hess; regimental clerk Sergeant-Major Max Amann (later the Nazi Party’s* and Hitler’s business manager); and fellow dispatch rider and “wholesome son of the soil” Hans Mend—who would write a best-selling book entitled Adolf Hitler im Felde 1914–1918. Published in 1931, it caused some considerable embarrassment.† Their battalion adjutant was Lieutenant Gutmann, a Jewish typewriter manufacturer from Nuremberg, who recommended Hitler for his Iron Cross second class at Christmas 1914.3

  Hans Mend claimed that Hitler “never had anything to do with guns.” He was “a runner based behind the lines at regimental headquarters. Every two or three days he would have to deliver a message; the rest of the time he spent ‘in back,’ painting, talking politics, and having altercations.” Mend claimed that Hitler was soon known as “crazy Adolf” and claimed that the future despot “struck me as a psychopath from the start … often flew into a rage when contradicted, throwing himself on the ground and frothing at the mouth.”4