Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  It may seem rotten luck that at precisely that very moment Gurlitt was trying to build an independent life as an art historian and museum director. In 1925, there were twenty-seven thousand members of the NSDAP. Dividing the country into thirty-two main districts, or Gaue,* Hitler had appointed his gauleiters to each one, with Martin Mutschmann leading Saxony. Two years later, NSDAP membership nearly trebled, to 178,000.

  In October 1926 Joseph Goebbels became the gauleiter of Berlin. It was the gauleiters’ task to rejuvenate the party locally: clear out the violent rowdies who’d been putting off the “silent majority” and eradicate the Babylon that Germany had become. Thus, from the outset, Gurlitt found Mutschmann standing in the way of educating the inhabitants of Zwickau to the new horizons of modern art.

  Yet all was not lost. Gurlitt’s quick intellect and arrogance readily embraced the concept of eternal affability toward artists, gallery owners, and collectors. He was charm and persuasiveness personified. His exhibitions had special receptions providing enviable hospitality to schmooze the local great and good. Gurlitt’s flair for the modern, his contacts in the art world among living artists, his cultivated good taste, and his familial credentials were his unique selling points. His confidence, newfound energy, and apparent generosity of spirit were certain to attract connoisseurs.

  The most important of Gurlitt’s nurtured aficionados was the wealthy industrialist Kurt Kirchbach. Kirchbach and his twin brother, Ernst, were born and raised in Dresden. Their father, Karl, had invented a new process for industrial and automotive seals and set up a factory in 1910 in the small town of Coswig, between Dresden and Zwickau. When war was declared in 1914, Germany found that it could no longer provide any seals for automobile or tank engines, as the British manufacturer Ferodo had a virtual stranglehold on the German market. Naturally, Ferodo refused to ship any equipment after the outbreak of war.

  The brothers, in charge of the business since their father’s death in 1913, saw their opportunity, and rescued Germany’s War Department. Their genius was having come up with a type of woven asbestos, taking advantage of the local expertise in lacemaking, and creating molded and cured seals for any imaginable use. They delivered the first brake pads and seals ever made in Germany within months of the war’s outbreak. By the end of the war, they were fabulously wealthy.

  With enough money to back further inventions, they developed specialist friction-resistant resins and new perforated seals. Their wealth multiplied exponentially. Sadly, Ernst died in early 1920, toward the end of the horrendous outbreak of Spanish flu that killed around fifty million people worldwide.17

  By the time Kurt Kirchbach met Hildebrand, he was married and had taken a business partner, Hans Kattwinkel, and the company was branching out into automotive clutch facings, exporting to the rest of Europe and the United States under the trademark Jurid. With hyperinflation, Kirchbach had decided not only that they would demand to be paid in foreign exchange whenever possible, but that he would also make a range of investments to help protect his personal wealth.

  How, when, or why Kurt Kirchbach and Gurlitt began to work together is unclear.18 Yet within a very short time of his arrival in Zwickau, Hildebrand and Kirchbach became very friendly, and Kirchbach asked him to help acquire art for investment purposes—as a paid consultant. It was a phenomenal opportunity, and one to which Gurlitt devoted a great deal of time and effort.

  * * *

  Key to Hildebrand’s success would be his ability to create a collection that Kurt Kirchbach could simply adore. This meant getting to know each other well, and, above all else, trusting one another. As anyone in business knows, having a wealthy client who entrusts one with an intimate and expensive project creates a special bond and places that person in a certain position of power. Hildebrand saw not only the advantages for his short-term monetary gain and stability, but also the endless possibilities for Kirchbach to help him prize open the inner-sanctum doors of other wealthy industrialists.

  By the late 1920s, Kirchbach manufactured original automotive clutch linings and brakes for the entire German automotive industry. Kirchbach’s contacts were international, and reached the highest echelons of German industry. Gustav Krupp and Fritz Thyssen were important business associates. Philipp Reemtsma, of Reemtsma Cigarettenfabriken, was a personal friend. If Gurlitt could stick close to Kirchbach, his entire future in the art world as the “impeccable eye” of Germany’s wealthy would be assured.

  Consequently, after long and enjoyable consultations with his patron—for Kirchbach was far more than a client by 1926—it was agreed that their first foray into the art world would be in the realm of photography. It had the advantage of newness, grossly undervalued by many in Germany, and, as Gurlitt had seen in New York, was becoming vastly popular in the United States. It had the additional advantage in his patron’s eyes of being a phenomenal visual documentary of the previous tumultuous twenty years. The Kurt Kirchbach collection of over six hundred photographs—or, as it would later curiously become known, the Helene Anderson Collection—would become the most significant avant-garde photographic collection of the 1920s. Among the many photographic artists were Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Edward Weston, László Moholy-Nagy, Umbo, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. It was as if Stieglitz had whispered a wish list of his preferred European photographers to collect.19

  Of course, this was only the beginning. A superb modern-art collection followed over the long years of their friendship. Lovis Corinth, Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, and Max Liebermann became the cornerstones of Kirchbach’s collection of 234 modern-art masterpieces.20 Gurlitt had not only made an unimpeachable name for himself with this collection, but also solidified his reputation as a loyal and steadfast friend to Kirchbach. They would come to rely heavily on one another in the years ahead.

  14

  THE ROOT OF EVIL

  The dominant fashion is to look to the racial factor as the deus ex machina of the human drama.

  —CHRISTOPHER DAWSON, The Age of Gods (1928)

  It’s not what you know, but who you know, the saying goes. Thanks to Kurt Kirchbach, Gurlitt could do business as the first among equals. Despite the rise of the Nazi Party throughout the 1920s, and Mutschmann’s often loud displeasure, towns as far away as Hagen, in Westphalia, sought Gurlitt’s advice.1

  In 1925, it hardly mattered that modern art was scorned by Hitler and the Nazis. Indeed, throughout the 1920s contemporary art prices held their value. Museums continued to buy works direct from artists or the stocks of German art dealers. Most popular among the German Expressionists and Impressionists were Franz Marc, Otto Dix, Max Liebermann, and Max Beckmann.2 So long as the good times rolled on, so would Gurlitt’s rise within the established order.

  Still Gurlitt’s luck was on the wane again. Helene’s health was a concern, and her long stay of five months in the hospital had proven costly. Money was an ever rarer commodity than before. “I have sold a few things to help out the children financially,” Marie wrote. “Cornelius has sold two figures from the garden—it was not easy for us, but our burden in taxes has been heavy.… It will be so wonderful to see Helene and Putz again.”3 Hildebrand was no stay-at-home husband able or willing to nurse his wife after her two operations. Instead, he juggled the day job with advising Kirchbach and visiting Helene in hospital. Yet, despite his newfound vigor, he hadn’t realized he was battling against forces far greater than he could ever conceive.

  With President Ebert’s sudden death, the seventy-seven-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had been coaxed from retirement to become Germany’s new president. Stresemann, who had done all the groundwork in international relations, was very busy indeed. The Locarno treaties assured Germany’s western borders and the withdrawal of French troops from the cordon sanitaire* in the Rhineland. The pièce de résistance was Germany’s admission to the League of Nations. Hope prevailed, certainly among the English, that Franco-German relations would improve to the point where France would also
release its cordon sanitaire of alliances against Germany in the East—and that eventually—there would be a peaceful surrender of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, the Polish Corridor, and the Free City of Danzig.

  Nonetheless, the issue of reparations was far from resolved at Locarno. American banks and businesses had been piling on short-term loans to Germans; then the borrowers immediately plowed part of the cash into a falsely buoyant stock market for purely speculative purposes. Margin purchases and quick profits characterized investments in the “new era of hope.” Meanwhile, Germany remained obliged to continue its reparations payments with borrowed funds, digging a deeper and deeper pit for itself. Schacht announced on May 11, 1927, that the Reichsbank considered that the commercial banks’ reserves were too low.† Two days later, Schacht suspended all Reichsbank credit, creating the “Black Friday” of May 13.4 As the US secretary of the treasury’s agent general explained, “Germans are not going to get their payments under the Dawes Plan reduced because they have been buying securities on margin at much more than their correct value and now have to sell them at a sacrifice when the banks call their loans.”5

  Actually, all Europe was drunk on easy money and revolution. Everywhere, the rich speculated with a fraction of their own money that they “invested” in the stock markets. Britain had survived its ten-day General Strike of 1926, which saw the inexorable rise of a new force in politics—the Labour Party—and confirmation that the social structure of the country had irretrievably changed. Most people feared that Britain—the stalwart of European democracy—would turn toward the left like France.* At the same time, the French franc slid in value against the dollar and was worth only two cents. The French budget spiraled out of control. Joseph Stalin seized power in the Soviet Union, keen to expand Russian influence and communism. Suddenly, the Russian Bear was standing on his hind legs, growling.

  To make matters worse, Schacht, of course, was implacable at the Young Conference in February 1929 that was called at his urging and aimed at reducing reparations payments. Schacht worried about Germany’s close ties to the American economy and German indebtedness to the United States. Meanwhile, the New York Times had printed the previous December that Stresemann and Schacht were at loggerheads. In fact, Schacht went too far, demanding the return of Germany’s colonies, redefining Poland’s boundaries (making it landlocked), and demanding further reductions in reparations payments.

  Viewed as a current-affairs gambit, Schacht’s demands had risked everything, and he was thoroughly trounced at the negotiating table. The German delegate and industrialist Albert Voegler of United Steelworks stormed out of the conference and proclaimed to the government that there were insufficient safeguards for Germany.6 Of course, Voegler also told his industrialist friends Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen, and Kurt Kirchbach what happened. Rather than resign, Schacht capitulated and signed the agreement on June 7, 1929, under tremendous government pressure.†

  Schacht’s rapid surrender was heavily criticized by the conglomerates of Krupp and Thyssen. The government was agog. Kirchbach, who depended on steel from Thyssen, was firmly against the agreement, opposing any steps that might adversely affect heavy industry.

  Yet Krupp’s and Thyssen’s criticisms were playing to an audience. Schacht’s manner was reported as “vehement, intolerant … excitable and dogmatic. The most tactless, the most aggressive and the most irascible person I have seen in public life. But he was fundamentally right.”7 Nonetheless, like the two great industrialist families, Schacht had lost faith and confidence in the Weimar Republic.

  Schacht was also aware that Fritz Thyssen was the president of the supervisory board of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), and a major donor to the Nazi Party, handing over cash to Hitler personally. Emil Kirdorf, the king of coal in the Ruhr region, did the same.8 They led the industrialist backing for Hitler. United Steelworks was the second-largest coal and steel company in the world after US Steel Corporation.9

  The Thyssen connection mustn’t be underestimated. By 1929, Hitler was certainly living beyond his means, and declared to the tax officials that his personal links to German big business made this possible. In fact, on Hitler’s tax returns he stated that his profession was “writer” and the only income declared was his royalties from Mein Kampf. He was heavily in debt, if his tax returns are to be believed, and those debts were cleared absolutely in 1929.10

  A year earlier, Fritz Thyssen financed the new Nazi headquarters in Munich, named the Brown House, acting as the guarantor for the RM 350,000 loan made through the family’s Dutch bank. Pandering to Hermann Göring’s increasing self-aggrandizement, Thyssen also provided three gifts totaling RM 150,000 to “enlarge” Göring’s apartment and make improvements.11 It was a relationship that would flourish with tender attention over the coming years, and contribute to the exponential growth of the Thyssen companies. Big business, led by Fritz Thyssen personally, had abandoned Weimar.

  * * *

  October 1929 proved disastrous. Stresemann died at the beginning of the month, and on October 24 the US stock market crashed. Instantly, American loans were demanded back, and Germany—as well as the rest of the world—was plunged into a deep depression. Before the year was out, over six million Germans were unemployed. Previously booming factories had fallen silent. Bread lines snaked through cities. Petty crime was on the increase. Youth unemployment was rampant. Widespread misery enveloped the country. Schacht’s predictions of Armageddon had come true.

  Evil thrives on misery, and Adolf Hitler was positively blooming. “Never in my life,” he wrote, “have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days.”12 For Hitler, abject human suffering was the root cause of his future opportunities. He knew from the previous failed attempts at snatching power that his day could come only with the support of financial institutions and the military. The forthcoming election was tailor-made for his purposes.

  * * *

  The cornerstone of Hitler’s campaign to win the hearts of the German people centered on the emotional. He believed that only art—in whatever form—could touch the German people’s souls. He’d imbibed the essence of racial hatred and art espoused in Dr. Hans Günther’s theories in 1923 in Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes (The Racial Science of the German People) and Günther’s 1926 book Rasse und Stil (Race and Style). Others, like Ottmar Rutz (Menschheitstypen und Kunst, 1921) and Dr. Ferdinand Clauss (Die nordische Seele, 1923, and Rasse und Seele, 1926), were also instrumental. Still, it was Günther’s Rasse und Stil that coherently united art and the racist in an unholy alliance.13 Hitler, the eternal thieving magpie, took the relationship to heart as his very own.

  Essentially, these racial theories about art perverted the artist’s intent and the humanist ideal at the core of all expression. While pigeonholing the psychological catalyst that ignited all creativity, the racists were able to forge a philosophy stoked in the fires of hell based on hatred and a twisted interpretation of all human creative endeavor. When the architect Professor Paul Schultz-Naumburg’s book Kunst and Rasse was published, in 1928, he wrote, “Art is capable of expressing not alone its physical principle, but it also tries to secure supremacy in every way for its own spiritual law. The battle of Weltanschauung to a large extent is fought out in the field of art.”14 It was a mirror of Hitler’s thoughts.

  Yet the dubious distinction of being the first to express racist notions in art is reserved for the Jewish writer Max Nordau and his Entartung, published in 1892. He claimed that Entartung, or degeneration, would soon become a byword for all that was un-German. It was a concept that raged like a brush fire in a windstorm through Germany in late 1920s Weimar.15

  * * *

  In the midst of this furor, Gurlitt continued to advise Kirchbach on his collection. It was a means not only of acquiring wealth and guaranteeing foreign exchange but also of elevating Kirchbach onto the same platform culturally as his business associates Krupp and Thyssen. Kirchbach, as a leading importer of raw material
s from Norway, also helped Gurlitt organize the Zwickau showcase of German Expressionist artists in Oslo.

  The Thyssen connection would prove lucrative for Gurlitt in the future, particularly as it also provided him with entrée into an international circle of experts, like Sir Joseph Duveen, who advised the Colnaghi Gallery in London and the groundbreaking American-born art historian Bernard Berenson.* These men dealt extensively with American collectors, whom Duveen had the foresight to see “had the money” where Europe only had the art.16 Duveen and Berenson (codenamed “Doris” by Duveen) had the most coveted American private client list imaginable, which included Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry J. Frick, Andrew W. Mellon, and J. P. Morgan.

  Still, it was the allegedly “secret” side deal between Duveen and the Harvard-educated Berenson that intrigued Gurlitt. They lived in ruthless times, and it had been rumored in the trade that Berenson had cut a deal with Duveen whereby he would earn a commission of 25 percent of the purchase price of an artwork if Berenson merely gave it his seal of approval.17 It was a recipe that Gurlitt would seek to replicate.

  The Berenson contact made Gurlitt wide-eyed. The first known painting to be purchased by Heinrich Thyssen, according to the Thyssen-Bornemisza archive, was a landscape painted by Rembrandt’s friend Jan Lievens in 1635 entitled Rest on the Flight into Egypt. Thyssen’s dealer Rudolf Heinemann and “BB” (as Berenson was known to friends) were not worried in the slightest that it was bought without any provenance whatsoever.18 Gurlitt, like others, had taken note.

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  With the crash of 1929, Gurlitt entered the murky world of buying art from once-wealthy people desperate to convert their investments into cash—whether it was to pay their margin calls or simply to afford to live. This was when Gurlitt advised Kirchbach to begin to acquire German Expressionist artists from willing, recently impoverished sellers—or the starving artists themselves. This may have had little to do with the changing political landscape or Gurlitt’s usual foresight, and everything to do with raw opportunism.