Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Still, the first half of 1929 was one of personal hardship. Gurlitt was left dangling by the mayor of Hagen, in Westphalia, regarding his possible appointment as their cultural advisor—not from any malice of the mayor but rather for his untimely long-term illness.19 That June, Helene’s brother was critically ill in hospital. He was a ship’s engineer and his vessel had been shipwrecked, leaving him swimming in the Baltic for three days before he was rescued. Gurlitt “used his contacts” to have him brought to Zwickau so he could be near Helene. Yet, he soon died of pneumonia and was buried in Dresden in a plot near to Cornelia.20

  Less than three weeks later, “Hildebrand has all kinds of trouble, as the city of Zwickau faces bankruptcy and the museum will have to close,” Cornelius penned in a letter. “The mayor announced this to him and also expressed his regret and called his [Hildebrand’s] exhibitions a ‘shining testimony.’ How he will determine his future is anyone’s guess, but he’s in good spirits.”21

  How indeed. Mutschmann was outraged by the Oslo art exhibition. It was one thing to have to deal with this “syphilitic” art inside Germany, quite another to show it to the world. Marie, too, became worried. That October she wrote that “poor Hildebrand has a lot of trouble and excitement in the museum, the city has no money, and the museum will be closed and the position of director withdrawn.… They have had such a terrible year.” Indeed, eleven months earlier Hildebrand had been seriously ill with appendicitis and needed to be operated on twice, spending four weeks in hospital. Then Helene’s grandmother died, in April, followed two months later by the death of her brother. There was also the tragic death of Marie’s sister-in-law,* who was killed by a hit-and-run driver.22

  Obviously, Hildebrand was telling his parents only what he wanted them to believe: that he’d been the object of a systematic smear campaign by Gauleiter Mutschmann and Oberbürgermeister Richard Holz had quite evidently slipped his mind.

  * * *

  In 1928, the Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg—a former architectural student who had written the unreadable Myth of the Twentieth Century, which mistook all ideas about race and art for philosophy—had founded the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur with Hitler as the cultural seat of power of the Nazi Party.† Organized as an onslaught against modern art while taking advantage of the change in the political landscape, it was aimed at the hearts and minds—the emotional core—in maintaining and nurturing all that was truly German.

  Art would henceforth become the bludgeon to create the new Nazi mythology and the key to social integration in Hitler’s new, improved “collective society.”23 The raw emotional power of each individual’s reaction to art was raised to the level of high Nazi doctrine. This, Hitler felt, was intrinsic to his ultimate success.

  The Diktat of Versailles had oppressed Germany. Of course, Hitler blamed the Jews and Bolsheviks. It was a simple message, repeated time and again. A message that hit home. Hitler’s whirlwind campaign and message moved the German people. They felt that they had an ally. They also felt, wrongly, that in Hitler there was someone who felt their pain.

  When the results were in, Hitler’s NSDAP had won a staggering 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second-largest party.‡ Hitler’s inner sanctum was filled to overflowing with men who believed, as he did, that the perfect model for their new collective society would be the complete absorption of Germany’s art into the permanent fabric of the State.24

  Gone were the days when Hitler could be derided as the leader of some lunatic fringe. When the NSDAP won Saxony by a significant margin, Mutschmann swung into gear. The Ortsgruppe, or regional Nazi group, in Zwickau ousted Gurlitt on April 1, 1930, after the umpteenth assault on his character.25 Still the cover-up continued, this time on a national scale. Cited by Mutschmann to the NSDAP as the paradigm of progressive museum work, Gurlitt was nevertheless officially removed from his position for the “poor financial state” of his institution. Unofficially he was sacked for his love of modern art, a fact that Oberbürgermeister Richard Holz went to great length to affirm.26

  When the Reichsverband Bildender Künstler (Federal Association of Artists) heard about Gurlitt’s dismissal, a furor erupted. Only months earlier, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin had been heavily criticized for raising substantial funds to acquire paintings by van Gogh, and thus leaving German artists to misery in the Depression. In Gurlitt, they had an ally who bought from living German artists not only for his museum, but also for Kirchbach and other private collectors. Soon some fifty museum directors petitioned the government in protest. Surely it was their task to support contemporary German art, was it not?

  Unsurprisingly, when Hitler came to power, in January 1933, these fifty names would come to regret their solidarity with Gurlitt. They were all put onto a special list, for future retribution.

  Gurlitt, meanwhile, had no alternative but to pack his bags and return to Dresden with his wife. Still, he had no intention of living hand to mouth or hearing his father’s endless suggestions about his future for long. He’d had a foretaste of success through Kirchbach’s patronage and he wanted more. To achieve that, he would need to be flexible in his opinions, be outwardly charming, and appear to act without guile.

  15

  CHAMELEONS AND CRICKETS

  Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God.

  —The character Gottlieb in The Master (1919)

  Gurlitt sensed that those who could not adapt to the changing times would be devoured by them. His usual perspicacity had been on high alert since the art market tumbled with the crash of 1929. Museum purchases made up approximately 50 percent of the entire German market in 1928, but fell to around 28 percent in less than a year.1 By 1931, museums made up a mere 18 percent.

  Some dealers, such as Berliner Ferdinand Möller, went bankrupt during the 1923–24 hyperinflation and were barely making a comeback. Others, such as Curt Valentin, an associate of Alfred Flechtheim in 1930, complained openly about the misery of the art galleries, with their falling prices and rising expenses in photography, advertising, catalogue printing, and transportation.2

  The market was unpredictable. Prices fluctuated wildly depending on the desperation of the seller and the type of art. This was precisely when Gurlitt needed to be out in the market buying. In Kirchbach, he had a benefactor who trusted his judgment and understood the advantages and bargains on offer through other peoples’ misery. Of course, Cornelius’s disapproval made Hildebrand disguise his art dealing.3

  Nearly a year later, in March 1931, Hildebrand and Helene were still based in Dresden—and he hadn’t yet told his father the truth. Cornelius blithely wrote to his sister-in-law that Hildebrand “holds a lot of lectures and supports himself and his very dear wife. Housing issues aside, they want to move to Berlin where more earning potential is possible.”4

  Hildebrand may have tried to discuss the subject. If he did, Cornelius most likely brushed him aside, reciting the problems that Hildebrand’s uncle Fritz once faced and his cousin Wolfgang’s current financial difficulties. If Hildebrand persisted, the old man may have gone on about Hildebrand’s fragile nerves and said that he was better suited for a life in academia. Then again, knowing his father’s feelings on the subjects of commercial art dealing and his mental health, Hildebrand may have felt that silence would prove a better cure.

  * * *

  During his thirteen-month hiatus from museum life, Hildebrand surreptitiously dealt in art for Kirchbach and those to whom he was introduced. His art trade with Wolfgang dates from this period, too.* Acquisitions of German Expressionists—Nolde, Beckmann, Liebermann, and Schiele—were the most popular with both Gurlitt and Kirchbach. With the growth of the NSDAP, Gurlitt believed the contemporary art market would remain volatile. The opportunity to buy low in Germany and sell high to Americans was irresistible. It was precisely what Neumann, Duveen, and Berenson had been doing for years.

  The Museum of Modern Art had opened the year before in New York, thanks to the drive, donations,
and friendship of three women: Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Rockefeller.5 Peggy Guggenheim, the “Prophetess of the Blue Four”—Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Alexey von Jawlensky, and Wassily Kandinsky—was buying other artists’ works in droves.6 The long-awaited springboard of German Expressionists into America was achieved in 1929, too, when the Institute of Arts in Detroit bought its first Beckmann. If Gurlitt did not hop on board, the train would leave without him.

  Like Kirchbach, Hildebrand agreed that the biggest threat to the art market was not the Depression, but the rise of communism. The 1930 election had shown a rise in Communist voters to 4,592,000, increasing in their seats at the Reichstag from 54 to 77.7 The right-wing Nationalists dropped by half, paving the way for them to open discussions with the NSDAP. Gurlitt’s “shifting sands” morality helped him to reason that he was powerless to change the times in which he lived, except to make the most of them.

  The times, however, were changing beyond all reckoning. Within two years, everything Germans saw or heard was carefully and ruthlessly purged of all foreign influences. Everything from advertisements to imported foods would be censored to remove the foreign or critical elements according to the tastes of one man. For many of us today, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world where the penalty for criticism was torture and death. Gurlitt knew that if he did not adapt to the new order, he would become live bait, a cricket, for those who’d become chameleons.

  * * *

  In the autumn of 1930, a young architect who studied under Professor Heinrich Tessenow at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg, and who heard Cornelius Gurlitt lecture there, was at a turning point in his life. He had been relatively apolitical until then, though his father had been deeply distressed by the gains the Communists had made in the September elections. Like Tessenow, he believed that “It is in our nature to love our native land.… True culture comes only from the maternal womb of a nation.”8 His name was Albert Speer.

  Speer went to hear Hitler speak one evening at a beer hall at the behest of some of his students. Like some aging rock star, Hitler entered the room amid cries of near-hysterical enthusiasm. “On posters and in caricatures, I had seen him in military tunic, with shoulder straps, swastika armband, and hair flapping over his forehead,” Speer wrote. “But here he was wearing a well-fitted blue suit and looking markedly respectable. Everything about him bore out the note of reasonable modesty.”9 Speer was witnessing Hitler’s uncanny gift for turning chameleon.

  Speer expected to hear some lunatic speaking. Instead, he heard an impassioned plea against the dangers of communism and how it would rob Germany of hope and full employment and plunge their beloved nation into perpetual insecurity. Hitler succeeded at a stroke in sensing what his audience needed to hear, and how to deliver the defining message. He unified student and lecturer, small shopkeeper and the unemployed, and even provided them with a scapegoat—the international Jew. Speer was shocked at how impressive Hitler was. As for the anti-Semitism, it had been going on for so long in Germany that it was hardly something new. Besides, like everyone, Speer had “Jewish friends” and claimed he didn’t see the danger.10

  As if sleepwalking, Speer claimed that he entered “Hitler’s party” because of the hypnotic impression Hitler made on him. He claimed, too, that he had done so without reading Mein Kampf or Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, blaming this serious misstep on his lack of political schooling.11 Gurlitt could claim no such lacuna.

  * * *

  Gurlitt was the first museum director to become a victim of Nazi ideology concerning modern art. Whether it was through the support he had received from other museum directors or some introductions or assistance Kirchbach had provided behind the scenes, he was appointed at long last as director of the Hamburg Kunstverein.

  “We are very pleased with Hildebrand’s choice, and the dear young people look forward to finally being able to getting back to their own apartment,” Marie wrote in April 1931.12 The Kunstverein was located in the chic area near the Elbe on Neue Rabenstrasse. Still, Hildebrand complained to his mother after they moved into the apartment that the Kunstverein was short of money and couldn’t pay him an appropriate salary.13 The financial arrangement regarding commissions from paintings sold or indeed what private deal he had with Kirchbach at this time remained a secret.14

  In October 1931, Gurlitt went to Gothenburg, in Sweden, for the exhibition he’d arranged of a young Hamburg artist. How did he manage an international exhibition of a little-known German Expressionist in such a short period of time? Again, Kirchbach seemingly flung the doors open wide with his very substantial Swedish connections made from years of importing premium quality Swedish iron ore.15 Gurlitt’s relationship with the Zwickau industrialist was so close that when Kirchbach and his wife had growing marital difficulties, Kirchbach confided in Cornelius that Hildebrand was like an adopted son to him.16

  In the first week of December, Frau Kirchbach visited the Kaitzer Strasse home in Dresden as a houseguest for an entire week. It was she who told Cornelius and Marie how Hildebrand and Helene were really doing—and that she’d been to the “Gurlittfest” in Altona as well. Perhaps they had mixed feelings hearing about Hildebrand’s opening of another exhibition and the success of Manfred Gurlitt’s opera.* They were forced, after all, to visualize it through this polite but distant woman’s eyes.17 Even more upsetting was the unmistakable fact that Hildebrand and Helene were becoming increasingly detached from their humdrum lives and ever closer to the Kirchbachs. By the end of 1932, Kirchbach gave Hildebrand enough money to bail out Wolfgang Gurlitt from looming bankruptcy. It always paid to have a Berlin gallery in one’s back pocket.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1931, Hitler began to raise cash to fight—and win—the 1932 elections. According to his press chief, Otto Dietrich, “the Führer suddenly decided to concentrate systematically on cultivating the influential industrial magnates.”18 He would leave his rabble-rousers Goebbels and Hitler’s second-in-command Gregor Strasser to whip up the masses while he crisscrossed Germany meeting privately, often one-on-one, with Germany’s industrialists. The “hit list” was long and the usual suspects were already on board—Fritz Thyssen, Emil Kirdorf, and Albert Voegler.

  Kirdorf, Germany’s coal baron and an early convert, presided over Hitler’s slush fund, secretly known as “the Ruhr Treasury.” Others, like Georg von Schnitzler, a director of I. G. Farben, and August Rosterg, of the potash industry, said they would support Hitler. Soon Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and Commerz Bank followed. Hitler’s Munich-based SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, had his own Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft (Circle of Friends of the Economy), which would raise millions for the party.19 Lesser names like Kurt Kirchbach were also contributors, as Germany faced a stark choice in 1932 between going Communist or lurching to the right and the NSDAP.

  Schacht, too, became involved on the periphery, though he hadn’t joined the Nazi Party. He met with the heads of I. G. Farben, Bosch, and Siemens, who remained lukewarm toward Hitler as a personality. Friedrich Flick, the coal and iron magnate, gave a token fifty thousand marks to Hitler.* Wilhelm Keppler, another Nazi industrialist, pressed those involved in heavy industry to join through his fund-raising arm Keppler Kreis (Keppler Circle).20

  At this crucial time, another fund-raiser worked tirelessly, too. Hermann Göring returned to Germany in 1927 following a general political amnesty. He’d spent a great deal of his time in exile in Sweden, and married a Swedish woman who was, sadly, epileptic and contracted tuberculosis. Fritz Thyssen and other industrialists were his good friends, and soon Göring became an advisor to Lufthansa. No longer the dashing pilot of World War I, Göring would prove nonetheless invaluable in raising the Nazi profile among German aristocrats like Prince Philipp von Hessen, Queen Victoria’s great-grandson and the son-in-law of Victor Emmanuel III, king of Italy. Above all, Göring was most useful in helping to win over the military.

  A little over a month bef
ore the 1932 elections, Hitler became a German citizen, enabling him to stand for president if he wished. On February 22, 1932, Hitler allowed Goebbels to declare his candidacy for president of Germany in opposition to the elderly Hindenburg.21 As the campaign progressed, Hitler—later nicknamed “the Bohemian Corporal” by President Hindenburg—shed his recent lethargy and ran a merciless campaign of public appearances and speeches around the country, often chartering a Lufthansa aircraft. Just as the mythical gods descended from Valhalla, Goebbels used the analogy to describe “the Führer over Germany” swooping down to relieve his people’s suffering.22

  Ernst Röhm, the leader of Hitler’s 400,000 men of the SA, threw a cordon of his thugs around Berlin on the eve of the first election. The word “putsch” haunted the air again, according to Goebbels. Yet the results of the first March 13 ballot showed Hindenburg with just under the required majority to form a new government—with 49.6 percent of the vote. Hitler won 30.1 percent, and the Communist candidate Ernst Thaelmann had 13.2 percent. The influential businessman Alfred Hugenberg withdrew his German National People’s Party candidate for the second round, scheduled in a month’s time, rather than enter into a coalition with the NSDAP. Nonetheless, Hitler hoped to sweep up enough votes to beat Hindenburg, but was disappointed when Hindenburg won an outright majority of 53 percent on April 10, 1932—with a million fewer votes cast.23 Two weeks later, in the local Prussian elections, the Nazis were returned as the region’s largest party, with 38.3 percent of the vote.24