Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  All the while, the depression was deepening. Schacht was fighting his own economic fires, with the failure of his old bank alongside other institutions. Coupled with Hitler’s continued onslaught against the republic, the inevitable happened, and in May 1932 the rats deserted the rotting ship. General Kurt von Schleicher refused to head the Ministry of Defense unless Hindenburg hired a new captain. Chancellor Heinrich Bruening was forced to resign, and with him what was left of Weimar was lost. That June, the Reichstag was dissolved.

  Röhm wanted to strike, but Hitler hesitated. Whether his indecision was caused by the suicide of his half-niece and alleged lover Geli Raubal the previous September or by problems within the party or both is difficult to judge. By this time, Hitler began to mistrust his undisputed “number two”—Gregor Strasser—who led the party along with Ludendorff while Hitler was incarcerated at Landsberg.

  In fact, Hitler believed that no one trusted Strasser any longer, yet was loath to abandon him. Strasser, his brother Otto, and Ernst Röhm were the first to back him for the party leadership; but as far as they were concerned, the führer had changed its direction. They felt that a more socialist approach, in tune with the party’s roots, would win them the election.

  With nearly half a million men under arms in a private army, chaos reigned in Germany’s streets. In Prussia alone, there were over four hundred pitched battles. In Hamburg and Altona, nineteen people were shot dead and 285 wounded. The new chancellor, Franz von Papen, who came from impoverished Wesphalian nobility and had virtually no political power base, banned all parades prior to the forthcoming elections in July and proclaimed martial law in Berlin.

  Papen knew he had little choice but to accept a provisional cabinet headed by Hitler. “I regard your cabinet only as a temporary solution and will continue my efforts to make my party the strongest in the country,” Papen told Hitler. When polling day came, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag, with 230 seats.25 Surely Hindenburg could not refuse to make Hitler chancellor now?

  Yet that is precisely what happened. Hindenburg “regretted that Herr Hitler did not see himself in a position to support a national government appointed with the confidence of the Reich president, as he had agreed to do before the elections.”26 Naturally, Papen got the job as chancellor instead.

  Hitler’s riposte was to order his henchmen to prepare for an armed insurrection. While they plotted, he retired to his retreat at Obersalzberg. As Hitler withdrew from the limelight, Goebbels opened communications with the Center Party to sound them out about forming a coalition government. In August 1932, Goebbels went to Austria to strengthen the Nazi Party in Vienna.27 When Hitler emerged from his splendid isolation, he claimed he’d been worried about the economy. He announced that he had “held occasional conversations with economics experts like Gottfried Feder and Carl Röver and their theories foretold a disastrous future.”28 Papen must go. Only Hitler had the mandate to lead Germany, he told the government.

  Oddly, it was the Communist opposition and not the NSDAP that brought down Papen’s government. The Communists tabled a motion for a vote of “no confidence” in the chancellor; and no matter how bitter the taste, the Nazis were obliged to vote alongside them.29 The vote was 513 to 32 against the government. The Reichstag was again dissolved in September, when the new Reichstag president, Hermann Göring (representing the largest party), notoriously ignored Chancellor Papen while conducting the vote of “no confidence.” Another election was scheduled, for November 1932.

  * * *

  Rumors began to circulate that Gregor Strasser had clinched a deal with the provisional Chancellor Schleicher for the post of vice-chancellor. Goebbels, who had been suspicious of Strasser for years, urged Hitler to act. After pacing the length and breadth of his villa—literally for hours—reflecting on his course of action, Hitler told Goebbels that if the party splintered, he would shoot himself.30

  Hitler, of course, did no such thing. Shortly after Schleicher became chancellor, in December 1932, he attempted to split the Nazi Party by gathering Gregor Strasser to him. Strasser’s brother Otto had already defected. As the head of the party organization, Strasser was in direct contact with all the local leaders and had earned their loyalty. When Strasser demanded that the NSDAP tolerate the Schleicher government, Göring and Goebbels persuaded Hitler not to listen. Two days later, Strasser and Hitler met privately. After a bitter row, Strasser formally resigned from the party. The fallout was greater within the party than outside it, primarily owing to paranoia about what Strasser might do. Near-superhuman efforts from Hitler and Goebbels were needed to keep the party together. Gregor Strasser’s decision was a prelude to the Night of the Long Knives, two years later, when at least eighty-five former party members were killed, including Schleicher, Röhm, and Strasser.

  * * *

  Though toppled, Papen had enjoyed a taste of power, and wanted more. A secret meeting was arranged between Papen and Hitler at the home of a Cologne banker who had donated to the Nazis.* Also present were Hitler’s economic advisor Wilhelm Keppler, Rudolf Hess, and Heinrich Himmler. Hitler left his confederates in the parlor while he and Papen spoke privately for over two hours. It proved a turning point in both men’s fortunes.

  As a result of the new entente, Strasser instantly declined Schleicher’s offer to become vice-chancellor, remaining loyal to Hitler, and crucially telling the führer the new chancellor’s plan. Germany had been struggling without an effective government for two months, since the November elections.

  When Goebbels led the NSDAP to victory in a local election at Lippe on January 15, 1933, Hindenburg’s son, Oskar, and State Secretary Otto Meissner broke the deadlock. Stealing out of the presidential palace by taxi, they were driven to the Berlin home of the phony aristocrat Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was also, coincidentally, an old army buddy of Papen’s from the Turkish front in the 1914–18 war. Once there, Oskar von Hindenburg withdrew for a private talk with Hitler. Both men kept the content of their meeting an absolute secret, yet it was Meissner’s impression that Oskar had fallen under a sort of enchantment by Hitler.31

  On January 23, 1933, Schleicher reluctantly admitted to Hindenburg that he could not forge a government majority and asked to dissolve the Reichstag. Hindenburg refused. Five days later, Schleicher resigned. Hindenburg called Papen back and asked him to explore the possibilities of forming a legally constitutional government under Hitler.

  Though Schleicher was finished, he tried to keep Hitler from assuming power by ordering the army to take over the capital, claiming that he’d been obliged by events to seize power from the Reichstag under emergency measures. Colonel Oskar von Hindenburg intervened. Acting as adjutant to his father the president, he asked General Werner von Blomberg (who led the army) where his loyalties lay. Blomberg went to the president to explain that he’d received contrary orders—one from General Schleicher and the other from his son. Hindenburg immediately swore the bewildered Blomberg in as defense minister and gave him the authority to put down any insurrection.32

  Hitler gave credit where it was due, announcing shortly after becoming chancellor, on January 30, 1933, that “if in the days of the revolution the Army had not stood on our side, then we would not be here today.”33

  * * *

  Yet these momentous events hardly seemed to concern Gurlitt. In May 1932 he’d gone to London on business, thanks once again to Kirchbach’s thriving collection and his international links. Cornelius, true to form, advised his son, despite his own increased isolation from the outside world. “I was pleased how warmly he agreed with me about my views on art issues here.” There was no real science to the academic theoretical knowledge, Cornelius believed, only talent—which was something unfathomable. Every artist made his own art, and it was up to Hildebrand to try to understand the artist rather than his art if he wished to succeed. As a final comment, Cornelius duly noted that he was pleased that Hildebrand had made the time to visit his cousin Rose Gurlitt w
hile visiting London.34

  Evidently Gurlitt’s London sojourn was a success. That July, he mounted an English art exhibition in Hamburg from works he’d personally selected in England. The British ambassador and the mayor of Hamburg spoke at the opening, and Hildebrand was asked to organize a return exhibition for Hamburg artists in London.35

  Finally, in 1932, Hildebrand Gurlitt was prospering. Then, as if to ruin his good fortune, he began to have gastrointestinal problems, which were mistaken previously as a flaring up of his nervous condition. In fact, he was suffering from Crohn’s disease and was told to eat a diet of nothing but pulpy, unsalted foods if he wanted to avoid an operation. Given that Helene was expecting their first child, good health was all the couple had on their minds. Meanwhile Germany’s government reeled.36

  On December 28, 1932, Helene gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom they named Cornelius after Hildebrand’s father. He would become known as Cornelius III to his grandfather, just like “in other princely families.”37

  That same baby Cornelius Gurlitt would become known to the world shortly before his eighty-first birthday, in 2013, as that strange recluse who’d hoarded the largest collection of alleged Nazi looted art discovered since 1945.

  16

  THE FIRST STOLEN LIVES

  To save all, we must risk all.

  —FRIEDRICH SCHILLER

  Being chancellor of a minority government was hardly the fulfillment of Hitler’s dream. Worse, the Ministry of Culture and its Department of Propaganda eluded his ministerial clutches.1 How could he be expected to save Germany from a swarm of Communists when he’d been deprived of the hearts and minds of all Germans?

  It simply wouldn’t do. So, Hitler proclaimed that he could not work with the deputies elected to the Reichstag and called new elections for March 5, 1933. Although he had the men in the SS and the SA at the ready to seize power, Hitler was insistent that he must be duly elected. In the event of an election defeat, an armed insurrection by Röhm’s and Himmler’s military zealots was absolutely forbidden. It must be done legally. Throughout his twelve-year stranglehold on Europe, “legality” would loom as the fundamental cornerstone of his criminality—he would simply change the laws to suit his aims.

  * * *

  Still, no one bargained on his first act of outlawry. While Vice-Chancellor Papen dined with President Hindenburg at the Herrenklub on the night of February 27, 1933, he saw a red glow rising from the direction of the Reichstag. The shrill cry of sirens and people running in panic signaled that the parliament building was on fire. Papen bundled the aged Hindenburg to safety. When he returned, minutes later, he saw billowing clouds of gray smoke against the night sky, lit by flames licking at the Reichstag’s roof. It was already too late to save the building.

  Hitler spent that evening with the Goebbels family. Their meal was interrupted by an urgent telephone call from Hitler’s friend Putzi Hanfstaengl with the news. By the time they reached the Reichstag, engulfed in flames, Göring was shouting to the dumbstruck crowd, “This is a Communist crime against the new government. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot.… Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.”2

  Was Göring stage-managing events? An underground passage from his Reichstag’s President’s Palace connected the central heating system directly to the Reichstag itself. Had this tunnel acted as the thoroughfare for Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and Berlin’s new SA leader, and his small contingent of storm troopers armed with self-igniting chemicals and gasoline? Had these men then made good their escape back into Göring’s President’s Palace?3 One week before the election, the fire smacked of impeccable timing.

  Equally, it is inconceivable that either Goebbels or Hitler were kept in the dark. It is also absurd to believe that they had left their chosen arsonist victim to chance. Marinus van der Lubbe, a simpleminded Dutch Communist with a long history of arson, had been groomed as their scapegoat. While the storm troopers were working in one part of the building, van der Lubbe was setting his sad campfires in another. Within two and a half minutes of this poor patsy entering, the Reichstag was already consumed by flames.4

  Van der Lubbe was arrested by Göring as he exited. “Göring knew exactly how the fire had started,” a Gestapo leader, Rudolf Diels, later said. In fact, Diels had told Göring “to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people to be arrested immediately after it.”5 That night, Diels rounded up some four thousand Communist “agitators.”

  The next day, the Communist leader of the Reichstag, Ernst Torgler, surrendered to the Gestapo. A few days later, three Bulgarian Communists—Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev—were also arrested, and were put on trial along with van der Lubbe at the Supreme Court in Leipzig. Dimitrov, who would later become prime minister of Bulgaria, destroyed Göring’s version of events, and was able to secure an acquittal for himself and his fellow countrymen. Van der Lubbe, however, was less fortunate. He was found guilty and guillotined.6 Other stolen lives soon followed.

  * * *

  Despite emergency powers granted to Hitler on February 28 to suspend portions of the constitution—including freedom of the press; the right to freedom of expression; lawful assembly; and other provisions guaranteeing personal liberty—Hitler failed to gain an absolute majority in the elections, winning only 288 seats. It was a disappointing result given the aggressive propaganda campaign waged. Billboards plastered with Nazi posters, radio programs broadcasting Hitler’s, Goebbels’s, and Göring’s voices to the entire country, mass rallies, torchlight parades, forced entry into people’s homes, and summary arrests had all failed to deliver what Hitler so dearly coveted—a clear mandate from the German people to save them. He had fallen short of the two-thirds majority required to establish his dictatorship legally.

  The rest is well-trodden history. Hitler manipulated what remained of Hindenburg’s ministers to do his bidding. On March 13, Joseph Goebbels became minister of propaganda. With a wave of the wand, the pair contrived their masterstroke, announcing the opening ceremony of the new Reichstag at the Garrison Church in Potsdam, that great shrine of Prussianism. It was here that Bismarck opened the first Reichstag of the united Germany in 1871. Here Frederick the Great was buried. It was the place of prayer of the Hohenzollern kings and the place where a young Hindenburg went on pilgrimage in 1866 as a young Guards officer. Naturally, Goebbels arranged for radio to broadcast the ceremony.

  A visibly moved Hindenburg proclaimed, “May the old spirit of this celebrated shrine permeate the generation of today, may it liberate us from selfishness and party strife and bring us together in national self-consciousness to bless a proud and free Germany, united in herself.”7 If only …

  * * *

  Cornelius Gurlitt urged his family to vote for Hitler in the March 1933 elections. Despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic remarks, Cornelius wanted Hitler as chancellor because he “is a great man.” He was happy to accept restrictions on his freedom in recognition of a “higher power” that would protect Germany.8

  These “restrictions” referred to the Enabling Act, which Hitler put before the Reichstag on March 23. The duly elected delegates met for the first time at the Kroll Opera House that day, the only building in Berlin large enough to accommodate them. With the passing of the Enabling Act Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich, Hitler swept away parliamentary democracy in Germany in five short, sharp paragraphs. Total authority over all legislation, the national budget, and any constitutional amendments was given to the cabinet for an emergency period of four years. The powers of the president would remain undisturbed, as would the status of the Reichstag. The federal structure, too, would remain unaltered. Churches and their relationships with the state would not be changed.

  All who opposed the motion were shouted down. Still, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, leader of the Center Party, was able to argue successfully that the presidential veto should remain. Kaas mustn’t have known that Hindenburg was already descending into
the shadows of senility. When the vote was taken, 441 delegates agreed against 84, all Social Democrats, who voted against the bill.

  The gangsters had taken over the state, legally. Hindenburg would never exercise his right of veto. At last, Hitler was dictator, elected by a minority of Germans.

  * * *

  Only days after Cornelius pledged his support for the Hitler dictatorship, Hildebrand wrote to an art dealer in Tenerife, Eduardo Westerdahl. As a respected Spanish art critic, painter, and writer and the publisher of the Gaceta del Arte (the Art Gazette), Westerdahl had contacted Gurlitt about the Surrealist movement. Could Gurlitt possibly send him some photographs and articles for his magazine? Hildebrand was thrilled to comply, since by 1933 he was a changed man. The “new, improved” Gurlitt was never one to miss an opportunity, so he asked whether Westerdahl would consider an exhibition; and if so, would he like to exhibit the work of a Hamburg artist? Gurlitt, of course, was happy to arrange for transportation by steamer free of charge to Westerdahl, and hoped he would respond, giving the size of his gallery and how much space might be made available for such an exhibition.9

  Evidently, Westerdahl was delighted. In January 1933, Gurlitt wrote back concerning the transportation and packaging arrangements.10 Six months later, Gurlitt apologized to Westerdahl for taking so long to reply to his April 2 letter due to “subversion” and other “outside things” that had distracted him.11 The June letter states that in order to proceed with the export license, “you must write to me that you would like to exhibit the best examples of German Expressionism.” Then Gurlitt instructed Westerdahl to lie. He must also declare “that these works are from the old tradition of established art (also of less extreme art, such as the smaller experimentations). Please make your wishes abundantly clear … as only then, will I be able to send you the paintings you desire.”12

  What caused a delay of two months between Westerdahl’s April letter and Gurlitt’s reply? Given that he instructed Westerdahl in the precise wording of an outright lie, “the old tradition of established art,” there is only one possible cause. The Nazis were closing in on purveyors of the modern art so hated by Hitler.