Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Gurlitt, however, was not the only nervous art dealer in June 1933. The rough-and-tumble of the art world was becoming venomous. April 1—the day after Hitler’s dictatorship began—was also the consummate art dealer Alfred Flechtheim’s birthday and the day the Nazis began to specifically target him. Goebbels had appointed architect Eugen Hönig as the temporary leader of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste (RBK), or Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, twenty-four hours earlier. It was Hönig who would lead the initial attack against the Jew Flechtheim.

  Hönig proclaimed that the problem of inflation in the art world had not been caused by the world economic problem. Rather, inflation had crept in owing to that “element among art dealers who were raising prices … that there were those professing connoisseurship without having the moral competency.” Hönig had chosen his words carefully, accusing Flechtheim, the general director of the Staatlichen Museum in Berlin, Prussian senator of the Akademie der Künste Wilhelm Waetzold, and the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie director Walter Kaesbach of being guilty of carrying out “the whole art swindle.”13

  The sharp intakes of breath rippled across the international art markets. Flechtheim? Surely it was not for his art but rather for his obvious Jewishness? Why else involve the senator for Prussian art and the Düsseldorf-based Walter Kaesbach, who were Flechtheim’s closest friends in the government art sector? What about the Expressionist artists, like Emil Nolde, who supported Hitler?

  There was more to come. Ten days after Hönig’s war of words directed against Flechtheim, Göring ordered a search of the Bauhaus in Berlin, claiming it was a fortress of subversives. At the end of term in July 1933, it was closed. It was the beginning of the endgame.

  * * *

  Kulturpolitik, or cultural politics, was implemented from March 31, 1933. Over the next two years a dictatorial cultural bureaucracy took shape. Not only was Goebbels’s Reichs Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda involved, but so, too, were Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Education Minister Bernhard Rust. While provincial governments maintained their jurisdiction during the first nine months of the Third Reich, Hitler had already given the order to Göring to arrest Communist artists who remained in Germany.14

  From the outset, overlapping of duties and interpretation of bailiwicks remained vague. Alfred Rosenberg, the self-appointed spiritual leader of the Nazis, had been ineffectual in grabbing his fair share of the propaganda spoils from Goebbels. Meanwhile, Göring, Goebbels, and Robert Ley, head of the National Labor Front, frequently skirmished in the field of artistic expression. Education Minister Rust praised Nolde in private, but in public, Rust prevented Berlin’s Nationalgalerie boss, Alois Schardt, from endorsing modern art. Interior Minister Frick closed and then reopened the exhibition of modern works at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in Berlin—actions that smacked of indecision or, worse, some sort of cronyism of which Frick had been unaware.15

  Cronyism usually meant protection by a powerful ally, but could also mean carrying out the Nazis’ will. Möller was close to Rust and Goebbels, since he was allowed to continue to exhibit pro-modernist groups like Der Norden in his gallery well into the autumn of 1935. Yet his real safety stemmed from foreign ministers Konstantin von Neurath and later Joachim Ribbentrop.16 Möller continued exhibiting, buying, and selling modern art unmolested while acting with implicit Nazi approval.17

  Still, the art market represented only a fraction of Hitler’s perceived enemies. Those most dangerous to Hitler’s dictatorship, his political opponents, were handled under the Enabling Act, which allowed him to abolish the separate powers of the historic German states, and devastate Germany’s core political infrastructure. At the same time, the SA was given the go-ahead to wield its sadistic, primitive urges on Germany’s populace.

  Some fifty thousand supposed “opponents” of the regime were arrested and imprisoned in institutions and ad hoc concentration camps. They were subjected to extreme violence and brutality. Then there were “the disappeared”—in the main, political opponents from the Center Party, Communists, and Social Democrats. Unlike earlier, the elimination of the opposition was carried out in public, to serve as a constant reminder of what antagonism of the regime really meant.18

  * * *

  Flechtheim’s face became a ubiquitous symbol of the international Jew, as Hitler’s poster boy—plastered onto posters, spread across newspapers, and distorted into the very image of the degeneration that Hitler associated with modern art. Karl Buchholz had wisely left Flechtheim’s Berlin establishment to set up his own bookshop and gallery before 1933. Still, he remained loosely associated with his former boss through Curt Valentin, who became Flechtheim’s manager when Buchholz left. Alex Vömel still ran the Flechtheim Düsseldorf gallery. Together, they would be the key individuals to “help” Flechtheim ship his most valuable paintings to safety in France, Switzerland, and England.

  Nonetheless, as each day passed, Flechtheim heard and saw the atrocities taking place around him. Each day, he became more and more jittery, fearing that the Gestapo would burst in and take him away to some place of torture and steal his paintings and livelihood. The only thing keeping him in Berlin was his wife, Betty, who simply refused to leave her Berlin. Things would surely improve, she told her husband.

  Hildebrand Gurlitt knew better. On August 31, he wrote to Eduardo Westerdahl from a new temporary address—13 Zesenstrasse. “I must advise you that after long and arduous indecision I have resigned from my position at the art association. I would not like to abandon our project together, but must first see through a different company if there is a future in German abstract art internationally. While this chapter is frozen, I hope that our plans are merely deferred.”19 What was this “different company”? “Today’s Germany is so different intellectually,” he continued, “that our former working practices are no longer valid.”20

  The letter hints that Gurlitt may have been shaken by the dilemma facing dealers like Flechtheim and artists like Nolde and Liebermann. Or was it that he saw an unprecedented opportunity to get extremely rich quickly? He was certainly intelligent enough to have understood the threat to anyone trading in modern art or whose livelihood depended on Jewish artists. The incident with Westerdahl had been a double blow: closing a new market and losing face with Flechtheim, who had agreed through Gurlitt to provide Westerdahl with photographs for his magazine as well as give the contact details for Kandinsky.21

  * * *

  Whether Gurlitt had actually been attacked so early in the new regime seems unlikely, except for his support of modern art. Those with a Jewish grandparent—a second-degree Mischling, or mixed-breed—would need to wait until the September 15, 1935,* Nuremberg Laws. These restricted intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles and reduced Jews to “state subjects,” stripping them of German citizenship. This makes his decision to resign from the Kunstverein in August 1933 a calculated means of survival based on a clear assessment of the prevailing Nazi winds.

  Certainly, the effect of the cordon of Nazi laws squeezing the life force from Cornelius was a factor. Where the old man had voted for Hitler seven weeks earlier, he was now writing to his sister Else in words that would become a well-worn tale. Providing a long litany of Gurlitts who fought for Germany since 1870, Cornelius lamented that he was suddenly part of a “Jew-ridden family” expected to deny his own “dear and noble mother.”22 He wondered about the rest of the family and what was to become of them. Cornelius’s last thought was of Rose, in England, and Manfred, whose life had become difficult because of his “latest Bolshevik opera.”23

  Cornelius hadn’t known that Manfred’s mother, the despised Annarella, had already taken up her son’s cause with the Nazis, claiming that Manfred was not Fritz’s son but rather the offspring of Willi Waldecker. Whether true or not, this removed the stain of Judaism. After her tale was coupled with Manfred’s promise to join the Nazi Party and write music for the Nazis, Cornelius’s nephew became part of the Nazi arts establishment, too.24


  Then, days later, an outraged Cornelius fulminated, “My sons, I have to make statements, whether we are Aryans. This is very difficult, because no one knows what an Aryan is. Was our ancestor, the monk Matinus Gorlitius, a German or a Jew?”* Gorlitius was a good Lutheran and the superintendent in Brunswick. Their name derived from the village of Görlitz. Nearby Mount Gora, admittedly, had a Slavic name. Would Hitler next call them Slavs? “I and my sons, like all members of associations, have been asked to prove our Aryanism. How can I deny our beloved mother…? We have given our lives to Germany … there are four Iron Crosses in the family.”25 These were the same arguments all Jews used as they argued that they were German.

  * * *

  Setting up in business as an art dealer took a great deal of capital, large premises, and reasonable safety from persecution. Even if no money was needed, only Kirchbach could provide Gurlitt with the protection required for himself and his family. It was Cornelius, again, who shed light on the situation with Hildebrand, albeit in a tone of disapproval. “Hildebrand leads a strange life. A very rich factory owner, who has a very difficult marriage relationship, has discovered that Hildebrand is the only nonselfish man he knows, and therefore takes a strong interest in helping him, paying him a salary and the ensuing expenses.”26

  Cornelius’s New Year’s letter was highly informative. “Hildebrand is having bizarre experiences. A wealthy industrialist in Dresden, Mr. Kirchbach, came to visit me to clarify the situation.” Evidently, from the moment Cornelius heard about Hildebrand’s resignation from the Kunstverein, he was befuddled by his son’s new survival plan. Kirchbach arranged to visit Cornelius in person at Hildebrand’s behest. By the time Cornelius wrote his letter, Kirchbach and Hildebrand were in Naples, and would remain there throughout the Christmas period.

  Kirchbach also confided in Cornelius that “his wife was cheating on him.” Cornelius advised him, since the marriage was destroyed, to sue for divorce. Yet Kirchbach refused to contemplate a legal end to the marriage for unspecified reasons. “Now he has chosen Hildebrand as his guardian angel, because his nerves are broken. They are now both in Naples, he mostly bedridden, but he promises to pay Hildebrand well. Hildebrand is to buy him a house in Dresden when they return.” Hildebrand’s maternal cousin, the real-estate agent Hans Gerlach, was on his way to join them to discuss possible alternatives. Meanwhile, “Helene stays at the house in Hamburg and maintains the gorgeous little Cornelius. She is an excellent woman.”27

  Cornelius was allowing his innate disapproval of commerce to cloud his judgment. Kirchbach and Hildebrand had worked out that to buy and sell art in the months and years ahead, they would need to acquire Renaissance or earlier art as a basis for trade with the Reich. Where better to establish such an incomparable historical collection than Italy, where Mussolini had been exercising his own form of cultural brutality for some years? It was even smarter that they worked from a base in Naples, the hotbed of the Camorra, which even the Sicilian Mafia feared. Kirchbach could not bear for his adoptive son Hildebrand to be dehumanized by the Nazis, and agreed that such a collection would seal his guarantee of Gurlitt’s safety more than his own unassailable contribution to the war effort.

  Since the Nazis no longer wanted Expressionist art, Gurlitt saw Kirchbach as his means to bring German Expressionism under their protective wings and out into the wider world. Hildebrand immediately saw the benefit of “saving modern art” while becoming rich. Kirchbach, for his part, would amass a magnificent contemporary-art collection to match his photographic collection, while sharing the company of a man he’d come to admire. It was a plan that would eventually be mirrored by the Nazis during the forthcoming conflagration.

  PART III

  WORLD WAR AND WILDERNESS

  So foul a sky clears not without a storm.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King John

  17

  CHAMBERS OF HORRORS

  Newspapers are read differently now … between the lines.

  —VICTOR KLEMPERER, I Will Bear Witness, April 7, 1933

  “The prophets of racism and of racist art sounded to most of us in the Weimar Republic like lonely fanatics, condemned to everlasting frustration,” eyewitness Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt wrote. “So many of us, young and old … missed one important fact: these mad prophets were gathering around them significant audiences of ever-mounting size.”1 The Nazis were no longer some small right-wing group that could be shrugged off blithely. Their politics of humiliation and exclusion had gripped the country.

  Another eyewitness, Dresden Technical University academic, journalist, and diarist Victor Klemperer, knew from the outset that his earlier conversion to Protestantism was immaterial to the Nazis. His diaries, kept throughout the Nazi period, show a different Dresden from the one Cornelius Gurlitt portrayed. While many gritted their teeth and hoped, Klemperer felt shame wash over him. On the day Hitler became chancellor he remarked simply that he saw “a children’s ball with the swastika” in a toy shop.2 The führer intended to warp children’s minds from the earliest age.

  Those who opposed Hitler did so at their very real peril. The boycott of Jewish shops was announced on April 1. Dresden’s student body announced that “the honor of German students forbids them to come into contact with Jews.” Munich’s Jewish professors had already been prevented from setting foot on the university campus. The rectors of Frankfurt University, the Technical University Brunswick, and Bonn University Hospital were arrested along with the Christian business editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung.3 Klemperer mocked the Spanish Ministry of Education for offering Albert Einstein a professorship (which he accepted) as the most bizarre twist of history. As “Germany establishes [la] limpieza de sangre”—a purification of the blood first performed in the Spanish Inquisition—“Spain appoints the German Jew.”4

  Jews—whether assimilated or religious, captains of industry or peasants—were treated with equal disregard. Humiliation and torture were the Nazis’ stock-in-trade. In Dortmund, ten days prior to the boycott of Jewish shops, SA and SS thugs dragged a butcher, Julius Rosenfeld, and his son through the streets to a brickyard. There the son was compelled to set fire to his father’s beard with a burning newspaper for their captors’ amusement. After five hours, the elder Rosenfeld was released on the condition that he return with a slaughtered ox for his tormenters as ransom for his son.5

  These brutal acts and others, called Einzelaktionen, were commonplace before Hitler’s seizure of power, known as Machtergreifung. Courts were emptied of judges and lawyers—either for their political views or their religion; doctors were not allowed to conduct medical research or treat certain patients. These Einzelaktionen were not spontaneous excesses, as the Nazis characterized them in an attempt to brush the subject aside, but rather part of a concentrated national propaganda campaign to terrify any opposition into submission.

  Artists, too, were fighting for their existence. There were over 870 Jewish writers and editors in Germany in 1933 and an estimated 2,600 Jewish artists who were active in the visual arts and music. There were thousands more who were Communists or political opponents.6 Even William Dodd, Roosevelt’s rather green ambassador to Berlin, who arrived in the summer of 1933, couldn’t fail to miss the intimidation and the irreparable cost to human life.7 To claim ignorance of the arrests, disappearances, and propaganda or the rising violence throughout German society was nothing short of an outright lie to oneself and others.

  * * *

  Joseph Goebbels, as the Third Reich’s “culture czar,” ran a stiletto-sharp propaganda machinery of state, as agreed with Hitler a year earlier.8 Allowed to construct his own vast administration in the realms of the arts, propaganda, and Kulturpolitik, Goebbels was responsible for delivering Hitler’s undiluted message. Within the first month of the Machtergreifung, Klemperer noted “the influence of the tremendous propaganda—films, broadcasting, newspapers, flags, ever more celebrations (today is the Day of the Nation, Adolf the Leader’s birthday)?” He admired their
expertise in advertising, filling the cinemas with films of Hitler’s rallies “to 600,000 SA men … and always the Horst Wessel Song. And everyone knuckles under.”9

  Goebbels’s private fiefdom, the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda—the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, or RMVP for short—had become a mammoth organization by the beginning of 1934. Successfully poaching bits from other ministers’ portfolios—broadcasting from the Postal Ministry, the Press Office from the Reich Chancellery, censorship from the Ministry of the Interior, and advertising from the Economics Ministry—made Goebbels extremely powerful. With the diversion of tax revenue from radio licenses, the RMVP became virtually self-funding, despite its rapid growth.10

  Goebbels’s unfettered access to Hitler and a friendship stretching back some twelve years proved too sharp a dagger for other ministers to effectively blunt. When Göring or Himmler or Ribbentrop complained about Goebbels’s abrasive attitude and covetousness, Hitler seemed unnaturally pleased. There was nothing like dissent among his ministers to keep them from plotting against him. Besides, Goebbels had the added advantages of being a crack administrator, an arch plotter, and unquestionably loyal.

  Yet Goebbels had a weak point. He actually liked modern art. When Albert Speer was sent to Goebbels’s new home in June 1933 for a spot of interior-design work, he “borrowed a few watercolors by Nolde”—bright flower paintings—from Berlin’s National Gallery. Goebbels and his wife, Magda, were thrilled with the choice—that is, until Hitler came to look at Speer’s work. “The pictures have to go at once; they’re simply impossible!” Hitler cried.11 So, they did.

  Speer felt that the combination of Goebbels’s unbridled power and doglike servility to Hitler was bizarre. “There was something fantastic about the absolute authority Hitler could assert over his closest associates of many years, even in matters of taste. Goebbels had simply groveled before Hitler.… I, too, though altogether at home in modern art, tacitly accepted Hitler’s pronouncement.”12