Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  It was this lack of aesthetic debate that prompted Goebbels to set up his powerful Reichskulturkammer (RKK), or Reich Chamber of Culture, in September 1933. The RKK would oversee the seven arts: visual art, music, literature, film, the press, radio, and theater. Each of the artistic divisions would have its own chamber. Attempting to prove that there was no hint of party politics, non-völkisch artists were recruited to head individual chambers. Fritz Lang took on film, modernist poet Stefan George headed literature, and Richard Strauss led the music chamber. Artists, art dealers, and those associated with any branch of the seven arts needed to become RKK members in order to work legally. So much for Hildebrand Gurlitt’s resignation from the Kunstverein a month earlier.…

  * * *

  Less than three weeks after Gurlitt’s last letter to Eduardo Westerdahl in Tenerife, Flechtheim’s Berlin gallery was “Aryanized” by Alfred E. Schulte. Valentin moved on to work with Buchholz instead of remaining under Schulte. Valentin was already aware that he’d need Buchholz’s protection in the days ahead. After all, Valentin’s mother had converted to Lutheranism from Judaism before he was born, making him a first-degree Mischling.13

  Alfred Flechtheim, meanwhile, fled to Paris. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was Flechtheim’s first hope for refuge. Kahnweiler claimed he was in no position to help. Flechtheim’s other associate, Paul Rosenberg, would not help either, despite Flechtheim’s continued pleas. Over the next three years, Flechtheim became the eponymous “wandering Jew,” spending barely longer than two weeks in any one place—moving about trying to sell what remained of his art stocks wherever he thought he could to buy his freedom. He lived in constant fear.14

  As a result of the export restrictions and close surveillance, Flechtheim was obliged to sell at unconscionably low prices, and Gurlitt was one of many salivating to take advantage of Flechtheim’s financial and personal embarrassment.15 By the summer of 1933, Flechtheim expressed his plight to George Grosz, who had fled to New York: “Regards to your wife & to [I.B.] Neumann, please. He shall pay me for the Beckmanns [I sent him], at least somewhat. I have no money at all.”16

  Flechtheim’s predicament proved fortuitous for Buchholz, Valentin, Vömel, and even Gurlitt. Vömel, manager of Flechtheim’s Düsseldorf gallery, wrote to his special friend and art dealer Christoph Bernoulli in Basel that he was making great alterations to the gallery, and “when it’s all over the Düsseldorf gallery will be changed to Galerie Alex Vömel” from March 30.17 Vömel had, however, rather jumped the proverbial gun. By sending the invitation to his new, improved Alfred Flechtheim Gallery to Flechtheim himself, the fugitive owner arranged to have his remaining stock swiftly transferred to Buchholz for safekeeping.18 Of course, nothing would be safe.

  There were others who would benefit from the new chamber of horrors in Hitler’s Germany. Some victims, like Max Beckmann, were not Jewish. Others fell instead into “degenerate” categories of Communist, Freemason, and political opposition. Karl Nierendorf and I. B. Neumann were bludgeoned into dissolving their partnership, putting Neumann into severe financial distress, coming fast on the heels of the Depression. Nierendorf’s Munich partnership with Günther Franke was henceforth called Gallery Nierendorf and Graphic Cabinet. Grete Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, who had taken over Paul Cassirer’s Berlin gallery, abandoned their German art business altogether. Ring relocated to the Cassirer subsidiary in London, whereas Feilchenfeldt went first to Holland, then to England before finally settling in Switzerland. The name Cassirer continued in London, thanks in no small part to artworks channeled from Germany through the Amsterdam subsidiary run by Helmuth Luetjens.19

  Yet a chink in the Nazi armor glared brightly to those who had the supreme will to survive. There were some auction houses that were mysteriously exempt from the onslaught. Lepke—one of the largest in Germany—and Graupe both were owned by Jews. Still, both non-Aryan firms were allowed to continue as before (until 1936) under new legislation called Toleration Regulations. In other words, Jews who brought much-needed foreign currency into the Reich would be allowed to go on trading. From 1936, Lepke was compelled to take on an Aryan partner, Hans Carl Krueger. Hans W. Lange became the “Aryanized” firm of Paul Graupe in December 1937.20 By that time, Lange was already a trading partner of Gurlitt’s.

  From March 1933, it became impossible for any auction house to sell works by Nolde, Heckel, Marc, Feininger, Dix, or Oskar Schlemmer. Soon Beckmann and Liebermann joined the crowd. The only way these artists could survive in Germany was through sales at private galleries, like Gurlitt’s, or by surreptitiously exporting their works abroad.21

  Gurlitt saw the unrivaled vistas amid the chaos. Both he and Helene immediately joined the RKK, becoming as friendly as possible with its members, especially Lange; and Goebbels’s assistant, Rolf Hetsch; and the head of the RBK, Eugen Hönig, who had been Cornelius’s student. With Kirchbach’s money, a panicked art market, distressed sellers, and the trust of artists who were losing their representation in galleries daily, Gurlitt and Kirchbach earned fabulous amounts of money—in foreign currency. Gurlitt could make himself useful to the RMVP through Hetsch and the RBK through Hönig, with his new expertise in Renaissance art, while Kirchbach protected him from on high.

  * * *

  Where Goebbels had been the mastermind behind the public’s brainwashing against modern art, the Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was more at home in supporting the völkisch art movement. As the editor of the daily Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, and a member of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (literally Combat League for German Culture), or the KDK, Rosenberg became the figurehead of völkisch groups, which were predominantly radical traditionalists.22

  This völkisch movement, so admired by Hitler, idealized the German peasant and rejected all modern styles from the Impressionists forward into the twentieth century, often labeling these artworks as “cultural garbage” or “Jewish” or “Bolshevik.” It was Rosenberg who popularized the simpler false precept of “Jewish Bolshevism.” His main task was to “demonstrate the interdependence between race, culture, science, morals and soldierly values.” One of his earliest adherents was Heinrich Himmler. From 1932, members of Rosenberg’s KDK received an illustrated journal, the Deutsche Kulturwacht, or German Culture Watch, and its readers’ thoughts were molded by its reviews of the performing arts and literature.23

  Museum directors who wanted to keep their jobs were in a quandary. To survive, they knew exhibitions deploring modern art were essential. This desire for survival—so inherent in the human mind—gave rise to art exhibitions collectively known as Art Chambers of Horrors (Schreckenskammern der Kunst) or Exhibitions of Shame (Schandaustellungen). Some museum directors chose other names, such as Images of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewistike Bilder).24 The works exhibited were drawn from locally held public collections, concentrating on the “aberrations” created by German artists.* Throughout the summer of 1933, more exhibitions were announced, geared to specific audiences for educational purposes. Still, the hidden message to the Nazi elite from the museum directors was “These works were acquired by my predecessor(s) and I don’t agree with their policies.”

  * * *

  The Gurlitts were also direct beneficiaries of the new policy. Suddenly, paintings by landscape painters like Hildebrand’s grandfather Louis were back in vogue. Architect Eugen Hönig, Goebbels’s man in charge of the RBK, had written to Cornelius on April 21, assuring him of his deep admiration for the elder statesman and, paraphrasing the words of Shakespeare, when he wrote that “he was not a towering architect, but had greatness thrust upon him.”25 Cornelius was flattered. That December, while preoccupied that no publisher would print his autobiography, he wrote his sister Else that “the great crime of the German people is that they are so big and powerful.”26

  Oddly, Cornelius failed to mention the furor created in Dresden by an exhibition that September. Held in the inner courtyard of the Neues Rathaus, it became known as the Spiegelbilder des
Verfalls in der Kunst (Mirror Images of Decadence in Art). This show traveled to twelve other cities by 1937. Hitler declared that “this unique exhibition … ought to be shown in as many German cities as possible.”27

  Since Dresden had been at the heart of German Expressionism, with the Bridge and the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe in 1919 as well as the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany, known by the acronym ASSO, the city had more images to put on show than other cities of similar size. Karlsruhe and Mannheim also mounted exhibitions, but it was Dresden that proved the forerunner of the most notorious exhibition of them all—the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937.

  Not only was the art on display stage-managed to look chaotic and reckless, unmasking the artists as mentally deranged in the eyes of the public, but the cruelest trick of all was that the public was invited “here to form its own opinion,” according to the Hakenkreuzbanner (the Swastika Banner) of April 3, 1933. Whenever public outrage became muted, actors were hired to display “outrage” to visitors.

  Artists were accused of mental illness as well as degeneracy. Some exhibitions even posted the sale prices to the museums in pre-1924 marks so that they seemed extortionate. Minors were frequently forbidden entry on the grounds that “obscene” paintings were on display. The exhibitions’ educational purposes were underlined by the “model galleries” adjacent to the chambers of horrors where “healthy, stable art” instructed the public with its sane, contrasting example.

  By 1935, having stirred up public outrage against artists and art dealers, museums began to actively rid themselves of the offending paintings. These were quickly snapped up at a fraction of their former price by the likes of Gurlitt, Buchholz, and Möller to use for bartering purposes, sales abroad, or future stock. Initially, the Folkwang Museum in Essen joined forces with Möller, while the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne worked with Gurlitt.28

  No one could pretend they hadn’t seen the future in March 1933. Deutscher Kunstbericht (German Art Report), edited by Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, clearly stated “what German artists” could expect from the new government: “That all products of cosmopolitan and Bolshevist purport be removed from German museums and collections. They were allowed to be shown ‘in a heap’ … [and] what sums were spent on them, together with the names of the gallery officials and ministers of culture who were responsible for acquiring them, after which these inartistic products can have but a single use, which is as fuel to heat public buildings.”29

  * * *

  Hermann Göring was among the first to recognize that artworks had a huge export-market potential, particularly in Britain, Switzerland, and the United States. It was a simple hop and skip from that realization to the use of contemporary art in his Four-Year Plan as a primary means of funding Germany’s rearmament. His plan was intended to make Germany independent of all imports, launching an ill-conceived program of autarky. To achieve this utopian state of self-sufficiency, coal mines and other mineral-extraction operations abandoned long before as a result of lack of productivity were reactivated. Ersatz raw materials were produced, but never equaling or surpassing the world-market price. Schacht, now economic minister, made the blunder of believing that Germany planned to export these synthetic raw materials for foreign exchange.

  The raw materials were always destined to be used to rearm. What Germany could not manufacture, it would need to buy with foreign exchange. Göring’s Four-Year Plan flew in the face of all that Schacht had worked for, with the repudiation of his own “New Plan” of 1936. Newsweek reported that Schacht had rushed back to Berlin from his Easter holiday. “Reason: Adolf Hitler had given the Assistant Nazi-in-Chief, Air Minister Göring, absolute control over raw material imports and foreign exchange.… The disgruntled Economic Minister handed in his resignation. The Führer handed it back—and reminded the doctor that Adolf Hitler is Germany.”30

  Doubtless, too, Schacht was unaware of Hitler’s intention to use Germany’s wealth of contemporary fine art to obtain foreign exchange. Though before that would be allowed officially, Germany needed to get the 1936 Olympic Games out of the way and show the world that it was once again the physical and moral powerhouse of Europe.

  18

  THE FOUR HORSEMEN

  Did we force ourselves on you or you on us?

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Faust

  Disease, War, Famine, and Death would descend, first upon Germany, then upon the world in the coming war. The four official riders of the apocalypse that befell Germany’s contemporary art in 1937 were Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, and Bernhard A. Böhmer. Yet Gurlitt alone was classed as a second-degree Mischling.

  Well before 1937, like Karl Lueger in the Vienna of Hitler’s youth, Vice-Chancellor Göring claimed he decided who was Jewish. Exceptions under the Toleration Act were based on prior service and future opportunity. Gurlitt was a most resourceful and intelligent dealer. Besides, with Hönig indebted to his father, Kirchbach an essential cog in the ever-grinding wheel of war machinery, and Hetsch a daily fellow traveler, Gurlitt had insured his future well.

  Yet when Gauleiter Mutschmann demanded Cornelius’s retirement from the architects’ association in December 1935, the old man was utterly dismayed.1 He lost the will to complete his autobiography.2 Just a few days shy of Cornelius’s eighty-sixth birthday, Wilibald was compelled to take a “leave of absence” from the University of Freiburg, too. Only Hildebrand’s newfound illustrious position, in part conferred upon him by his relationship with the indispensable Kirchbach, bucked the family’s misfortunes. Cornelius failed to grasp the reality of Hitler’s Germany, even though it had been a long time in the making.

  * * *

  From March 1933, no one was under the illusion that art was just some harmless pastime. What constituted art in any of its seven forms was of paramount significance to the essence of what made a “good” German. Two months later, Goebbels, as gauleiter of Berlin, demanded the resignations of Kollwitz, Beckmann, and Karl Hofer from the art academy. Robert Scholz, the Third Reich’s most influential art critic, called for a “purge” of the racially alien elements in the arts.3 Mutschmann hit out against Dix in Dresden. Klee was removed from his teaching post in Düsseldorf. Ten members of the Prussian Academy of Arts were expected to tender their “voluntary” resignations, including its much-lauded Jewish president, Max Liebermann.4 Modern artists were warned to respect the Malverbot (prohibition to paint) if it was declared against them. An infraction could be determined by the mere whiff of turpentine or the touch of a wet paintbrush during a surprise visit by the Gestapo. The elderly Nazi sympathizer Emil Nolde, despite his sympathies, was shocked when he received his Malverbot order.

  That October, Hitler personally laid the cornerstone of the Temple of German Art, or Haus der Deutschen Kunst, in Munich, which would exhibit art personally vetted by him. Carl Spitzweg, one of Hitler’s favorite artists, would take pride of place with Lucas Cranach, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, and Böcklin. There should have been a few Louis Gurlitts there as well. Nowhere would the “representation of the true face of war” or “unfinished works” be present.5

  Naturally, the purge of museum directors continued, with many of those who had supported Gurlitt earmarked in the cull. Dr. Lili Fischel was dismissed from Karlsruhe in 1933, replaced with a new director who ensured that all Impressionistic and Expressionistic paintings were displayed with pejorative labels. Stuttgart soon followed Karlsruhe’s example.

  In 1935, the valiant Gustav Hartlaub of the Mannheim museum was “caught” harboring outlawed modern art in the museum’s cellars. In a show of medieval shame usually reserved for harlots, bawds, and thieves, the gauleiter arranged for these “degenerate” paintings, among them Rabbi by Marc Chagall, to be loaded onto wagons and paraded through the streets of the city, prominently displaying the prices Hartlaub had paid with taxpayers’ money. To seal his public humiliation, a large photograph of Hartlaub was also displayed.6


  When museum directors evaded or blatantly ignored the imperatives thrust upon them, humiliation became the least of their worries. Carl Georg Heise was advised to “resign of his own wishes” in September 1933 or stand accused—falsely—of misappropriation of public funds and immoral conduct. When Count Klaus Baudissin, one of a clutch of Nazi art historians, became the director of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, he ordered its fabulous rotunda, decorated with murals by Oskar Schlemmer, to be painted over.7 Baudissin was delighted to accept 9,000 reichsmarks for Kandinsky’s Improvisation 28 from Ferdinand Möller, who promptly acted as intermediary in the sale of several Kandinsky paintings to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.8 Along with the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, in Cologne, Gurlitt found a willing buyer at the Folkwang Museum in the years ahead.

  * * *

  Shortly before the Olympic Games in 1936, the Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin held an exhibition of Franz Marc paintings. Marc was Jewish, yet had also won a coveted Iron Cross in the war. At the opening party,* the Gestapo stormed the gallery and closed down the exhibition on the basis that it endangered the Reich’s Kulturpolitik and was a hazard to “public safety and order.” Soon after, Berlin’s Nationalgalerie director, Alois Schardt, emigrated to the United States.9

  During the Olympics, Schardt’s replacement, Eberhard Hanfstaengl, hosted Berlin’s German Art Since Dürer exhibition. Yet even this could not make up for Hanfstaengl’s earlier transgression—a Max Liebermann exhibition. As soon as the tourists headed home, Education Minister Rust closed down the separate modern-art building of the Nationalgalerie at the Kronprinzenpalais. Similar moves were made throughout Germany. The time had come at long last to eliminate the “syphilitic” elements from society and German art.