Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Despite Ribbentrop’s intervention, the deal was sealed with the Lucerne art dealer and auctioneer Theodor Fischer. All that remained was the selection of paintings to be sold. Goebbels, meanwhile, decided that since the grain store was needed for its intended purpose before the winter of 1939, whatever could not be sold at Lucerne would be set alight in “a bonfire as a symbolic propaganda action” intended to mirror the book burnings of 1933 that targeted “un-German” authors.

  Meanwhile Buchholz’s gallery on Berlin’s Leipziger Strasse and a warehouse on Wilhelmstrasse that had been used by Wolfgang Gurlitt were also coopted to supplement the space at Niederschönhausen.10 At the end of February the order came to destroy the artworks remaining at the grain store. On March 20, some five thousand artworks were allegedly burned in the courtyard of Berlin’s central fire station. Chances are the four art dealers took anything deemed to be of value first.

  The highly prescient Gurlitt, the sophisticated and wily Buchholz, the seasoned art dealer Möller, and the Güstrow-based sculptor-turned-dealer Böhmer all knew the risks they were taking in trying to corner the market for the expropriated artworks. Each had also developed his own subsidiary networks that he felt he could, more or less, trust.11 Wolfgang Gurlitt, Theodor Fischer, Curt Valentin, Harald Holst Halvorsen, and Aage Vilstrup were their most preferred partners in the initial stages of the sales.12 Valentin was allowed to leave Germany in 1937, armed with a letter from the ministry licensing him to sell German art in foreign countries and set up as Buchholz’s New York partner in Manhattan. An estimated 85 percent of Buchholz’s profits would come through Valentin’s endeavors.13

  * * *

  All “degenerate” art was not, however, fully in the government’s control. Some remained with dealers or still resided with private collectors. With the Malverbot extended to all nonapproved contemporary artists in the previous year, Max Beckmann joined others, like Max J. Friedlander, former privy councillor of the German Empire and Gemäldegalerie director, in Holland. This meant that the dealers had to be wary of expatriate German painters and artists devaluing their own supply. Hetsch, in an effort to protect the value of the hoarded collection, ordered that all modern art must be surrendered to those who acted as temporary, local government depositories: Günther Franke in Munich, Fritz Carl Valentien* in Stuttgart, Alex Vömel in Düsseldorf, and Wolfgang Gurlitt in Berlin. These quasi-official depositories were instructed to forward the art for triage and preparation for sale.14

  While the four dealers were officially prohibited from selling direct to Germans, they created a black market nonetheless by ignoring the interdiction. Over the twelve years of Nazi rule, they became adept at understanding precisely where the best price could be obtained in their own financial interests. Still, the government’s expropriation from private citizens paradoxically added to the dealers’ problems. Confiscation from wealthy Jews had long been labeled as redemption of Jewish assets. Taking money or valuables from those who were classified as “Jewish” (whether practicing Christians or nonpracticing Jews) was a redeeming process for the perpetrator, akin to an act of religious salvation. Since Jews were no longer citizens of the Reich according to the Nuremberg Laws, they were illegally in possession of assets that formed part of the Volksvermögen, or “the People’s Property.” Whatever had been owned by the Jewish population was considered plundered or exploitative assets to be returned to the German people.

  Often these assets were taken as Fluchtgut—escape goods—in the form of exit or emigration taxes. Compulsory payments to flee the country somehow magically equated to the person’s entire wealth, making them immigrant paupers in their new homelands. As these Fluchtgüter were converted into cash, they were transferred to a special account at the Reichsvereinigung (Reich Federation).15

  A similar system had been set up with the Reich Chancellery for the sale of all entartete Kunst (degenerate art), commonly called “the EK account.” The big mistake made, however, was that only all net proceeds from the sale of the artworks were to be deposited. This meant that the dealers first made their sales—either directly overseas or by a series of convoluted transactions involving swaps and barter—and then took their commission, which ranged, in principle, from five to 25 percent, before transferring the net amounts into the EK account. It was a system rife with abuse. By 1939, the four dealers became adept, too, at stealing from Hitler.

  * * *

  It is wrong to assume that all “sales” were simple buy-and-sell transactions. Often artworks were bartered for other “approved” works or for other undervalued “degenerate” art abroad. How to buy in foreign markets was also tricky due to the inconvertibility of the reichsmark. Vast sums had been blocked in Germany, awaiting counterparty transactions in foreign currency abroad. The ever-enterprising Swiss helped enormously with a solution. Ferdinand Möller wrote, “As you know, in selling to America, there is the opportunity to sell through the agency of the Trust of the Treuhand-Gesellschaft in Zurich. This will save approximately one-third of the purchase price. Naturally, for the client, a price reduction of 33% is interesting, and it is that which makes the Swiss Trust attractive.”16

  The discounted rate made the Swiss trust system the agent of choice for the four dealers. Before the Anschluss, the Norwegian Harald Halvorsen had agreed on a purchase price of RM 5,000 for eighteen works by Munch. RM 4,500 was paid in blocked currency and RM 500 paid in unblocked, or hard, currency. In 1938, Möller used the same method when he transacted a subsequent sale to Halvorsen. Later, Halvorsen bought more works by Munch taken from German museums through Gurlitt on the same basis.17 In all the cases described the Swiss trust called the Schweizerische Verrechnungsstelle (SVSt) was the crucial component of the dealers’ profitable trades. Thanks to the Swiss, art became the resolution of all foreign-country trades where payments had been blocked by the Nazis. As early as December 1935, the requirement for hard cash increased to 50 percent of the purchase price.18

  In this complex trust arrangement with the Swiss, nothing was straightforward. To illustrate using one of the Halvorsen acquisitions: Essentially, the German government released reichsmarks blocked from earlier unrelated transactions at a 10 percent discount to the Swiss and Halvorsen paid the Swiss only 10 percent on top. The SVSt as intermediary then repaid the Germans in highly coveted Swiss francs or other foreign currency using standard clearinghouse methods at market rates, and taking a commission on both sides of the transaction. The more foreign currency obtained in these art deals, the better it was for Germany.

  Other issues affected the discount rate or percentages of unblocked versus blocked reichsmarks used, including the willingness of foreign governments to trade with Germany and the availability or scarcity of paintings. The relationship to hard cash made art a pure trading commodity that could release blocked reichsmarks originally intended to pay for raw materials or other purchases by Germany. At a stroke Switzerland became the money launderer to Hitler’s increasingly criminal regime, and art the method of payment for war matériel.

  Still, fingers should not be wagged exclusively at Switzerland. England and the United States were deeply involved in similar complex financial undertakings prior to the SVSt, in the mid-1930s. In 1936, Otto Fischer, head of the Swiss museums, had exclusively used England and the United States to finance his purchases. His first acquisition through the SVSt was, however, the highly dubious acquisition of Lovis Corinth paintings from his widow for the Basel Kunstmuseum using 65 percent blocked reichsmarks.19

  As early as 1939, Hildebrand Gurlitt and Karl Buchholz had begun trading together through these Swiss channels as well as through other agencies. With the help of the SVSt, in the period between 1937 and 1941 the four official dealers sold some 8,700 artworks in Switzerland.20 Finally, Hildebrand Gurlitt had arrived at the treasure house of the world.

  20

  THE TREASURE HOUSES

  We have a good opportunity to sell these pictures for Germany in Switzerland, a most important and prec
ious thing to obtain.

  —WOLFGANG GURLITT to Basel Kunstmuseum, April 1942

  While declaring that “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria or to conclude an Anschluss,” the Germans were welcomed as conquering heroes into Vienna on March 12, 1938.

  Overshadowed by the swarm of Luftwaffe planes overhead, thousands fled to the British embassy on that day and in the days and weeks that followed. Horror stories of women in labor breaking the embassy’s windows so their children could be born on British soil or their needlessly prolonging their interviews, once inside, in the hope that they would go into labor were legion. Others, fleeing certain death as Jews or Freemasons or Communists, waited in the embassy queues that snaked for nearly a mile through Vienna’s streets.

  Britain’s Parliament urgently provided emergency legislation. Captain Thomas Kendrick, the naval man in charge of British intelligence at the embassy in Vienna, along with the Reverend Hugh Grimes, of the Anglican Church, immediately instituted underground activities that included issuing false passports, backdated baptismal certificates, and other deceptions worthy of the best spies.1

  Slightly less than eight months later, allegedly in retribution for the murder of a German legation secretary in Paris by the young Jew Herschel Grynszpan, a well-planned assault against Jews was given the green light.2 While publicized as public outrage against Grynszpan’s heinous act, the groundswell of hatred against the Jews seemed more of a loving remembrance dedicated to the führer on the fifteenth anniversary of his failed Munich putsch. On the night of November 9–10, the SA and ordinary German and Austrian citizens took part in Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass)—a pogrom of all physical edifices that housed Judaism within and the Jewish people.3

  In London, the Times headline read “A Black Day for Germany,” whereas the Daily Telegraph reported “German Mobs’ Vengeance on Jews.”4 While reportedly “only ninety-five people” were killed, more than thirty thousand Jews were arrested in Germany and Austria. Over a thousand synagogues were burned down, and all the Judaica within was either destroyed or looted. In Germany, to prevent a black market devaluing Jewish assets, the Ordinance on Utilization of Jewish Assets was published a few weeks later, on December 3.5 Some of the cultural property and artworks reached the hands of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

  * * *

  The wealthy wood-importing family of Friedmann owned four agricultural and hunting estates near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) producing sugar beet. David Friedmann was the main beneficiary of the riches of the family business. His sister Marie Hildegarde was amply provided for by her share of the inheritance and her lawyer husband, Dr. Georg Garnowski. In November 1938, the Garnowskis had two boys—Klaus, aged fourteen, and Hans, aged eighteen. Friedmann’s father had been appointed general counsel for Germany to Venezuela under the Weimar Republic for his role as the most significant importer of exotic hardwoods to Germany. Fortunately for him, he died shortly after Hitler became chancellor.

  That October, Friedmann agreed to sell the family hunting lodge to General Paul von Kleist—who less than a year later commanded the Twenty-Second Panzer Corps invading Poland. The hunting lodge was envisaged as Kleist’s playground and haven from the coming war. Friedmann’s brother-in-law, Georg Garnowski, was acting as Friedmann’s lawyer. The date for the closing was set for the morning of November 10 at Friedmann’s home on one of the neighboring estates. However, during the devastation of Kristallnacht, Garnowski was arrested by the Gestapo.

  Frantic with worry, Marie Hildegarde telephoned her brother. Of course the property closing for the hunting estate would need to be postponed. Marie Hildegarde then had the inspiration to call Kleist directly. Surely such a powerful man could help her husband? Surely his arrest must be some dreadful mistake—he was a good German, after all, she pleaded. Kleist reassured her. He would have Georg released. She must go to her brother’s home, where they would meet as planned.

  So Marie packed up warm underwear and socks for her husband, presuming that he had been kept in squalid conditions overnight, and drove with her younger son, Klaus, to her brother’s home. In the tense hours that followed, Klaus languished beneath the Max Liebermann oil painting Two Riders on the Beach, waiting fretfully for his father. He loved horses and the painting.

  True to his word, Kleist arrived in his chauffeured car, followed by Georg, who had been driven from the prison by two SS guards. Kleist allowed the reunited couple to embrace while he patted young Klaus on the head and comforted him, “See your father is unharmed.” Klaus was then sent back to wait in the small study where Two Riders on the Beach hung. While Kleist’s closing went ahead without any further hitches, Klaus saw another world, another time in the painting.

  After the completion of the sale, they all sat down to a full three-course lunch together. Then the men played a little skat.* By late afternoon it was time to leave, and Georg said his good-byes to his son, wife, and brother-in-law. That’s when Klaus learned that his father was only on day release. Georg was driven directly to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he remained for three weeks. The idea behind this short stint in a concentration camp was not to murder, but to humiliate, annihilate any resistance to the Nazi will, and, above all, to take possession of any of the detainees’ personal wealth.

  On August 23, 1939—one week before the declaration of war by Great Britain and France for the invasion of Poland—Klaus was put onto a Kinder transport bound for Sweden. His brother Hans had escaped to Holland separately. Aged fifteen, Klaus would never see his uncle or parents again. The next time he would hear of the Two Riders on the Beach was November 3, 2013, when the news broke that Hildebrand Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius, owned the painting, among some 1,406 others.6

  * * *

  Throughout 1939, Gauleiter Kajetan Mühlmann raped Vienna of its treasures. Sales to Switzerland progressed by the thousands. By spring, Hitler’s future war plans were made clear to the perspicacious Gurlitt and clever Buchholz through a memo sent from Hans-Heinrich Lammers at the Reich Chancellery that all the depositories were to protect the art from any bomb damage by “making bombproof basements” at their establishments.7

  The specter of war had long been foreshadowed, and the four dealers had time to prepare themselves. Yet “saving” art may not have been their top priority, even at this stage. The horrors of the Third Reich were already abundantly clear, even though the mass deportations to the East would only begin in 1941. Personal survival, especially for the second-degree Mischling Gurlitt, depended on fail-safe protection.

  With Cornelius’s death, Hildebrand treated Kirchbach increasingly as a surrogate father, returning his many kindnesses with like generosity.8 Their relationship would continue until death, and would be so close that Gurlitt never mentioned Kirchbach’s name to his captors. On July 15, 1940, Gurlitt arranged for Kirchbach’s registration of worldwide patents for his esoterically named “Jurid” process in the relative safety of Uruguay, with Buchholz’s assistance. From now on, payments for use of his patents were made directly to his Uruguayan account, most likely in dollars, Swiss francs, or pounds sterling. Payment in coveted foreign exchange was always preferable, and also eliminated any risk of sequestration.

  * * *

  Of course, 1939 plunged Europe into another world war, thereby renaming the Great War forever as the First World War, with this new one unabashedly christened as the sequel with the number “Two” or “Second.”

  Yet this monstrous year for humanity proved a momentous year for the art world. The often reviled Nazi Party member and art dealer Karl Haberstock devised a plan to elevate art trades upon the world stage. He had two cracking ideas with which he hoped to topple the “four horsemen,” and thereby control the German art market. The first was an international auction in Switzerland, the second the realization of Hitler’s dreams.

  Hitler had been toying with creating a temple to the arts in his hometown of Linz for decades. Indeed, he had red
esigned all of Linz himself many times over on paper. Haberstock was, if nothing else, a wizard of organization, and suggested to Hitler that he knew just the man for the job as Linz’s director. Understandably, the führer’s Linz project lagged behind the redesign of Munich and Berlin, where Hitler already employed a dozen architects on their major projects.9

  Hitler envisaged Linz’s improvements with a suspension bridge and impressive public buildings embracing both sides of the Danube as it wended through the city. At the apex of his plan was the district headquarters for the Nazi Party, which would house a bell tower with a crypt for his burial place. There would be a picture gallery, a library, a museum of armaments, an exhibition building, a military headquarters, a stadium, and a town hall. While Hitler fell into excited raptures over the project, explaining how Linz would be the German Budapest, Haberstock pointed out that Hitler’s museum seemed a rather poor relation.10 Until then, apparently, Hitler hadn’t realized that the planned museum was merely on the same scale as museums in other cities. It took little, if any, convincing for the führer to see the opportunities a “supermuseum” would create—particularly if he was in charge of the selection of artworks.

  Still, Hitler had a war to orchestrate. Of course, Haberstock agreed, the museum building needn’t be built before making acquisitions. There was ample room in the basement of the Führerbau in Munich in the interim. Haberstock put forward only one name as Linz’s director: Hans Posse, director of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. Not only was Posse the right man in terms of his experience, his expertise in Renaissance art, and his international reputation, but, most significantly in Haberstock’s eyes, Posse would be eternally thankful to him. Once Posse was appointed, Haberstock hoped, the four dealers’ days would be at an end.