Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Predictably, on June 21, 1939, Hitler announced that Posse had been appointed to the exalted position of director of the Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Project for Linz). Posse would liaise with Hitler and the architects for the revised plans of the building, but his primary function was to acquire art befitting Hitler’s legacy. When construction was completed, the museum would be called the Führermuseum. Meanwhile, the offices of the Sonderauftrag Linz would remain at Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. The two art historians in Posse’s service there, Robert Oertel and Gottfried Reimer, were appointed as his assistants for the Linz acquisitions.11

  * * *

  While Haberstock moved to override the four dealers’ importance with the appointment of Posse, there were other independent dealers who represented a danger to his plans. Walter Andreas Hofer, Hermann Göring’s art agent, fed his master’s insatiable appetite for art by supplying Göring’s cavernous mansion Carinhall with treasures. Hofer had a well-oiled network with the crafty Lucerne-based Swiss art dealer and auctioneer Theodor Fischer, as well as with Fischer’s Paris representative, the German expatriate Hans Wendland. This enabled Hofer to buy, sell, or barter on behalf of Göring with relative impunity.

  Somehow, Haberstock also believed that he could override Hofer. Fischer was an old friend from their days at the Cassirer firm in Berlin, so Haberstock resolved to offer him a juicy bone—an auction of degenerate German art. Fischer leapt at the opportunity. Working for Göring privately as well as for the Nazi State made Fischer the preeminent auction house and art dealer for the Germans in Switzerland.12 The advantages were clear; why sell a dozen paintings through complicated blocked-and-unblocked-currency-hedging methods when an international auction every month or so would bring in much more foreign exchange?

  Yet Haberstock hadn’t bargained on three major factors. The first was that Hitler and his mass-media mogul Goebbels had been calling the degenerate art “rubbish” publicly for years. They had also flooded the market through a combination of confiscations from fleeing refugees and expropriation from museums and Jews. The May 1938 law legalizing expropriation by the state solidified this impression abroad. Secondly, a decided reluctance by some museums to buy artworks that had been brutally wrenched from their legal homes had settled in. Finally, the four dealers knew the vicissitudes in the art and currency markets and in the previous two years had become adept at manipulating them to their advantage. They were supple in their greed, where Haberstock had allowed it to cloud his vision.

  * * *

  Trading at the Schloss continued regardless of Haberstock’s machinations. Georg Schmidt of the Basel Kunstmuseum was the hot prospect, acquiring art throughout the spring. Separately, only 125 artworks were selected for Lucerne, yet Gurlitt seemed keen to close a deal with Schmidt to buy direct in Berlin. So he visited Schmidt in Basel on the Wednesday prior to the auction.

  Gurlitt told Schmidt that he’d help bid on the artists’ work that most appealed to the museum director during the auction. Separately, Buchholz offered to represent the museum with the German government after the auction of subsequent purchases. Following Gurlitt’s visit, Schmidt wrote to Buchholz that it had been agreed that the museum would purchase first from those works still stored in Berlin, to better plan what funds might remain available for the auction itself. Gurlitt and Buchholz had joined forces, using the meeting in Basel as a final lever.

  As the more senior dealer, Buchholz took the lead in subsequent negotiations.13 Schmidt selected thirteen paintings prior to the auction, including Corinth’s Ecce Homo, Marc’s Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals), and Kokoschka’s Die Windsbraut (The Tempest), for a purchase price of 18,000 Swiss francs.14 It was the first documented sale negotiated with Buchholz and Gurlitt acting in partnership. Others followed.

  * * *

  The Fischer Auction took place on the beautiful summer’s day of June 30, 1939, at the Grand Hotel National overlooking the peaceful Lake Lucerne. Museum directors around the world were torn between attending or boycotting the proceedings, since it was rumored that the proceeds would fund Nazi expansionism and rearmament. The Basel Kunstmuseum had no such scruple. Neither did Switzerland’s Zentralbibliothek. Schmidt had been granted an initial allocation of 50,000 Swiss francs.15 While Alfred A. Barr of the Museum of Modern Art was in Paris at the time, refusing to attend, he would continue to buy purged modern art from German State collections through his friend Valentin and Buchholz through November 1941 and possibly beyond.16

  The minor squall surrounding the auction rose to a thunderstorm in early June when Alfred Frankfurter, editor of Art News and advisor to the American banker and art collector Maurice Wertheim, cabled Fischer: “To counteract rumors suggest you cable confidentially not for publication actual ownership June 30 sale and whether money obtained goes to Germany STOP Believe would stimulate American bids.”17 The less-than-truthful Fischer replied that all payments were to be made to his gallery for distribution to German museums for new acquisitions and that a competitor in Paris was responsible for the nasty rumors.

  That “competitor” was the exiled Paul Westheim, a German Jewish publisher banished to France, who knew precisely how the German government intended to recirculate the money. Fischer also claimed that a group of dealers were colluding in a ring that was the result of Westheim’s outcry, and that their malicious influence had spread to New York. Potential bidders were contacted directly, but to no avail. By the time the 125 artworks were previewed, the unsubstantiated gossip had soured several heavy hitters from attending.

  Fischer penned a panicked series of letters to the Propagandaministerium protesting about Schmidt’s buying direct from Buchholz and Gurlitt in Berlin. Before he had a reply, he wrote again, asking permission to lower reserves to a margin of 20 percent below the reserve prices for the six most prized works by Gauguin, van Gogh, and Marc and three by Picasso. He also asked for a full week after the auction to find buyers for the unsold works.

  The reply was emphatic. Fischer could lower the reserves on three less valuable works and seek buyers for unsold works after the auction. However, it was out of the question for the most valuable paintings to be sold for less than the reserve price. Furthermore, it was deemed inappropriate for the Propagandaministerium to be represented except by an unknown junior official. Neither Hofmann nor Hetsch would be present. Haberstock, too, was ordered to stay away.18 Gurlitt, however, was there.

  At three o’clock, the auction began. Seated among the 350 guests were Swiss collectors like Emil Bührle; the Art News editor Alfred Frankfurter, bidding on behalf of Maurice Wertheim; and painter Henri Matisse’s son Pierre, who was an art dealer in New York and Paris. Pierre was interested primarily in his father’s painting Bathers with a Turtle, as were Saint Louis, Missouri’s Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., and his bride, Louise, who were on their honeymoon. Pulitzer had persuaded Matisse to bid on the painting for him. Film director Josef von Sternberg and New York dealers Karl Nierendorf and Curt Valentin were also present. The museums from various American cities snuck in alongside their Antwerp, Basel, Bern, Brussels, and Liège counterparts. There was also a smattering of English, French, Swiss, and German collectors, and journalists were there to report on the proceedings. The auction took place in German, French, and English, and the bidding was set in Swiss francs. No advance credit arrangements needed to be made, and anonymity was guaranteed—a very Swiss specialty.19

  Just as the auction began, a bellhop dashed in and whispered to Frankfurter that he had an urgent telephone call. Exceptionally, after the painting on the block fell under the hammer, Fischer announced that they would wait for Frankfurter’s return. Murmurs spread through the crowd. Even today, experts have differing theories about what was said in that phone call. Had Frankfurter been threatened? By whom? Or had he been warned off acquiring any other paintings, save lot 45? Whatever was said remains a mystery, but it was a pale and shaken Frankfurter who reentered the auction room several minutes later.20

  The auction continue
d, punctuated only by Fischer’s monotone droning on in three languages until lot 45, Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, came onto the auction block. Frankfurter became suddenly animated, and deftly outbid his nearest Belgian rivals, paying an equivalent of $40,000 for the painting. He promptly submitted his bidder’s card, took the painting away, and called for his car. He swiftly placed it in the trunk and drove away as if scalded by the experience.21

  * * *

  “Jews boycotted the auction,” Fischer later complained to Haberstock; only “two-thirds of the works were sold.”22 Of the 125 lots, thirty-eight did not meet their reserves. Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker did not sell and became the vortex of an international incident. Its original donor to the Hamburger Kunsthalle demanded to have a right of first refusal to buy the painting back. Instead, for the next two years, it hung in the German embassy in Bern while the ensuing litigation was resolved. It was ruled that the donor had no further claim on the painting. “I want to avoid at all costs a situation in which our payment will be blocked in Switzerland,” Haberstock wrote heatedly to Fischer. “If there’s any danger of this, the sale must be handled in such a way that the painting would be first returned to us and the payment made directly in English pounds to us at the Reichsbank to the account ‘EK.’”23

  Valentin, meanwhile, had temporarily reprieved Alfred H. Barr from his worst demons. “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction,” Barr wrote to his manager, Thomas Mabry, on July 1, knowing that he planned to acquire four significant artworks through Valentin from the auction: Derain’s Valley of the Lot at Vers, sequestered from Cologne; Lehmbruck’s sculpture Kneeling Woman, from Berlin’s Nationalgalerie; Klee’s Around the Fish, purloined from Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie; and the Essen Folkwang Museum’s Blue Window, by Matisse.24 Barr had, of course, previously arranged to purchase Kirschner’s Strassenszene through Valentin, for which Buchholz had paid $160 at the Schloss.

  Barr knew he was allowing his heart to rule his head. The outrage felt by artists like Beckmann and Picasso and French dealers was nothing compared with the furor in the European—and particularly French—press. Yet the morality of his acquiring art at the expense of German museums and private collectors forced to flee Germany penniless was overwhelmed by the absolute need to possess these works for his museum. With this clearly in mind, he instructed Mabry in that same July 1 letter that “I think it very important that our releases … should state that [the works] have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.”25

  Barr not only paid Valentin his commission on all transactions, but also sent museum trustees to shop in the Buchholz Gallery in New York, popping in personally once a week to “say hello.” Had Valentin told Barr that Buchholz, one of the four official dealers for Hitler, was his business partner? Or that Buchholz had provided an initial stock from the grain store and Schloss Niederschönhausen for the gallery when Valentin immigrated? Or even that he had been given a letter by the Nazis authorizing him to sell these artworks in the United States?26 This authorization had been granted in mid-November 1936 in response to Valentin’s September 22 request to immigrate to New York to sell German art in America. It was no different from the authorization given to Hitler’s other “approved” dealers.

  The original of Valentin’s authorization is housed at the Archive of American Art, part of the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC. Valentin had given the letter to his faithful assistant, Jane Wade, with the handwritten note “1936 permit to continue buying pictures in Germany” appended at the bottom. On the next line, he wrote to Wade, “Can be destroyed.”27 “Can” and “must” are two different instructions, and so Wade held on to the document.

  While Valentin may not have confided these darkest secrets to Barr, MoMA’s director must have suspected the closeness of Valentin’s relationship with Buchholz. Over a decade later, Barr implied to an Associated Press journalist that MoMA had actually boycotted the auction, losing (to Gurlitt) the best Munch that had ever been sold.28 During the war he might have assuaged his conscience by funding Varian Fry’s emergency efforts to save the German and French intelligentsia through Fry’s base in Marseilles. Or perhaps he was simply helping Fry as an old Harvard classmate.

  Eighteen years later, Barr defended his actions to Kenneth Donahue, the curator at the Ringling Museum of Art, in Sarasota, Florida, who was wrestling with the same moral dilemma. “I frankly thought it was a good thing for the Germans as a whole,” Barr rationalized, “to have some reminder of their collective guilt and folly.” That was bad enough. Yet Barr went on to reassure Donahue. “You’re safe on the first count (legal); your conscience must guide you on the second (moral).”29

  * * *

  The total proceeds from Fischer’s June 1939 auction were 500,000 Swiss francs. Compared with other specialist auctions of the period in the main capital cities of the world, it was a meager result. Of the thirty-eight unsold works, only The Absinthe Drinker found a home in Switzerland. The thirty-seven that remained were returned to the Propagandaministerium in Germany only in 1941.

  Gurlitt, Buchholz, Möller, and Böhmer would profit, however, from Fischer’s losses. It was Böhmer who eventually bailed out Fischer in 1941, selling Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker on behalf of the Propagandaministerium to Fischer for an estimated 24,000 Swiss francs against a trade for Anthony van Dyck’s Madonna and Child, appraised at a value of 150,000 Swiss francs. This same van Dyck had been purloined from the Max Emden Collection a short while earlier at an appraisal value of 60,000 Swiss francs. Fischer sold it on to Otto Huber for 25,000 Swiss francs.30 Böhmer’s commission was 10 percent based on a revised valuation for the picture at 110,000 Swiss francs. At the auction that June, Böhmer purchased Corinth’s Self-Portrait for less than half of its estimated value.

  * * *

  That summer Posse’s Sonderauftrag Linz dominated the European art market. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and days later World War II began. By June 1940, Hitler had spread his net throughout Eastern Europe and successfully invaded Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and carved up France. Czechoslovakia had been slowly strangled by the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the ultimate invasion of the whole country on March 15, 1939. After the fall of France, Great Britain alone stood against Germany in Europe—teetering on the edge of destruction until lend-lease for war matériel was signed with the United States in March 1941—ending the shadowboxing surrounding American neutrality. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa for the invasion of the Soviet Union began. There was no longer any delusion about Hitler’s aims.

  * * *

  Until the end of 1941, Gurlitt, Buchholz, Möller, and Böhmer worked primarily for the Propagandaministerium for thousands of transactions involving the confiscated art. Gurlitt’s own incomplete and redacted ledgers show this clearly. Thousands of works of art that the Reich had expropriated were never found. Until recently, all were believed lost. Among the missing works was Max Liebermann’s The Lion Tamer, which would be rediscovered only in 2011, at a Stuttgart auction. The unnamed seller was Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius.

  21

  THE POSSE YEARS

  While Man’s desires and aspirations stir,

  He cannot choose but err.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Faust

  Impending war inevitably led to the squirreling-away of art treasures throughout Europe. London’s National Gallery moved the bulk of its holdings to remote Wales. Belgium asked for asylum for its priceless van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece in France. Knowing that France was the Continental prize Hitler most coveted, the Musées Nationaux spread its riches between dozens of former royal châteaus in the Loire. Belgium’s Altarpiece was moved to the south. Noted collectors were also given the opportunity to safeguard their collections alongside those of the Louvre. Many, including the Rothschilds, whose cousins had suffered so badly in Austria, were glad of the help. British subject Alphonse Kann sent a portion of his
collection to the château at Brissac. The American Nazi sympathizer Florence Gould put her valuable tapestries in storage at the American embassy.1

  * * *

  Since the Fischer Auction, there was a new master whom all art dealers in the Third Reich wanted to serve—Dr. Hans Posse, the weak-chinned, thin-lipped son of Dresden, who had been the director at the Gemäldegalerie since 1913. He was talented, opinionated, and starry-eyed at the unparalleled potential of the new role conferred on him: amassing riches for Hitler’s übermuseum.

  During the war of 1914–18, Posse was responsible for Raphael’s magnificent Portrait of a Youth from the Czartoryski Collection of the National Galerie in Cracow, which had been evacuated to Dresden by German Monuments Men for safekeeping.2 Perhaps one of Posse’s greatest selling points to Hitler was that he refused to return the Raphael painting until 1920, once the harsh sentence of the Versailles Diktat was passed on Germany.3 Covetousness in the name of the Reich was always applauded. When Gauleiter Mutschmann attempted to oust Posse for alleged anti-Nazi sentiments in 1933, he was immediately and personally reinstated by Hitler—at the quiet urging of Haberstock. Posse’s true crime was the acquisition of modern art.4

  Gurlitt knew that Posse hadn’t warmed to him while they lived in the same cliquey art community in Dresden. Hildebrand blamed Posse’s coldness on some perceived snub in the unending feud between Posse’s friend Pinder, in Leipzig, and his father. Notwithstanding this, it seems more likely that Posse couldn’t abide Hildebrand’s high opinion of himself. Whatever the cause, Gurlitt sensed that the only way to ensure his exalted position for the future was to work for the Propagandaministerium and Posse. First, however, he’d need to break Haberstock’s stranglehold of gratitude on Posse.