Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  All of the dealers’ Nazi prewar and wartime histories were so interwoven that if any one of them snagged the silken thread of half truths, they would all find themselves on the wrong side of the Art Looting Investigation Unit he understood the Americans had instituted to probe into the ERR, Dienststelle Mühlmann, and even Sonderauftrag Linz. That he had worked directly for Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Bormann, Speer, and others needed careful thought prior to any Allied interrogation. Then, he might have worried about what would happen if Buchholz were captured. What if they discovered that the dealers had targeted the United States for sales of looted art from the outset?

  Gurlitt needn’t have worried about Buchholz. He had been flown in Göring’s personal plane to Madrid on May 5, 1945, to establish another of his bookshops and art galleries at number 3, Avenida General Mola. Buchholz was living well, if illegally at number 83, Avenida General Mola, out of the reach of Allied interrogators in neutral Spain.11

  * * *

  Timing remained crucial. The Red Army was rapidly approaching Dresden, and Gurlitt had no intention of surrendering in a Soviet-controlled zone. BBC Radio talked about the Allies “shaking hands” in Berlin, but Gurlitt firmly believed that the Soviets would claim vast swaths of Germany for their own and—in a wicked twist of fate—encircle Berlin for their own Communist lebensraum.

  Indeed, Gurlitt warned the other dealers countless times that they’d never be able to recover the bulk of their collections if they were found behind the Red Army lines.12 Hadn’t they realized that the Soviets were in no mood to listen to bedtime stories about whether this German or that one had subscribed to whichever of the Nazi ideologies?

  To the Soviets, all Germans were loathsome; and Stalin let it be known to his advancing general Zhukov that the more raping, killing, and pillaging that went on, the better. If the art dealers thought that they would be safe from the Red Army excesses spreading westward faster than their war machine, they were assuredly mistaken. The czar’s former palaces at Tsarskoe Selo, near Leningrad,* had been ravaged by the Third Reich, and millions of Russians were dead.13 Yet Böhmer and Möller were slow to comprehend the depth of Soviet hatred for the German people and remained in Güstrow and east Prussia respectively.

  Gurlitt’s supportive wife, Helene, was another matter. It took no such explanations for her to understand the gravity of the situation. She had been a sleeping partner with him from the beginning. She had looked after the collection while her husband was traveling—which was more often than not the way of things. She understood why he packed a few things to go away again after the bombing of Dresden. If his children, Cornelius and Benita, whined that he was leaving them alone again, or that they were afraid, Gurlitt would have explained his duty to visit Professor Voss without delay to protect Germany’s cultural heritage. That he was collecting his Dresden-held collection, too, soon became apparent.

  Ultimately, the most critical part of his plan rested on the cooperation of Hermann Voss. Only Voss could ensure Gurlitt’s strategy for escape from prosecution and help avoid some unanticipated blunder. Voss’s home in Dresden had been hit, too, but like Gurlitt, he was safely ensconced outside the city. Claiming illness, Voss was at Schloss Weesenstein—around fifteen miles away on back roads and farm tracks from Possendorf.

  Gurlitt knew he’d have only this one last meeting to discuss the thousands of questions and anodyne answers that needed to be agreed on with Voss. After all, what stories would Haberstock or Böhmer or Möller or Buchholz or Dietrich or any of the other art dealers come up with to defend their actions? Would they reveal something they shouldn’t about their personal collections that could implicate him in their wrongdoing? He’d bought and sold art with them all, never questioning any provenance. Then there was the matter of what they might say about their little shop at Schloss Niederschönhausen, just outside Berlin, where more than twenty-one thousand safeguarded artworks were eventually sold.

  What could he say about the artworks from private collections? Did his mind wander to the Chinese tapestries he had purloined from the Goldschmidt-Rothschild collection?14 These must be denied, of course. Whatever had been settled between the dealers before the Dresden bombing, Gurlitt realized at this point that he couldn’t trust any of them to keep their mouths shut.

  * * *

  When Gurlitt reached Schloss Weesenstein, his rattled friend Voss was, of course, delighted to see him. After commiserating about the destruction of Dresden, the two former museum directors planned their futures. Their discussions lasted much of that day and the next, and it was agreed that Gurlitt must make his way to Mainfranken, or Lower Franconia, which BBC Radio had declared safe from bombings. It was a racing certainty that it would also be controlled by the Americans.

  Voss agreed he’d handle communications with the other art dealers and urge them to escape to Franconia, too, while Gurlitt made his way south and west. Voss assured Gurlitt that he’d send word ahead to the ancestral home of the medieval baronial family of Pölnitz at Aschbach, near Schlüsselfeld. It had all been arranged. After all, Gerhard von Pölnitz was also complicit in the safeguarding of artworks for the Church and the Reich, and had flown many of Göring’s purchases from Paris and to hiding places abroad. Had Pölnitz flown Buchholz to Madrid? Chances are, given what followed, that Pölnitz had also flown several shipments for Gurlitt to Germany and Switzerland, too.

  Finding adequate transport and open roads was Gurlitt’s next task. Money was, of course, no object, since he carried significant sums in foreign exchange at all times.15 Fortunately, he hadn’t too far to look. The firm of Posselt proved most amenable to his urgent demand, swayed by the unexpected sight of folding money in US dollars. Posselt agreed to lend Gurlitt the use of a large truck and trailer that eventually needed to go to Nuremberg.

  Within weeks of arriving at his mother’s refuge at Possendorf, Hildebrand, Helene, and their two children waved good-bye to Hildebrand’s mother. Had he offered to take his mother with them? Had she refused? Whatever happened, she would be trapped behind the Red Army lines and he would never see her again.

  As the Gurlitts climbed aboard their truck and trailer, the children were laid onto mattresses by the wood-burning stove.* It would be Cornelius’s job to top up the fire when his father shouted back to him. With all the crates on board, there was hardly any room left for the two children. It would have been quite an experience—claustrophobic, terrifying, and exhilarating.

  Their parents most likely told them that they were embarking on a great adventure and were traveling to a beautiful castle where they would all be safe. Three days later, after a harrowing journey, picking their way through the imploding German countryside, they arrived at the castle home of Baron Pölnitz at the tiny village of Aschbach bei Schlüsselfeld, in Upper Franconia. There, the Gurlitts were met by Hildebrand’s alleged nemesis Karl Haberstock, Baron and Baroness Gerhard von Pölnitz, their sons Peter and Ludwig, and the baron’s French mistress, Jane Weil. Here, Gurlitt and his family patiently awaited his “surrender.”

  * * *

  From the children’s viewpoint, their adventure was a watershed. For as long as they could remember, their father had flitted in and out of their lives like some incredibly rare butterfly—frightfully important and extremely sought-after for his knowledge. Throughout the war, he had never stayed long enough for them to comprehend his affairs. Cornelius, for all that his grandfather had lauded him as a bonny lad befitting royalty, had become a quiet and withdrawn boy, connecting emotionally only with his sister, Benita. He was intelligent and also a talented artist, but as time marched on, his apparent shyness and father’s devastating secrets would impel him into the life of a loner. It was these next few months and years that would scar him forever.

  Already, Cornelius’s life had been stolen by his father.16

  PART IV

  THE STOLEN LIVES

  The Lord God, merciful and gracious … who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathe
rs on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.

  —Exodus 34:7

  27

  HOUSE ARREST

  Leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

  —Epictetus

  On April 30, 1945, Hitler shot himself after his new bride, Eva Braun, took a cyanide capsule. In accordance with Hitler’s will, Bormann had their bodies brought to the garden outside the führer’s bunker and set alight. Inside the bunker, Speer’s model of the Linz Führermuseum, so often contemplated by Hitler in his final days, remained abandoned. Since the Nazi Party was Hitler’s sole beneficiary, as party chairman Bormann either had taken the artworks from the bunker with him or had previously arranged for them to be secreted away.

  Bormann, however, escaped. For more than twenty years, many believed he had survived and fled to Paraguay.1 Gurlitt heard the rumors about putting Bormann on trial in absentia alongside twenty-three leaders of the Third Reich. Doubtless Gurlitt was unaware that Bormann had arranged for his ardently Nazi wife, Gerda, and their nine children to flee Berlin by abducting another five youngsters so that she could claim she was the director of a children’s home conveying her young charges to safety.2 Though many searched for Bormann’s whereabouts or remains, he appeared to have vanished amid the chaos of the battle for Berlin. Did this mean that Gurlitt, as custodian of Hitler’s and Bormann’s art, which he had secreted in Switzerland, would remain its guardian until the party chairman instructed him? Was Voss in the loop?

  * * *

  Gurlitt’s interrogator, First Lieutenant Dwight McKay, had no idea about his secrets. McKay had already learned, however, that justice was as ephemeral as a purloined jewel in the Third Reich. If Hitler didn’t like what he came across, he made an edict changing the law and—poof—it was illegal. His minions changed the law’s shape and meaning so it couldn’t be recognized, and inserted it into a new jewel of their own making for their own nefarious purposes. Still, McKay would think like that, since he was a lawyer from Illinois, from a long line of Midwest lawyers.

  It had been six years since McKay graduated from University of Chicago Law School. He’d been working for only two years when he enlisted after Pearl Harbor in December 1941. From the moment the Allies landed in Normandy, McKay was assigned to General Patton’s Third Army Judge Advocate’s Section to track down war criminals. Eventually, his outfit was detailed to sniffing out German art looters and stationed near Frankfurt between the collection points set up at Wiesbaden and Marburg by the Allies.3

  That’s how he found himself a stranger in a ravaged and alien country, asked by the US government to determine (a) who were war criminals, (b) what atrocities they were alleged to have committed, and (c) whether they should be brought to Nuremberg to stand trial. He was thirty years old and some 4,400 miles from home. He knew next to nothing about art—except the names of some famous artists—but was learning quickly how the Nazis used art to achieve their war aims. What McKay found most shocking was that he truly cared about people and right and wrong—and none of that seemed relevant to Hitler’s Germany. He was thunderstruck by what the Nazis had done to their own people and the rest of Europe.4 Never mind what they had done to the law.

  McKay’s unit had been investigating the German art looters for about a month before they were tipped off that one of Hitler’s main dealers for the Führermuseum was in the vicinity. When he checked the name of Hildebrand Gurlitt on his “most wanted” list, the inevitable red flag stared back at him. The list had been compiled through a variety of sources: the Roberts Commission, the French Musées Nationaux and their equivalent in all other occupied territories, the Army Services Forces Manual M-352-17B Civil Affairs, and input from individual officers of the Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU). The “most wanted” list from the Allied armies for crimes against humanity was consulted separately.

  According to McKay’s report, Gurlitt was “captured” at Schloss Frankenberg at Aschbach bei Schlüsselfeld, the ancestral home of the von Pölnitz family. When the American jeeps rolled into the small village, the mayor greeted them, and informed the soldiers that the “schloss”—where the main street rises behind the lake—was now home to Nazis who’d arrived with many trucks. Soon after, McKay was on the scene.

  Gurlitt’s collection of 117* paintings, nineteen drawings, and seventy-two various objets d’art were among the hundreds of crates cosseted in the castle. Naturally, Gurlitt was placed under house arrest and his collection taken into custody by McKay and his team. The collection was shipped to the imposing Neue Residenz high atop the city of Bamberg, some twenty miles distant. McKay’s next job was to depose Gurlitt, make his preliminary judgment, then wait for the ALIU to take over from there.5

  For three grueling days, from June 8 to 10, 1945, McKay interviewed the forty-nine-year-old Gurlitt.6 It had been forty days since Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. The “bush telegraph” between the art dealers told Gurlitt that other dealers had been arrested, too. Haberstock and Pölnitz had been taken elsewhere for questioning. Each was now weaving his own tale.

  McKay noted that Gurlitt was soft-spoken, wore spectacles, and was nervous and taciturn. His replies were to the point and translated with accuracy, so Gurlitt attested, by the US Army sergeant translator number 5 of German Jewish origin, Paul S. Bauer.7 McKay also knew that a smart witness said as little as possible.

  The American began his questioning with standard biographical information: name, date of birth, wife’s name, children’s names, current address. To lull Gurlitt into a sense of security, McKay then asked him about his parents. Gurlitt’s reply led McKay to believe that his prisoner had a highly inflated opinion of himself, since his face lit up when describing his father as the former president of the Union of German Architects and president of the German City Planning Academy—and that he had “rediscovered” the significance of baroque architecture.8

  When it came to his mother, Gurlitt laid it on with a trowel. Naturally, he did not call his mother by his youthful biting nickname for her—Madame Privy Councillor.9 Instead, he played on his second-degree-Mischling status, and the prominence of his Jewish grandmother’s family. McKay appeared unmoved, simply noting down the facts as Gurlitt told them.10

  Undeterred, Gurlitt continued, no longer reticent, sensing perhaps that if he told this lawyer more about his distinguished family, his interrogation would be over. So McKay was regaled with stories of Gurlitt’s renowned landscape-painter grandfather and an uncle who was an eminent composer in England. McKay must see surely, Gurlitt added in a suitably timid voice, that he came from a long line of influential artists.11 Gurlitt finished with the sad story of his father’s final disillusionment—omitting of course to mention that Cornelius had voted for Hitler. He also forgot to say that he freely signed “Heil Hitler!” on his correspondence. Nor did he mention Wolfgang’s brother, Manfred, a Nazi Party member who had emigrated to Japan, especially as America was still at war in the Far East.

  Of course, McKay was not to know that much of Gurlitt’s tale was a well-rehearsed lie, even though he suspected he hadn’t been told the truth. He also hadn’t received any files confirming that Gurlitt had stowed some of his personal valuables, along with those of the Gemäldegalerie, at Schloss Weesenstein.

  * * *

  Next McKay asked about Gurlitt’s own professional achievements. Understandably, to evoke sympathy, Gurlitt began with the Great War and how he’d been wounded three times between 1914 and 1918. He omitted any mention that he had “safeguarded” art in the West or written propaganda dispatches from the eastern front. Questions relating to Wilhelmine Germany were not asked as a rule, but in McKay’s limited experience, they were frequently answered. Every Nazi of a certain age had to prove that they had served the kaiser loyally, too, as if this would somehow exonerate them from the most heinous crimes under Hitler.

  Gurlitt painted a dismal pictu
re of his suffering after the Great War: how his personal friendships (non-Nazi, inevitably) and hard work eventually led to his directorship of the City Art Gallery in Zwickau from 1925. That skirted over six years of personal history and limited “professional achievements.”

  It had long before been agreed with Kirchbach that Gurlitt would never mention his name to his interrogators. Meanwhile, Gurlitt had learned that Kirchbach’s Coswig factory remained unscathed; however, it was firmly within the Soviet sector. To his relief, Kirchbach and his wife escaped to Basel in the final days of the war, and would remain there until the dust settled.12 All was proceeding according to their postwar plan.

  When McKay asked about Zwickau, Gurlitt became tight-lipped, stating merely, “Through developing this small museum into a living updated institution for workmen I incurred the enmity of the Nazis and was dismissed already in 1930.”13 McKay was no fool and knew that the Nazis had grabbed power only in 1933, yet when he pressed Gurlitt on this obvious sin of commission, McKay’s prisoner refused to say more. For some unknown reason, McKay did not note down that there were three years that were not adequately explained by Gurlitt.

  Next, McKay asked the obvious question: So what did you do next? Gurlitt’s hard-luck story continued. “I gave lessons of the history of art in the Academy of applied Art in Dresden, published a book about Käthe Kollwitz … and wrote articles for the Vossische and Frankfurter Zeitungen.”14

  Gurlitt claimed that he was “called to Hamburg as director of the Kunstverein” in 1930, making his establishment a haven for modern art—including modern English artists. He talked about the Swedish and English exhibitions, but said he was denounced when he “sawed off the flagpole” of the Kunstverein to avoid flying “the swastica [sic] flag.” This incident led to his downfall and seemed to surprise Gurlitt since Hamburg had been a mecca for “free-thinking artists” until then, he added verbosely. He had no choice but to become an art dealer to survive. McKay already knew that Gurlitt had survived quite well—he had RM 250,000 in bonds and another RM 250,000 in cash on deposit in Germany.15