Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Moving artworks was an activity that echoed in his memory and reminded him of his childhood. His playmates had always been the paintings by Beckmann, Chagall, and Liebermann. When his family moved from Hamburg to Dresden, they hung on the walls of the new home. When he graduated from secondary school in Düsseldorf, they hung once again on the family walls there.

  When he was close to the paintings again, his friends, he could recall easier times when his father hung them in their new homes and showed him the backs of the paintings all bearing the “Gurlitt mark” of ownership. As a measure of protection against evil, he recalled how Hildebrand had hung the green-faced portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirschner above Cornelius’s bed—Hitler had always loathed green faces, Cornelius told Der Spiegel.10

  * * *

  Cornelius began his retreat from reality before Helene’s death. When he was questioned in 2013 about the “Munich hoard,” as the 1,407 artworks found in his apartment were dubbed by the press, Cornelius admitted that he had stopped watching television when Germany’s second television station—“the new station,” Cornelius called it—began broadcasting in 1963. He had heard of computers and the Internet, but continued to book his hotels and taxis by post, arranged sometimes months in advance. He composed his letters on a typewriter and signed with a fountain pen, just as he had done in the 1960s.

  Still, how had he remained invisible to the German government? How had he never filed a tax return, or come under other scrutiny? He had a residence in Salzburg, Austria, long before Helene’s death, and had also become an Austrian citizen afterward. It is impossible to believe that the laundering operation had been a machination of his own making. He traveled exclusively between Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on an identity card, having diverged only once, as a young man, when he visited Paris with his sister.

  Cornelius had no German bank accounts. He never collected a pension, declared any expenses on the German national health service, or paid property taxes in his own name. Everything that needed to be paid for in Germany was paid in cash—electricity, water, building charges. In fact, the apartment from which all the 1,407 artworks were confiscated didn’t belong to him. Forty-five years after his mother’s death, Cornelius Gurlitt was still living in an apartment registered in his mother’s name.11

  31

  THE LION TAMER

  The life of the dead is placed in the hands of the living.

  —CICERO

  Cornelius had always wanted to please his father. That’s why he studied art at the University of Cologne and attended lectures, as his father and uncle did, on philosophy and music theory. Hildebrand was trying to remake his son in his own image. Sadly for Cornelius, he was made of different stuff—perhaps better stuff, but nonetheless a disappointment to his father.

  It had been obvious to both Hildebrand and Helene long before their deaths that neither Cornelius nor Benita would be in a position to take over his dealing in art with the same flair. Their son was a soft-spoken man of significant intellect, but who had equally withdrawn from society. Whether it was some form of autism or simply the knowledge that he could never fill his father’s shoes, we shall never know.

  Secrecy had been hardwired into Cornelius’s genes. His grandfather, despite his presence in the art world, had been a very private man. His father had learned that trait at his father’s knee and carried it into his secret, scheming life. Hildebrand would not leave it to chance that Cornelius—or indeed Benita—would live any other way. If they did, his reputation would be nothing more than a sham—and Hildebrand cared a great deal about his reputation and his legacy.

  Cornelius’s phobic protection of his “friends, the paintings” from the prying eyes of strangers was drummed into him from the earliest age to the point where he could not recall a time when the paintings hadn’t been important to him. The family mantra was “Always the paintings” for his parents, and it became “Always the paintings first” for him.

  Recalling his days as an eleven-year-old helping his father to pack away his “friends” from the family home in Dresden, Cornelius told Der Spiegel, “The family moved around a lot, always following a father who didn’t have an easy time because he ‘wasn’t racially flawless.’ But he always fought and was very clever.”1 Cornelius went on to cite the example of his father not owning his private Kunstkabinett as one of his clever ploys, not realizing that it had been common practice among outcasts in the Third Reich.

  He was proud that his father hadn’t complied with the law to register his art dealership in Dresden. This was hardly necessary, since Dresden was merely a convenience address that belonged to Hildebrand’s mother and where he traded after having been bombed out in Hamburg. “My father was often driven out,” the eighty-year-old Cornelius said, “he often fell but he always got back up on his feet again.”2 All the moving around under the auspices of a hero-like father, a famous man in Germany—a man seen by his son posing for photographs with Thomas Mann and Germany’s first postwar president, Theodor Heuss—made Cornelius immensely proud. He even believed the malarkey he’d been fed that his father spoke fluent French and English, lamenting that “I only speak English, but slowly.”3 Overwhelmed, self-effacing, appreciative of beauty, and thankful to his father for his legacy, Cornelius Gurlitt was a man who thought he had always obeyed the law. He had no inkling of the mess his parents had left for him.

  * * *

  Still, Cornelius had to live. From 1968, how to live would be best overseen by Benita and her husband. Yet it would be Cornelius who would need to do the running. While Bar, Brun hadn’t succeeded in selling in his mother’s lifetime, it had not excited any debate either. So he decided to try to sell the painting at other auctions—also without luck. Through Sotheby’s in Munich, Cornelius arranged for the painting to be sent to auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1980. There, too, it found no buyers.

  Finally, three years later, in 1983, Marvin Fishman of Milwaukee bought Bar, Brun at Sotheby’s auction in Munich for DM 550,000. Thirteen years after that, in 1996, the painting was sold to Robert Looker, who died in 2012 and whose heirs left the painting to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)—unfortunately on the same day that the Focus article about Cornelius scooped the world press.4 LACMA’s stalwart museum curator and the organizer of the groundbreaking 1991 Degenerate Art exhibition, Stephanie Barron, remained confident, however, that despite the Goepel and Gurlitt provenance, her research into the “gifted” painting had proved that it had not been looted or sold under duress.5

  * * *

  It is likely that in the intervening years other paintings were sold by Cornelius, with the proceeds being kept either in cash in his Munich apartment or in Austria or at bank deposit boxes in Switzerland. Notwithstanding this, it would be the sale of The Lion Tamer, also by Max Beckmann, in 2011 that enabled the authorities to close in on the unsuspecting Cornelius.

  * * *

  The Lion Tamer was on Hildebrand Gurlitt’s inventory submitted to the Monuments Men in 1945 when he was placed under house arrest at Aschbach.6 It was returned to Gurlitt in 1950, since no claim had been filed for the painting. However, the last owner of record, Alfred Flechtheim, had been branded and hounded from Germany—with friends like Buchholz, Valentin, Vömel, and Gurlitt taking chunks of his vast collection to “sell” or “hold” on his behalf. Flechtheim had become Hitler’s poster boy, and worried himself into oblivion. He never sold The Lion Tamer. Flechtheim’s nephew and heir—a tailor in London’s East End—never knew it still existed and so was unable to make a claim.

  * * *

  Life has moved on since those ad hoc days in the 1940s and 1950s when the onus was on the victims of the looting to determine when and where and how their worldly possessions had disappeared. Since the Washington Principles of 1998, publicly funded museums and galleries of all signatory countries are under an obligation to inspect their collections and make any potentially looted work of art from the Nazi era readily identifiable to the public.


  This generally is interpreted as some sort of notice on a museum or gallery’s website. They may even go the extra mile and register it on other lost-art websites such as the Art Loss Register. Yet there are more than a few problems with the system. Not only is there a proliferation of these lost-art websites, but increasingly the second and third generations of descendants of victims of the Holocaust and the Third Reich are unaware of the complete inventory of their ancestors who were murdered before the information could be passed on through wills or other documentation.

  The more remote the knowledge base, the more often claimants will be unsuccessful in their claims. Finally, the Washington Principles do not cover private owners of looted art. To claim from a private owner, the claimant must—in almost all cases—sue for restitution. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the beauty of the 1998 accord is that for the first time a statute of limitations was theoretically no longer a valid excuse to keep any looted artwork.7 Paradoxically, this is also one of the reasons the agreement does not bind the current owners of the works who have bought them in good faith. In the words of the Washington Principles’ architect, Stuart Eizenstat, it is an imperfect justice.

  * * *

  Fortunately for Alfred Flechtheim’s heirs, they had hired a New York lawyer, Mel Urbach, and his German partner based in Marburg, Germany, Markus Stoetzel, to help locate Flechtheim’s exceptional collection. It was Stoetzel who made the breakthrough with The Lion Tamer.

  According to the Financial Times, Stoetzel discovered the forthcoming sale only a few weeks prior to the auction due to take place at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne. In fact, it was to be the auction’s highlight. Stoetzel, as part of his work as a lawyer recovering looted art, thumbs through auction catalogues from around the world. When he saw The Lion Tamer that November, he was stunned. He knew that most of the Flechtheim collection had been plundered by the Nazis and that at least twelve Beckmann pictures were still missing—including The Lion Tamer.8

  By mid-November Stoetzel had written to Karl-Sax Feddersen at Lempertz to notify him that this picture had been part of the Flechtheim collection since June 1931 and that it had never been sold. In truly lawyerly fashion, Feddersen was put on notice that Stoetzel knew more about the painting’s history than the auction house did. The gouache and pastel work on paper had been created during the period of exclusivity when Flechtheim and I. B. Neumann represented Beckmann and could never have belonged to the Gurlitt collection before January 30, 1933, as the gallery claimed in its catalogue.9

  It took Feddersen some while to respond definitively to Stoetzel’s letter, although apparently there were a number of telephone conversations. At first, Feddersen prevaricated. His client would not budge. Cornelius was never named as that client during the discussions, but it was somehow known to Stoetzel that it was Gurlitt’s son or daughter who might be selling the picture. Stoetzel was forced to go into print a second time, adding the force of argument behind his initial letter that Flechtheim had been driven into penury by the middle of 1933, writing to Neumann in New York, “Ich habe kein Geld”—“I have no money.” If he had sold the Beckmann only a few months earlier to Gurlitt, surely this would not be the case?10

  Finally, only two days prior to the auction, Feddersen’s unnamed client agreed to split the proceeds with Flechtheim’s heirs. According to Stoetzel, it was proof that the Lempertz client was “willing to accept the fact that Mr Flechtheim was a persecuted Jew who had lost his collection under duress.”11 That was the victory Stoetzel sought to achieve. “In these cases, the most significant wrong to be righted,” Stoetzel said, “is often the mere acknowledgment of the initial crime which always led to desperation and often to murder. We know Flechtheim was in effect murdered by the Nazis. What we seek for him and his heirs is justice.”12

  The split of the proceeds between Cornelius and the Flechtheim heirs was 60/40 in favor of the current owner. The painting sold for 720,000 euros* at the Lempertz auction on December 2, 2011, meaning that approximately 400,000 euros went to Cornelius. Feddersen was allowed to purr in public about the “wonderful picture” and how it was “one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. A very, very impressive, large work.”13 Feddersen also said that his curiosity had been piqued by the famous name in the art world in Germany as the last owner of the painting and asked if there were other artworks for sale. Apparently, Cornelius didn’t answer him.

  * * *

  The timing of the sale of The Lion Tamer may be significant, too. It was the first time Cornelius had gone to Lempertz, one of Germany’s largest auction houses. Was he in a hurry to sell it to help pay for Benita’s cancer treatment? Or was it simply part of the ongoing disposal of his father’s hoard? Given that it was one of the artworks that were special to him as a boy, its sale would most likely have held a certain importance to him. It would be in character if he had decided to part with one of his dearest “friends” to help his sister—the only person with whom he felt a warm human connection. After all, Cornelius did say that he sold The Lion Tamer for medical expenses.

  32

  FEEDING FRENZY

  I’m not as courageous as my father. He loved art and fought for it.

  —CORNELIUS GURLITT to Der Spiegel

  The beginning of the end began on what should have been a routine return trip from Switzerland. On September 22, 2010, Cornelius was returning from Zurich to Munich on the EC 197 train. A customs official noticed the then seventy-eight-year-old avoiding his gaze, and when he questioned Cornelius, felt he was acting suspiciously. Cornelius was taken to the men’s room and searched. Nine thousand euros in cash was discovered. Cornelius hadn’t committed any crime, since the limit for declaring cash across borders in Europe is 10,000 euros.1 Even so, it would be the height of hubris to believe that Cornelius Gurlitt was not singled out on that train.

  The Zurich to Munich train is one of the prime places to find tax evaders of all nationalities. The shy and easily flustered Cornelius could not stand up to the slightest scrutiny from a rough customs officer. His crime was his apparent shiftiness, yet the officious official was forced to let him go, reporting Cornelius’s Munich address to his superiors since the 9,000 euros gave rise to reasonable cause of suspicion of tax evasion.

  That was when the alarm bells blared. Cornelius Gurlitt, according to all tax and income records in Germany, was a man who never existed. Nearly two years later, on February 28, 2012, a team of perhaps as many as thirty people—customs investigators and lawyers from the Augsburg public prosecutor’s office—burst into Cornelius’s fifth-floor apartment by breaking the lock. The “strangers,” as he called them, swarmed like angry wasps, advising him that they were government officials and were confiscating his collection.

  For what seemed an eternity, but was in fact two days, Cornelius sat in his dressing gown in the corner while his “friends”—121 paintings and 1,285 drawings, watercolors, and prints—were boxed up, folded into blankets, and whisked away.2 Even his father’s papers were scooped up in the raid. He watched helplessly as his favorites were wrenched from their home. Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach, which he had beheld for over four decades on the same wall, was taken from where it hung. Chagall’s Mythological Scene was purloined from a locked wooden cabinet.3 The apartment held a treasure trove of great German modern artists like Beckmann, Liebermann, and Marc, as well as Picasso and Chagall. There were also works by Fragonard, Dürer, and Impressionists Degas and Corot.

  Desolate and alone in the empty apartment, Cornelius was bewildered, fulminating at the injustice. Not only were these strangers telling him that he had broken laws, but that his father had looted the art. In typical twenty-first-century “caring” fashion, a counselor from the local public-health services was sent to help Cornelius “talk about his feelings.” It was, to use Cornelius’s own word, “gruesome.”4 He had never talked about his feelings with anyone, except perhaps Benita. The counselor was dutifully sent away with the assurance that he had no inten
tions of committing suicide, but none the wiser about anything else.

  * * *

  For the next nineteen months, experts appointed by the Bavarian government pored over the collection. Not once in that period did they question Cornelius, or indeed the auction house of Kornfeld he was said to have visited in Bern on that fateful trip. More significantly, they never tried to contact the potential claimants of the paintings, some of whom are now in their nineties. Cornelius fretted and missed his “friends”—but, unknown to the government, he had others stashed elsewhere.

  When Focus magazine got the scoop of the decade breaking the news, in early November 2013, no one asked how they managed it. Until then, Focus was thought to be a small but good magazine, but not the type that was noted for breaking stories of international interest.5 Some of those close to the Gurlitt case feel that money may have passed hands between a source at the customs warehouse where the artworks were stored and Focus. If not, then how did the magazine know?

  Perhaps no one could have foreseen the media feeding frenzy that would result. In the weeks that followed, the world’s press was parked outside Cornelius’s apartment block, trying to tempt him out to talk with offers of cakes and other sweets they’d heard he loved, in an unedifying display of repellent behavior.

  Still, there was more to the feeding frenzy than the search for a scoop or the story of how he could have so many valuable artworks in such a small apartment and remain unknown to the government. It quickly became a public-relations disaster and the throbbing heart of an international incident. Winfried Bausback, justice minister of Bavaria, claimed the first he’d heard of Gurlitt’s hoard was from the press.