In May 1949 the gang shot and killed the driver of a BMW and stole his car. Now the police finally uncovered the tracks of the gang and went to arrest Gladow in Friedrichshain in the Soviet Sector. After a gun battle in which Gladow was wounded twice, he was taken into custody and charged with 352 offences, including two murders and fifteen attempted murders. In the dock he was undiminished in his cockiness. Attempts to reduce the sentence on the grounds of age were rejected, and Gladow was beheaded in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on 5 December 1950.33
14
Light Fingers
Naturally I nicked things sometimes, coal and that sort of thing. Wood too. Just recently I even stole a loaf of bread from a baker’s shop. It was really quick and simple. I just snatched the bread and walked out. I went out calmly, only when I got to the corner did I start to run. You just don’t have the nerves any more.
Heinrich Böll, ‘Geschäft ist Geschäft’, in Wanderer kommst du nach Spal - Erzählungen, Munich 1997, 171
Theft was not confined to petty larceny among the soldateska, DPs or starving Germans. Whole governments were involved in robbing Germany of anything that took their fancy. It could have been just about anything, such as Göring’s yacht, the Karin II, which ended up in the hands of the British royal family. One Soviet priority was the seizure of any important works of art found in the capital. This was a fully planned operation, and no particular novelty. The greatest art thief of all time was probably Napoleon Bonaparte, and French provincial museums are still filled with paintings acquired on his campaigns. The Nazis too plundered art wherever they went, but they proved themselves amateurs beside the Red Army. The art works stolen by Soviet troops were originally planned to be exhibited in a huge museum of war trophies - the equivalent of Hitler’s museum in Linz. As the tide of opinion changed, however, the Russians chose to conceal the art works in special closed galleries throughout the Soviet Union. Many of them remain hidden to this day.df
In true Soviet style many of these works of art were destroyed in the fighting and more were to be eradicated by negligence during the first days of the occupation. The pillage was by no means limited to Berlin, and within their zone and in the former German areas that were ceded to Russia and Poland the Soviets were able to make off with some two and a half million objets d’art including 800,000 paintings. Some of these had been stolen by the Nazis.
Art boffins travelled with the Red Army as they conquered Germany, grabbing anything of value. This was not always so easy, as the squaddies were often more likely to destroy works of art than to preserve them. Fyodor Chotinsky, for example, chanced upon his first haul when he entered one of the houses of a Graf Pourtalès on 10 March 1945. His excitement was mitigated, however, when over the next few days troops shattered the larger part of the porcelain, knocked over statuary, and poked out the eyes of portraits in the style of Rembrandt and Greuze. Even when troops were posted to watch over a collection, the boffins returned to find that the guards had slept in the tapestries and used the porcelain to cook in.1
The nemesis of this Russian pursuit of trophies was the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives) department of the US army. They too took art works into ‘custody’, including some 200 canvases found in Berlin. The Americans originally planned to ship a large percentage of Germany’s art treasures home with them. This was a policy warmly supported by Clay, who wanted to ‘hold them in trust for the German people’. There was a little more to it than that, however. Clay’s concern for the art works encompassed an element of ‘trophying’: the ‘American public is entitled to see these art objects’. He opposed the return of works from the Kaiser Friedrich Museumdg in Berlin before a place could be found to exhibit them. Eventually President Truman stepped in and promised to send them back.2
This was in part due to Captain Walter Farmer, the author of the ‘Wiesbaden Manifesto’, who encouraged ministers, senators and museum curators to protest against official policy. Those works of art that had already been removed to America were brought back to Germany after their return had been officially sanctioned by Clay in March 1948. The Prussian Collections were given to Hessen, as the state of Prussia would shortly be abolished by the notorious Control Council Law No. 46 of February 1947. The former Prussian Collection from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum had found a temporary home in Wiesbaden. They included the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. Much of Berlin’s treasure was housed in the castellated flak towers that were National Socialism’s most striking gift to the capital. In one of them, the Zoo Tower, Soviet art historians in uniform discovered Heinrich Schliemann’s gold: the treasures of Troy protected day and night by the director of the Museum for Antiquities, Dr Wilhelm Unverzagt. Unverzagt had managed to prevent the soldiers from finding the gold until 1 May, when a superior officer appeared. Then he revealed the contents of the cases. The officer posted sentries. A few days later General Bersarin made a visit to the tower and assured Unverzagt that the treasures would be taken to a safe place. At the end of the month Schliemann’s gold was carried off on an army lorry. Its ultimate destination was Leningrad.
Unverzagt had one last job to perform: he had to supervise the inventory as the boxes were filled with other treasures as they were removed from the tower. The first convoy set out on 13 May. By the 19th the work was all but finished. On the 21st he learned that the lorries were heading for the Soviet army HQ at Karlshorst. Speed was vital: the Western Allies were due in Berlin at any moment and the Soviet authorities did not want the British or the Americans calling them to order. The Zoo Tower was going to be in the British Sector after all. The art historians had to convince the generals of the importance of what they were doing. Many of these senior officers were demontageniki - keener on using their lorries and railway trucks to ship out whole factories together with any heavy machines to rebuild the Soviet economy.3 And there was still a problem: the flak tower was under Smersh - Military Intelligence - control, and the culture boffins had no right to remove the objects from it. They had to win over Marshal Zhukov. This was done by sending Andrei Belokopitov, in civilian life the director of the Artists’ Theatre in Moscow, to see the marshal. Zhukov thought the visit was to do with the theatre and received Belokopitov cordially. When he learned that it was to do with the treasure in the flak tower, he became angry. Belokopitov told the marshal, however, ‘If this collection falls into the hands of the Americans, you will regret this mistake.’
Zhukov summoned his adjutant, Antipenko. They would override Smersh: the culture boffins had twenty-four hours to empty the Zoo Tower. Belokopitov broke into the conversation: twenty-four hours were too few, because the objects were very large. Zhukov awarded the boffins forty-eight and dismissed them. They enlisted a detachment of some 300 experienced pioneers who set about dismantling the Pergamon Altar. They also loaded 7,000 Greek vases, 1,800 statues, 9,000 antique gems, 6,500 terracotta figures and thousands of objects of lesser value. The bigger job was finished by the beginning of June. When the Americans arrived they were told that the altar had been removed undamaged, but that some Egyptian reliefs and Roman statuary had been smashed, and that a Chinese bronze gong had rolled away down the stone steps.4 The largest piece of booty transported to Russia were the friezes from the Pergamon Altarpiece, which had been a present to Kaiser William II from the Ottoman emperor to thank Germany for its help in excavating the site. The Pergamon Museum had been built up around it.
The greatest tragedy of the sack of Berlin was the fire that took place in the Control Tower in the Park at Friedrichshain. The huge concrete tower was abandoned by its defenders on 2 May. Over the next three days it was picked over by various foreign workers who were chiefly looking for food. The tower was, however, the temporary repository of the classical antiquities from the Berlin museums together with the paintings from the picture gallery. There were 8,500 objects from the classical collections, as well as 1,500 in glass. Of the 411 canvases, 160 were Italian masters, a quarter of the total collection, and including works by Fra Angelico an
d Luca Signorelli. Italian sculpture was represented by Donatello’s Madonna and Child. There were large works by Rubens, as well as pictures by Chardin, Zurbarán, Murillo and Reynolds. Of the German works one of the most famous was Menzel’s Tafelrunde.
In the night of the 5-6 May the Control Tower burst into flames, destroying at least some of the art works housed on the first floor. It was thought that the fire had been started by Germans looking for food. Someone had the wilder theory that Werewolves had set the tower alight. Still it was impossible to convince the Russians to guard the tower, and some time between the 7th and the 15th another fire broke out that destroyed all that remained. The second fire may have been started by thieves trying to find valuable works of art, as some artefacts and at least one picture later materialised on the market. As there was no light in the tower it was supposed they had lit newspapers in order to see better. When art historians visited the site a few days later they found that the forced labourers had already scoured the remains, taking with them fragments of antique glass and pots. On contact with the air the marble disintegrated in the hands of the despairing experts.5
At the beginning of July the Russians took another look at the Control Tower in Friedrichshain. It was decided to sift through the ruins to see if there was anything worth retrieving. They filled fifteen chests with broken antiquities. One of the archaeologists was excited about a strangely shaped vase he found buried in the ashes. When he had dusted it down he found that he was holding a Russian bazooka shell that had failed to explode. The Russian experts knew that it was important to remove anything salvageable from the Control Tower before the autumn as the damp air would destroy the remaining artefacts. The military governor of Berlin, Colonel General Gorbatov, wrote to Zhukov to this effect, but work did not begin until December. By March 1946 around 10,000 objects had been dug out. Even the Americans from the MFAA were able to retrieve a few objects. There seems to have been little or no security at the tower.6 More antiquities were taken from the cellars of the New Mint where they had lain around in pools of water, in many cases badly damaged. From the Museum Island the Russians selected fifty-four canvases from the cellars. Among others there was Goya’s May Pole, and Ghirlandaio’s Christ on the Cross. All the looted treasure was taken to Schloss Tresckow in Friedrichsfelde or the former abattoir for shipment back to Russia.
The fate of Hitler continued to trouble the Russians for many months: was he actually dead? The British too had launched an investigation, with the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper piecing his last days together. The Russians had the advantage of possessing the Chancellery, the bunker and - although they were confused at first - his bones. Trevor-Roper did not have those, although the picture he drew was substantially correct.7
Meanwhile the Soviet authorities were falling out over the bones. Stalin had been informed by Zhukov that Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April. His body and that of his new wife Eva Braun had been dug up in the garden, in the spot designated by Admiral Voss. As the Smersh soldiers were not certain that they had the right bodies, they reburied them, only finally exhuming them on 5 May, when together with the bodies of the Goebbels children, the chief of staff General Krebs and a couple of dogs, they were sent to their HQ at Berlin-Buch as important trophies. The autopsies were performed the next day. Contradictory evidence made the officers concerned reluctant to send in a final report on the cause of Hitler’s death. The Soviet authorities preferred the version that had him taking poison - a cowardly way out. Shooting oneself was a braver, more soldierly death.
When the Soviets’ Operation Myth was launched in 1946 to establish the real sequence of events leading to Hitler’s death, some of Hitler’s personal staff were brought back to Berlin and the bunker, in order to point out the precise details of the suicide and subsequent burning in the garden. The bones, for the time being, were stored in Magdeburg.8 Of particular importance were the objects in Hitler’s personal collection. For them an aircraft was laid on as Stalin wanted his bones examined by his foremost experts. The Führer’s skull was eventually put into a paper bag and deposited in the State Archives. The paintings in his private collection were taken to the abattoir.9 The area around the Chancellery remained out of bounds to Berliners. When Ruth Friedrich poked her nose into the cour d’honneur of the Chancellery in May she saw a Soviet squaddie comfortably ensconced in an armchair with a machine gun across his knees.10
At Schloss Sophienhof near Berlin, Russian soldiers destroyed the complete archive of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Part of the medieval-weapon collection housed in the Berlin Arsenal was destroyed on orders issued by the Soviet military authorities. At Karinhall, the house Göring had built for himself on the site of the the Kaiser’s hunting lodge on the Schorfheide, the Russians indulged in an orgy of destruction, demolishing statues by Pigalle, Houdon and Boizo by using them for target practice. The hidden pictures by Emil Nolde (the Nazis had forbidden Nolde to paint) in Teupitz Hospital were burned.11
Not everything was rubbished. In Silesia delighted Russian officials seized immense numbers of wireless sets. In the villas of prosperous Silesians well-stocked libraries were found, and 40,000 art books were collected and despatched back to the Pushkin Museum. In Gleiwitz there was excitement when a horde of Stradivari and Amati violins was seized, until it turned out that they were fakes. Silesia, however, was not as rich in artefacts as its soil was fertile. A Kolbe figure was located and appropriated. As they searched for booty on one estate Soviet art experts found a group of soldiers about to hang a monkey. The creature was accused of having lifted its paw in salute when they had shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ as a joke. The irony of the monkey’s response had been lost on them. The art historians rescued the beast and made it their companion.12
Soviet officers - particularly Lieutenant Yevgeny Ludshuveit - were credited with saving the Schlosser of Sanssouci (the town palace was destroyed by British bombs in April). Frederick the Great’s art collection, however, went east, and a Russian officer is thought to have slashed Philip de László’s portrait of William II with a sabre.13 Most of the Russian energy went into removing the best parts of the collections they found. In the old Cistercian monastery at Lehnin they found some stored works of art and organised their shipment. Frederick the Great’s first palace, Schloss Rheinsberg, was stripped of its last contents, right down to the painted over-doors. Viktor Lazarev, however, a professor of art history at Moscow University, was one who respected the architectural ensemble where possible. In Potsdam he advocated leaving paintings, sculpture, chandeliers and tapestries in situ, when they were conceived as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk. As many as 60,000 POWs were used in the evacuation of these works of art, loading them on to 90,000 railway trucks.14
Berlin was not the only place rich in art treasure. The Russians had the run of Saxony and much of Thuringia, not to mention Pomerania and the prosperous port of Danzig. The electors and kings of Saxony had been great collectors, and the Dresden Gallery was one of the world’s foremost art museums. Part of the collection had been stored in a quarry at Grosscotta near Pirna. Among the paintings there was the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. The art historian Natalia Sokolova was the first to see the pictures when a German unlocked the door to the store room.
A simple goods wagon stood in the tunnel. The German handed me the candle. [Leonid] Rabinovitch turned on an electric lamp. In this twilight were glimpsed the gold frames of the pictures, that were tightly packed together. We turned our lights towards them and I felt I had gone deathly pale. Before me I could see the broad span of the eagle that bore off Rembrandt’s Ganymede in its claws. Rabinovitch carefully moved the painting to the right, and another appeared.
‘Do you see?’ he whispered. ‘Wonderful,’ said the German . . . what lay before me was the Sleeping Venus of Giorgione . . . After that came the Self-Portrait with Saskia by Rembrandt and a small, silvery landscape by Watteau, a view of Dresden by Canaletto, Titian’s Portrait of a Woman in White . . .
The conditions in the qua
rry were terrible: it was cold and damp: ‘The Germans had lost any moral claim to [the pictures]. Now they belonged to the Red Army.’ There was a fear that they might have to fight the Americans for them if they did not get them to their collection point at Schloss Pillnitz as quickly as possible. Marshal Koniev came to inspect the haul. He was also impressed and telegraphed Stalin to tell him that the treasure had been found.15
There was more booty in Schloss Weesenstein. Here the Russians found the Koenig Collection that had been bought by Prince John George of Saxony, and forty-five Rembrandt etchings that had belonged to the industrialist and banker Rudolf Gutmann of Vienna and had since been earmarked for the Führer’s Museum in Linz. Only one of the etchings had been detached from the collection: The Jewish Bride was thought to portray too sensitive a subject.16
After the Reich Page 52
