Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  Although Hitler and Braun, it is now known, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, that was not certain for many months. The interval of ambiguity allowed wild suppositions to flourish. The first seemingly authoritative statement came on May 1, with the Soviet Army in Berlin, when a Hamburg radio station announced that the Führer, fighting valiantly at his offices at the Reich Chancellery, had been killed and named Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the head of the Navy, as his successor. "Our Führer Adolf Hitler is dead," Doenitz came on the radio to say. "… He died a hero's death." But just then a voice of unknown origin interrupted, declaring, "This is a lie!" and urging listeners to "rise against Doenitz."

  This bizarre broadcast, especially in the context of the Nazis' well-known mastery of propaganda, produced a strange blend of hope and disbelief. That the German capital had fallen not to the Americans or the British but to the Soviets—hardly known themselves for objective and honest news reporting—added to the unreliability of the information. Little in the following weeks clarified Hitler's fate. On May 2, President Harry Truman told reporters that the United States had "official information" that Hitler was dead, but neither he nor his aides could provide any proof. For months, conflicting press reports fed the confusion. One much-hyped article in the Chicago Times placed Hitler and Braun in Argentina, living on an estate in frigid Patagonia; though based wholly on hearsay, it was picked up by every major American and European newspaper.

  Soviet leader Josef Stalin and his regime actively encouraged doubts about Hitler's death. On May 2, Tass, the Soviet news agency, warned that the radio announcement of the Führer's demise was a "fascist trick" designed to allow him to go "underground." This proposition became the official Soviet line. On June 6, Red Army officials in Berlin declared that they had found Hitler's corpse, but just three days later, their commander, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, denied that Hitler's body had been identified and suggested that "He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment." In June and July, Stalin personally told Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, and American envoy Harry Hopkins that he was sure Hitler was alive. Most audaciously, Moscow charged in September 1945 that the British had been hiding Hitler and Braun in a castle in Westphalia.

  Stalin's motives for this disinformation remain inscrutable. Although given his paranoia, he might have believed it, more likely he hoped to use the threat of Hitler's survival for strategic advantage. If the resurgence of a Nazi-led, expansionist Germany remained a prospect, then Stalin might gain leverage for reparations and more favorable postwar borders. In the ideological war with the West, he could portray the capitalist Allies as soft on fascism and Soviet communism as fascism's true enemy.

  The British sought to refute the outrageous charge with a thorough investigation that involved numerous interviews with witnesses to Hitler's death. The resulting report, which conclusively fixed Hitler's death as a suicide on April 30 in his bunker, helped quell much rumor-mongering. So did the publication (and astonishing popularity) two years later of The Last Days of Hitler, by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had helped conduct the British government's inquiry and enriched that account with meticulous sourcing.

  But even these reports couldn't satisfy every skeptic. Because they stated that the bodies of Hitler and Braun were burned with as much as 180 liters of gasoline, some enterprising amateur scientists undertook showing that such an amount of gas couldn't consume a human body, in one experiment setting fire to a pig. Others revived the doppelgänger thesis, suggesting that the man whom witnesses saw retreat to his room to shoot himself wasn't really Hitler at all.

  The survival myth endured for decades in a multitude of forms, even as additional witnesses and information from the Soviet Union emerged to confirm Hitler's death. Pulp magazines ran lurid headlines proclaiming that his suicide had been faked or recounted stories about his absconding to distant shores. A Hungarian exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, published a book entitled, Je Sais Que Hitler Est Vivant (I Know Hitler Is Alive). In 1955, a magazine that was circulated to American high-school students demanded that the government "Clear Up Hitler's Death."

  One set of stories argued, in all seriousness, that Hitler was hiding out at the South Pole. Real-life Hitler look-alikes continued to get stopped at customs, and as late as 1969, German authorities were still rounding up men who resembled Hitler—including one retired miner, Albert Pankla, whose refusal to change his hairstyle or shave his mustache led to his arrest, he claimed, on some 300 occasions. In more recent times, the trope has been fodder for an endless catalog of bad (and some good) art, from the delightfully trashy 1976 novel (and 1978 movie) The Boys From Brazil (which had Josef Mengele surviving Berlin's fall to undertake Hitler's resurrection) to George Steiner's novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

  The persistence of the survival myth suggests several interpretations. It reveals a worry over the rebirth of Nazism, a fear that all the sacrifices of World War II still might not have permanently expunged this horrible evil. It is also a vehicle for admitting a perverse kind of awe for Hitler, a way to acknowledge his power without seeming to profess admiration. Or, as McKale suggests, it may betray an unwillingness "to allow Hitler to have the peace of death."

  But there is something more universal in the survival myth as well. The trope of the monstrous villain that won't die has a long lineage. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, when St. George slays the dragon, the onlookers at first refuse to believe it is dead. In almost every Hollywood action or slasher movie of the last 20 years, the bad guy, when presumed dead, rises one last time to give the audience a final scare. Our emotions in watching the war are not so different. In the Onion's recent parody "Military Promises 'Huge Numbers' For Gulf War II: The Vengeance," Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as saying, "In the original, as you no doubt know, we defeat Saddam Hussein, only to let him slip away at the very end," and promises to finish the job this time around.

  As is often the case, the Onion may be onto something. I suspect that for all of our triumphalism, we are actually ambivalent about total victory. There is pride, of course, in having achieved Saddam's quick removal, just as there was in ending the Third Reich. But it makes sense, too, that we should at some level want to see our victory as less than complete. Swift and total conquest brings the disconcerting shock that our military might is even more potent than we knew. It induces an anxiety about the ease with which we decide to topple a regime. And it leaves a let-down and dissipated sense of purpose after an all-out fight against an arrant villain. After all, if Saddam is really dead—if evil personified is permanently put down—what's left for the United States and its military to do?

  Thanks to Donald McKale's Hitler:The Survival Myth and to Ron Rosenbaum and his book Explaining Hitler.

  Trading Places

  Cultural property disputes are reshaping the art world—but how?

  By Carol Kino

  Posted Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

  It's a sad truth that the depredations of war and imperialism have sometimes had positive side effects for art history. Take the Metropolitan Museum's recent "Manet-Velázquez" show, on the influence of 17th-century Spanish painting on 19th-century French art. For most of the 18th century, Spanish artists like Murillo, Zurbaran, and Velázquez were little known outside their homeland. Then in the early 1800s, hundreds of Spanish paintings arrived in Paris as Napoleonic war loot. Some were briefly shown at the Louvre before Napoleon's defeat, after which they were returned. Later that century, French artists began adopting the Spanish artists' realist aesthetic and loose, sensuous brushwork—a move that laid the foundations of Impressionism and radically changed the course of modern art.

  Unlike many European museums, American museums were built with civic and capitalist muscle, rather than imperial might. Yet well into the 1970s their attitude toward acquisitions—as any expert will admit off the record—was frequently "don't ask, don't tell." But today American courts are dealing with an unprecedented number of Holocaust reparation
cases. And last year, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted a well-known New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, for conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. As a result, some foreign collectors and museums have become more cautious about loaning work to museum shows—particularly those in America—and everyone has become vastly more diligent about conducting provenance research before buying.

  What prompted this shift in global attention, when the world often turned a blind eye in the past?

  The laws that allow countries to seek restitution of what's known as "cultural property" are a byproduct of the early 20th century, when art-rich countries like Turkey, Italy, and Greece began to introduce what are known as "patrimony laws." (These essentially deem all newly discovered artifacts found within their borders to be the property of the state.)

  The movement to protect world culture dramatically intensified after World War II, during which the Nazis and the Russian army confiscated unprecedented numbers of artworks from individuals and public institutions throughout Europe. 1954 saw the drafting of the Hague Convention—the first major international agreement to establish guidelines for protecting cultural property during wartime. Then, in the 1960s, the international art market heated up so much (resulting in increased trade of stolen goods) that UNESCO, in 1970, drafted another convention that encouraged countries to work together as much as possible to enforce each other's export restrictions. (By 2003, UNESCO's guidelines had been ratified by 96 countries, including the United States.) As Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, famously wrote in his 1993 memoir, Making the Mummies Dance, "I recognized that with the UNESCO hearings, the age of piracy had ended."

  Today, trying to make sense of all the different international laws is enough to set anyone but a lawyer wailing like the tortured figure in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." In 1995, UNIDROIT (originally the legal auxiliary of the old League of Nations) drafted a convention that aims to enforce export restrictions and help unify cultural property laws worldwide. Within most countries, illegally gotten cultural property is generally covered by a nation's stolen property laws. But transport that cultural property across a border, and you may have violated civil law, criminal law, an import or an export prohibition, or a combination of the above, depending on which country we're talking about, what the object is, and who owns it—and that's just for starters. Much also depends on the particulars of the bilateral and multilateral agreements, if any, between the countries in question, which stipulate whether and to what degree one will honor another's export restrictions.

  Obviously, when the dispute is between nations, national pride, politics, and political grandstanding tend to take precedence over law. That's probably why such disputes have a habit of becoming so emotional, and so unresolvable—as evidenced by the long-running brouhaha over the Elgin Marbles, which escalated about 20 years ago. Britain holds that the sculptures, removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, were legally purchased by Lord Elgin from the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled Greece—a move that thereby saved them from destruction during Greece's War of Independence and by modern-day Greek air pollution. Yet Greece counters that the seller was an occupying force, therefore the purchase shouldn't count. Both nations regard the sculptures as their cultural patrimony. But Greece didn't exist as an independent nation until 1832—and in any case, its 20th-century patrimony laws can't be applied retroactively. Perhaps that's why Greece, so far, has attempted to resolve the matter through diplomacy, rather than in court.

  Last December, an alliance of about 40 major museums, known as the Bizot Group, issued a statement in support of the so-called "universal museum"—one whose collection brings together work from many periods and cultures. (18 museum directors signed the statement, including those of the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hermitage.) The statement argues that with time, objects become "part of the heritage of the nations which house them." Clearly, the signatories were also trying to protect their own backs: If the British Museum were ever to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, the act would likely unleash a torrent of similar claims that could drain the resources—and the collections—of some of the world's great treasure-house museums.

  Nonetheless, the Bizot statement has since been slammed by various museum associations and cultural watchdogs for being "Eurocentric" and for taking "a George Bush approach to international relations."

  Yet when it comes to cases that can be fought in court, the United States (New York State and California in particular) is actually one of the best jurisdictions in the world in which to recover stolen art. For one thing, our common-law legal system offers theft victims better protection, because it mandates that even a good-faith purchaser cannot acquire stolen property.

  The United States also has a record number of especially tough bilateral agreements with other countries, like Italy, Cyprus, and Peru, which allow those countries to pursue their own illegal export cases here. Yet to much of the world, our prosecutorial approach seems to miss the point. Europe and Japan, when balancing international relations against free trade, have tended to favor the latter—the argument in favor of a more relaxed art market being that it helps grease the wheels for traveling loan shows and allows museums to keep on collecting, thereby helping culture to circulate globally.

  Of course, it doesn't matter what laws or bilateral agreements are in place if no one enforces them—as we've seen recently in Iraq. Yet using legal parameters as the restitution cut-off point makes total sense. Clearly, the issues underlying each case are complex; thus each must be judged individually. But a legal measuring stick—rather than a more amorphously moral one—still permits prosecution of cases involving Holocaust spoils and many 20th-century export restriction breaches, while avoiding the Pandora's box of centuries-old claims that could be opened if the British Museum were to return the Elgin Marbles.

  And ironically enough, as some recent conflicts have shown, it's not always such a terrible thing to have some of a country's treasures dispersed throughout the world. If an Elginesque diplomat had struck a dicey deal for Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas in the 19th century, the Taliban wouldn't have been able to shell them into smithereens in 2001. In May, just after the Baghdad Museum was looted and many of Iraq's Mesopotamian treasures were lost, the Metropolitan opened "Art of the First Cities," its own Mesopotamian survey, which relies heavily on loans from the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Hermitage. Were it not for 18th- and 19th-century imperialist depradation, that history might well not exist today.

  Culturebox thanks Lawrence M. Kaye and Howard N. Spiegler of Herrick, Feinstein, LLP; Jason Hall, director of government and public affairs, the American Association of Museums; and the U.S. State Department's International Cultural Property Protection Web site.

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  The wording of these laws generally applies to objects found "on and under the ground," in order to cover undocumented antiquities taken from archeological sites.

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  Later in the century, European countries like Britain, France, and Italy, realizing that their own cultural legacy was being sold piecemeal to the new world economic power, America, began to establish their own export restrictions. These usually give a government first right of refusal when an object deemed essential to national heritage is sold. By 1983, most Communist countries and developing nations had also established their own such restrictions, ranging from qualified sale limitations to full-scale export embargos.

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  After the Second World War, the Allies returned many displaced artworks to the nations they'd been stolen from, the assumption being that the countries themselves would locate the rightful owners. Frequently, this didn't happen. And because many of the nations that received returned work were part of the Soviet Union, their archives were sealed until recently, making it impossible for survivors and their descendents to gain the evidence needed to press claims. Thus the dissolution of the USSR has pr
ovoked a rash of new claims.

  Many U.S. museums maintain public registries of artwork whose provenance has gaps during the Nazi era (1933-1945). In September, a searchable national registry of such work, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal, will go live on the American Association of Museums' Web site. Several states are also in the process of enacting Holocaust exception legislation. The toughest of these is a California law that became effective in January 2003: It doesn't permit museums and other institutions to use the statute of limitations defense for any action commenced before the end of 2010.

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  New York's statute of limitations runs for three years, and the clock doesn't start ticking till the day after the plaintiff's demand has been refused.

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  After the Second World War, the Allies returned many displaced artworks to the nations they'd been stolen from, the assumption being that the countries themselves would locate the rightful owners. Frequently, this didn't happen. And because many of the nations that received returned work were part of the Soviet Union, their archives were sealed until recently, making it impossible for survivors and their descendents to gain the evidence needed to press claims. Thus the dissolution of the USSR has provoked a rash of new claims.