by Noah Charney
Various explanations have been offered for the passionate enthusiasm Hitler had for this project. Hitler was a failed art student. His work considered too poor, Hitler was rejected from studies as a painter and an architect in Vienna. Here was an opportunity to show the lords of the art world not only that they had erred in rejecting him, but that he could deprive them of their greatest treasures. Hitler’s inferiority complex, about which much has been written, may also have contributed to his choice of Linz, a working-class town without much in the way of culture, as his new world art capital. By elevating his boyhood hometown, Hitler could elevate his own modest origins. Hitler’s Linz would be ever after known as the culture capital of the world, his kulturhaupstadt. Hitler’s dislike for Vienna, a city he had once idealized before he was rejected from studies there and forced to live in low-income communal housing, may also have contributed to his choice of Linz. He would strip the old Austro-Hungarian culture capital and elevate its poor neighbor.
The entire city of Linz was to be converted into one expansive museum that would house all of the world’s art. Every art historian would come there to study. Even the art that Hitler considered “degenerate,” primarily nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and abstract works, would be placed in a special museum to be viewed by future generations as evidence of the grotesqueries from which the Nazis had saved humankind. The city, naturally, would have to be completely transformed, old buildings uprooted in favor of new state-of-the-art museum facilities. There was a joke that while Munich was the city of Nazi Bewegung (the Nazi movement), Linz would become the city of the Nazi Bodenbewegung (the Nazi earthquake).
Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s artistic agenda followed his social one. He was passionately in love with art by northern European artists or of northern European subject matter. He sought works by Teutonic/Scandinavian artists or Teutonic/Scandinavian subjects—art that, to him, demonstrated Aryan greatness—by the likes of Breughel, Cranach, Dürer, Friedrich, Vermeer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Bouts, Grünewald, and Jan van Eyck.
Hitler already had experience with censorship. Early in his tenure as führer, he had ordered the closing of the modern wing of the former crown prince’s National Gallery in Berlin, the same museum that had displayed six panels from The Ghent Altarpiece until the Treaty of Versailles. He referred to this wing, with its masterpieces by the likes of Kandinsky, Schiele, Malevich, and Nolde, as the “Chamber of Horrors.” It was closed officially by the Ministry of Education on 30 October 1936, just months after the departure of foreign visitors who had been in Berlin for the Olympic Games. The timing of the closure indicates a Nazi awareness that their views on art would not be well received by the world at large.
It was a sign of the times. Two months prior, the director of the Folkwang Museum in Essen had deaccessioned a Kandinsky painting and sold it to a dealer for 9,000 marks, in what he called a public act of purification. He went on to insist that degenerate art such as this would infect all who looked upon it, and therefore it must be hunted down and removed not only from museums, but from private collections as well. To establish an edifying point of contrast, the House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst) was set up in March 1937: an annual exhibition of Reich-approved artworks that would set a morally elevating example for what the art of the Reich should be. It was housed in the first building constructed as an edifice of German propaganda, built between 1934 and 1937 in an adaptation of the Neoclassical style that would come to typify Fascist architecture.
While the Nazis expressed their hatred for so-called degenerate art, they were certainly aware of its monetary value. True iconoclasts would want such art destroyed, but the Nazis did not hesitate to profit from the art they were denouncing, selling the confiscated art to dealers and collectors who prized it and would continue its legacy as an object of beauty and veneration.
On 30 June 1937 Hitler authorized Adolf Ziegler, an artist and the president of the Reich’s Department of Plastic Arts, to seize for the purpose of exhibition the examples of German degenerate art to be found in German imperial, provincial, or municipal possession. Ziegler was one of Hitler’s art advisors and a longtime friend of the führer’s. (Hitler had commissioned Ziegler to paint a memorial portrait of Hitler’s niece, who had recently committed suicide.) Hitler collected a number of Ziegler’s paintings, which he displayed at his Munich residence. Ironically, Ziegler had begun his painting career in the Modernist vein, a movement he would later help to condemn.
Only twenty days after the mandate, Ziegler mounted the so-called Exhibition of Depraved Art, first in Munich and then in Berlin, Leipzig, and Düsseldorf. The exhibition was the result of the rapid and systematic roundup of the cream of modern art in German collections. Abstract or minimalist painters, and artists of non-Teutonic origin were best, or one might say worst, represented. Emil Nolde had the most paintings exhibited, with twenty-seven on display. Among the art of other condemned artists of note were nine works by Kokoschka, six by Otto Dix, and paintings by Chagall, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.
It was intentionally curated in the least flattering way. A total of 730 works were hung clustered together in long, narrow galleries with dim lighting. What light might have come in through the windows was mostly blocked by screens, which were pocked with holes in order to let in blinding spotlights of sunshine. Sculpture was placed in front of paintings. Placards that contained demeaning analyses hung beside certain paintings. A wall of works by German contemporary artists bore the inscription “Until today such as these were the instructors of German youth.” This traveling exhibition made stops in Germany’s most artistically endowed cities, much like accusers wheeling their captured witches for all the townspeople to see before sending them to the stake.
Following this exhibition, Hitler implemented a massive plundering of his own people, under the guise of “purification.” Throughout Germany every artwork that Ziegler’s committee deemed depraved, based on no further criteria, was confiscated without compensation, regardless of its location in a museum, gallery, private home, or church.
It seems that this plundering occurred before Hitler himself had a clear idea of what art he liked and admired. Artists who would soon become personal favorites of his and other Nazi leaders, such as Rembrandt and Grünewald, whose works represented some of the finest accomplishments of Teutonic artists, were included in this initial artistic witch hunt. In all, 12,000 drawings and 5,000 pictures and sculptures were seized from 101 public collections alone, not to mention countless private seizures. These included works by Cézanne, van Gogh, Munch, Signac, Gauguin, Braque, and Picasso. Perhaps the most famous item in this roundup was van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet.
Hitler inspected these confiscated works in a storeroom in Berlin. A six-volume catalogue lists its contents:• 1,290 oil paintings
• 160 sculptures
• 7,350 watercolors, drawings, and prints
• 3,300 other works on paper stored in 230 portfolios
This made for a total of 12,890 items looted by Nazis from their fellow Germans. After his inspection, Hitler stated that on no account would any be returned, nor would any compensation be given. In anticipation of a similar action, a list was drawn up of the artistic holdings of both private and public collections in Vienna, the city that Hitler was so eager to depose as a cultural center.
What was to be done with all of this degenerate art? The Berlin Amt Bildende Kunst (Office for Pictorial Arts) was a subdivision of the Amt für Weltanschauliche Schulung und Erziehung (Office for World Political Education and Indoctrination). That meant that any Nazi operations related to pictorial arts, including confiscation, were driven by and had to answer to the Nazi propaganda and indoctrination office. This helps to explain how Nazi censorship of “degenerate” art morphed into art looting.
On instruction from Josef Goebbels of the Reich’s Propaganda Committee, a task group was formed in May 1938 to determine how best to dispose of the seized artworks. T
his proved an important month in the formation of Hitler’s plans for how to deal with art in the Third Reich. In April of that year, Hitler had first begun to plot the use of Linz as the future art center of the Third Reich. Then in May, Hitler visited Mussolini in Rome and was humbled by the majesty and palpable history of the city, which he thought made Berlin look like a sandcastle. He was inspired to replicate the Roman Empire not just geographically, but also through monuments that would proclaim the endurance of his empire. Art and architecture were the legacies of great civilizations. Ancient Rome had plundered the lands it conquered. The obelisks in Piazza del Popolo and in front of Saint Peter’s were taken as trophies of war following the fall of Egypt. Hitler would follow in Rome’s footsteps, even designing his own mausoleum, which would be the centerpiece of the Linz city plan, inspired by Hadrian’s mausoleum at Castel Sant’Angelo.
During a visit to Florence that May, Hitler fell in love with the Ponte Vecchio. Then, to the annoyance of Mussolini, who was no art lover, Hitler spent a full three hours strolling the galleries of the Uffizi, marveling at that treasure house of wonders—and perhaps formulating a shopping list of what he would take when the time was right.
Back in Berlin, the Reich’s Propaganda Committee met for the first time. It included Ziegler and a handful of dealers with connections abroad. The task group’s members were allowed to choose any works from the storerooms and sell them abroad for foreign currency—on condition it was made clear that the works were of no value in Germany itself.
The main dealer selling Nazi-looted art abroad was the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, which remains an auction house to this day. The gallery held an international auction, claiming that proceeds would fund purchases of new works for the museums from which the auction contents had come. In fact, the proceeds went to build Nazi armaments.
Those works that had not sold by 20 March 1939, when the storehouse was suddenly required for use as a grain depot, were burned in the yard of a nearby fire station. This pyre included 1,004 oil paintings and sculptures and 3,825 works on paper. But before the sales and the burnings, some of the choicest of the confiscated works were siphoned off by Nazi leaders for their own collections.
Hitler was not the only Nazi leader who ravenously collected art through war looting. Foremost among Nazi private collectors was Luftwaffe reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. During the Second World War, Göring assembled an enormous collection of the highest quality at Carinhall, his estate near Berlin. This elaborate hunting lodge had been built in 1933 in memory of his first wife, a Swede named Karin, who had died in 1931. He would live in it with his second wife, Emily Sonneman, after whom he named his second home, Emmyhal. But it was his first wife whom Göring posthumously fetishized. He built up an elaborate art collection as a votive shrine to her. And he had no scruples about the manner in which he acquired artworks. As the war began, Göring infamously said, “It used to be called plundering. But today things have become more humane. Nevertheless, I plan to plunder, and to do so thoroughly.”
Göring’s tastes mirrored those of Hitler. By the end of the war he would own sixty stolen paintings by German sixteenth-century master Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose background and paintings were considered exemplary of the best of Teutonic artistry. His preference for Germanic art and artists was such that he once traded a hundred and fifty authentic nineteenth-century Impressionist and Post-Impressionist French paintings, looted from Paris galleries, for one Vermeer, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, which turned out to be a two-year-old fake by the Dutch master forger Han van Meegeren.
On paper, Nazi policy in the Second World War abided by the guidelines on art protection set during the First World War—because great art was eternal, it should rise above war and be preserved as the greatest accomplishment of human civilization. Once again, while that sounded good, things were different in the heat of war.
On 26 June 1939 Hitler issued the official directive to gather works for the planned Linz museum. At the same time, Hitler was cautious as to how his actions would appear to the world at large, which made him hesitant to steal art outright, at least the most famous works. He went to great lengths, particularly through Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry, to provide legal excuses, however flimsy, for the looting and destruction that he oversaw. This extended from the legalized seizure of goods belonging to “enemies of the Reich” (Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, or anyone who had something worth stealing) to the Napoleonically inspired acquisition of artworks as terms of an armistice.
In 1940, special divisions of art historians and archaeologists were charged with the task of making inventories of artistic possessions in each European country, ostensibly to protect them against theft and damage. They were led by Dr. Otto Kümmel, director of the Berlin State Museums. The inventory became known as the Kümmel Report. But the Nazi Party-controlled state had an ulterior motive. The Kümmel Report actually detailed a list of artworks that the Nazis considered to be the rightful possession of the Third Reich. The state secretly planned to use these inventories as wish lists, embarking on a program of plunder of which, at first, the army special divisions were unaware. The army obeyed orders regarding confiscation of property but for the most part did not participate in looting for themselves. The one great exception to this was Göring, who stole for his own collection.
The Kümmel Report included every work that had ever been completed or commissioned in Germany or by a German, every work that was in the “German style” (a blanket description that included every northern Renaissance and Romantic painting, along with anything else that tickled the führer’s fancy), and any work that had been in Germany and was removed since 1500. The Ghent Altarpiece fit all of the categories, and the loss of its wings to the Treaty of Versailles was a raw and gaping wound for Hitler.
A hint at Hitler’s grand plan became known in June 1940, when France fell to the Nazis. Hitler carefully orchestrated his revenge, ordering his troops to find the exact same railcar in which the Treaty of Versailles had been signed in 1918. He had the building that housed the railcar knocked down; the railcar was shipped to the same piece of land in Compiègne, near Versailles, where the treaty had been signed. Hitler sat down in the very chair that had been occupied by Marshal Foch, the leader of the French troops in the First World War, when the treaty was signed. Only then, in the same railcar, on the same piece of land, with Hitler now in the victor’s chair, were the French forced to sign an armistice. After the ceremony, the railcar was shipped back to Berlin, where it was placed on display, to show how mighty Hitler had righted the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles.
The Reich’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on 21 July 1940 that they would “safeguard” the art of France that was in private and public collections. The German army apparently believed that the Reich’s declaration of art protection was genuine, while the Reich itself had no intention of keeping its word. The truth became clearer on 17 September 1940, when Hitler announced the formation of the Sonderstab Bildende Kunst (Special Operations Staff for the Arts), the primary task of which was to confiscate art from Jewish collections in France, beginning with the wealth of the Rothschild family. This unit was the precursor to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Rosenberg Operational Staff, or ERR), run by Alfred Rosenberg.
The ERR began its work on 5 June 1940, when Reichsführer Alfred Rosenberg proposed that all libraries and archives in occupied countries be scoured for documents of value to Germany. Hitler agreed. The seizure of documents led to the abduction of artworks, as the ERR’s mission broadened.
Alfred Rosenberg was born in Tallinn, where he supported the Whites during the Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks took over, he fled to Munich, arriving in 1918. He fell in with the new National Socialist German Workers’ Party, soon to become the Nazi Party. He edited the party newspaper, befriended Hitler, and even claimed to have coauthored Mein Kampf. In 1929 he founded the Militant League for German Culture and lost to Joachim von Ri
bbentrop in the race to be Germany’s foreign minister. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union during the war, Rosenberg would be appointed head of the Reich’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, and the running of the ERR fell to others.
Rosenberg had initially employed art historians in the ERR to compile lists of important monuments. These same art historians were now charged with overseeing the confiscation of artworks and documents, sometimes shamelessly out in the open, sometimes under the thinly veiled excuse of protecting the art from the turmoil and damages of war.
Hitler’s and Göring’s personal accumulation, through their own special agents, made even Alfred Rosenberg uneasy. When Hitler or Göring wanted one of the confiscated artworks, it would for all intents and purposes disappear. Rosenberg began to insist that members of his staff obtain receipts from the agents of Hitler and Göring for any seized artworks that they, in turn, confiscated from the Einsatzstab Rosenberg.
In France alone, from 1940 to 1944, twenty-nine shipments of art were brought to Germany in 137 freight cars packed with 4,174 crates of art. And in a report dated 3 October 1942, Alfred Rosenberg reported to Hitler that, to date, he had overseen the confiscation and shipping to Germany of 40,000 tons of fine furniture.
The full extent of the Nazi art looting may never be known, but its spectacular breadth is indicated by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg inventories. As early as 20 March 1941, Rosenberg penned a cheerful, chatty report to the führer describing his successful looting of Paris, particularly the belongings of a who’s who of leading Jewish art dealers.
