The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  In the summer of 1941, around the time of his “euthanasia-stop” order, Hitler turned his sights on the Jews. At the start of Aktion T4, Jewish patients had been treated like the others, picked out on the basis of their registration forms. In March or April 1940, Brandt and Bouhler, in consultation with Hitler, introduced a new policy: From that moment, all those who registered as Jewish would be marked out for killing, irrespective of their diagnosis or their ability to work. This decision foreshadowed another, made in spring or summer of the following year, the so-called Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage (the Final Solution to the European Jewish question). Aktion T4 had convinced Hitler that genocide was now feasible—that, as the historian Henry Friedlander put it, “ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings,” and that the bureaucracy would cooperate. The “euthanasia” program had acted as the test bed for Hitler’s greater remodeling of the German race, and for the extermination of six million Jews and half a million Roma people.

  This time, Hitler refused to sign a written authorization and instead gave the order verbally to the SS-Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler began the killing using paramilitary Einsatzgruppen units. In 1941, the death squads worked behind the Wehrmacht advance as it moved into Soviet territory, shooting en masse all the psychiatric patients and all the Jewish, Roma, and disabled people they could round up. But the SS and Sicherheitspolizei (security police) found this method to be labor-intensive, and they decided it would be more efficient to bring the victims to a central killing location, as Aktion T4 had done—although, given the complaints that arose around crematoria, it was no longer deemed advisable to carry out such operations inside Germany. Instead, the extermination of the Jews would take place in the conquered lands to the east. Brandt, Bouhler, and Brack now offered T4’s expertise to the SS, and to Odilo Globocnik, the officer Himmler had tasked with killing the Jews in occupied Poland.

  Globocnik’s operation, “Aktion Reinhard,” ran along similar lines to T4. The ideology of race-hate and degeneracy was the same; so, in the main, were the techniques and even the personnel, as the KdF contracted out its murder teams. At least ninety T4 staff members worked in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka alone. Like the euthanasia centers, the Polish murder factories were designed to deceive: Where doctors and nurses had given the impression that Grafeneck was a hospital of sorts, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were introduced to Jews as labor camps. In both actions, victims were lured into gas chambers disguised as showers. In both actions, their teeth and their bridgework were broken out of their mouths to be melted down. In both actions, their belongings were carefully collected and their corpses burned on-site in Topf ovens.

  Of course, the scale of the horror in the east surpassed even that of T4: Aktion Reinhard would kill around two million Jews and an unknown number of Roma, and even Bouhler worried that “the absolute degradation and brutalization of the people involved” would mean his men were no longer capable of working inside the Reich. T4 veterans such as Christian Wirth, who was put in charge of a handful of Aktion Reinhard camps, developed an unrivaled reputation for brutality and ruthlessness. Gottlieb Hering, T4’s commandant at Belzec, invented an “entertainment” in which he tied a Jewish man to his car with a rope and drove along while his dog ran behind, biting the prisoner. The T4 psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl was appointed commandant of Treblinka, where his ambition so far exceeded the capacity of the extermination camp’s ovens that thousands of dying or dead prisoners lay strewn around the site, and the stench of rotting corpses could be detected six miles away.

  Another gruesome connection between the “euthanasia” program and the “Final Solution” was medical research. In the summer of 1941, Horst Schumann, the doctor who oversaw Bühler’s killing, was sent to Auschwitz; there he subjected Jewish prisoners to sterilization experiments using X-rays, which killed many of his subjects. In Heidelberg, the T4 assessor Carl Schneider ordered the brains of murdered patients to be sent to his histopathology lab for dissection. Beginning in the summer of 1943, Schneider ran an even more macabre research project into the causes of “idiocy.” Fifty-two children were subjected to his investigations, at the end of which they were to be murdered to order in the “Children’s Ward for Expert Care” at Eichberg and their body parts sent to Schneider for dissection. Due to the logistical difficulties imposed by the war, only twenty-one of the fifty-two victims were actually murdered, and three brains made it to his lab. In total, the brains of 187 “euthanased” patients were identified in the Heidelberg hospital after the war.

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  Hannah Arendt observed that totalitarian regimes explain the “total terror” that is their essence as a way to accelerate the people toward their goals. In the case of the Hitler cult, the industrialized extermination, combined with the rate at which new “Aryan” life was called forth, was intended to speed up the process of genetic selection and the cleansing of the Volkskörper into a better, purer race: der Neue Mensch. Art, as the qualitative manifestation of racial purity, was essential to that process, since only artists could envision the target image of the sunlit Nazi man—and the horrific consequences of faltering along the path. So, even as Hitler murdered his cultural-racial enemies by the million and called for ever more Germans to sacrifice their lives for a losing war, his regime continued to use Prinzhorn’s art collection to point out the racial annihilation that faced the Aryans if they gave up the cause.

  At the start of 1941, the Reich Propaganda Directorate (RPL) dusted off Entartete Kunst, which had lain in storage in Berlin for a year and a half, and sent it off to radicalize the eastern territories. It was a shrunken version of its former self: Where 700 works had been shown in Chemnitz on the eve of the war, only around 235 were now included, plus an unknown number of Prinzhorn pieces. The first stop on Entartete Kunst’s new tour was the Silesian town of Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, in Poland), where it ran for two weeks from January 18, 1941, at the local branch office of the NSDAP. This new campaign was meant to satisfy party members in small towns who felt they were being left out; it was also meant to establish the idea of a final confrontation with the enemies of Germany, in this case the democracies of Britain and France. The RPL had adjusted its propaganda to present the art as an example of where the “degeneration and rot” of the enemy worldview inevitably led. According to the Neues Tageblatt—faithfully, we can assume, parroting Goebbels’s line—viewing it would be enough to persuade anyone of the fact that democracy was the mortal enemy of National Socialism. The Prinzhorn works in particular showed how deep the disease had reached before the coming of Hitler:

  Those [modern artists] who were active in some or other “ism” had clear brains, but they often drew, painted, and wrote poetry consciously like idiots, so it could happen that the insane actually competed with them. The exhibition shows a number of such [Prinzhorn] works, which…were taken completely seriously in the age of degenerate art.

  There could be no deals struck with the purveyors of such material, the reporter dutifully noted; instead, there was only “life-and-death confrontation.”

  Eight thousand visitors came to see Entartete Kunst in Waldenburg, a tiny number compared with the crowds it had once drawn, but a significant proportion of the town’s population. It likely traveled to other Silesian cities after that before turning west, arriving in Halle an der Saale at the start of April. Again, newspaper reports mentioned the presence of Prinzhorn material. The Halle show closed on April 20, after which Entartete Kunst probably continued to tour, but the next documented evidence of its whereabouts comes from mid-November, when the exhibition was sent back to the ministry in Berlin for the last time. Two hundred and thirty-five paintings, sculptures, watercolors, drawings, and graphics were returned, according to the inventory, but there was no mention of the Prinzhorn material, nor any subsequent record of the pieces that were with the exhibition in its lat
er stages, such as Genzel’s Mädchenkopf. These works are missing to this day, as is Bühler’s Der Würgengel. They are believed to have been destroyed or stolen.

  More than 3 million people visited Entartete Kunst during the five years it toured the Third Reich. Some 1.2 million saw it with the Prinzhorn works, and millions more had seen these works in the exhibition guide, which was printed in great quantities, and in the extensive newspaper coverage. Although its purpose was to defame rather than present art, Entartete Kunst remains the most-visited art exhibition of all time.

  The retirement of Entartete Kunst did not mark the end of using “degenerate art” as a tool for legitimating Hitler’s policies. In 1942, the year the war turned against Germany, the idea was deployed once again to reinforce the message that this was a life-and-death struggle of cultural annihilation between the mad Jewish Bolsheviks and the noble Aryan West. As German divisions fought their bitterest battles against the Red Army, Himmler’s office in Berlin produced a brochure entitled Der Untermensch (The subhuman), which used Schultze-Naumburg’s now-familiar technique of juxtaposition to make its point: that Jewish cultural parasites were attacking German values like a “plague bacterium against the healthy human body,” as the copy read. Photographs of alarmed “Aryans” contrasted with shifty-looking Jews and easterners; ugly, flinty-eyed Soviet women were compared with their lusty blond counterparts; and apple-cheeked German children were shown alongside bedridden, disabled Russians. If Germany were to be overrun by such degenerates, the result would be untold horror, a quote from Himmler explained:

  The leading heads of a people are bloodily butchered, which leads to economic, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and physical slavery. The rest of the people, robbed of their own value by endless mixing of blood, is degenerated—and in the historically brief course of centuries at best it is still known that there was once such a people.

  The evidence of cultural extermination was displayed on two double-page spreads given over to the Entartete Kunst and Große deutsche Kunstausstellung shows. Prominent for the degenerates once again was Otto Freundlich’s sculpture Großer Kopf, which had appeared on the cover of the guidebook Hitler and Goebbels had dreamed up long before in Bayreuth. Other reprints from the guide included Schwangere (Pregnant woman) by Christoph Voll, and Menschenpaar (Couple) by Kirchner. Again the lie was trotted out that these sculptures represented a genetically inferior “subhuman” for which the artists yearned, while the Nazis would produce racial purity, illustrated by the gym-fit neoclassical nudes of Josef Thorack. By this time, the creators of the “degenerate” works included here had all paid for their affront to Hitler. Kirchner and Voll were already dead: Kirchner by his own hand, Voll from cancer, an illness exacerbated, according to a friend, by the “psychological disruptions” to which the regime had subjected him. Freundlich, who was Jewish, had been interned by the Vichy regime in France, and released only because of the intervention of Picasso. In 1943 he would be rearrested and sent to the Majdanek extermination camp, where he was killed on the day he arrived.

  Der Untermensch brought Nazi ideas about art and race to their most hysterical pitch. It harnessed the idea of degenerate art for National Socialism’s Wagnerian finale, what Goebbels would describe in a 1943 speech as totaler Krieg, “total war,” an apocalyptic conflict that would be more radical and destructive than anything the Germans had ever imagined. There could only be one winner in this last act: He who could exterminate his enemies the quickest.

  20.

  IN THE MADHOUSE

  “Geniuses consume people,” Goebbels had written, with some prescience, in his semi-autobiographical novel Michael. By the end of 1941, the “genius” of National Socialism was consuming people at an unprecedented rate, and the benefits for the faithful were not as tangible as they had once appeared. Far from being a “winner,” Hitler was proving to be a disastrous military leader. The last years of his life were filled with catastrophic tactical errors, heinous crimes, and a growing mania for destruction.

  When German troops were repulsed from Moscow in December, Hitler blamed everyone but himself and took personal charge of the armed forces. Increasingly, he withdrew into the troglodyte world of concrete bunkers with comic book names—Wolf’s Lair, Werewolf, Wolf’s Gorge—that served as his forward headquarters. He rarely visited the front, and made few public appearances. Instead, he directed his divisions from the world of charts and maps in the situation room. The dilettantism that had served him so well in politics now worked against him. He was a micromanaging commander-in-chief who trusted no one. He issued confusing, conflicting orders, and screamed betrayal and cowardice whenever his strategies led to disaster. The strain showed in his appearance: His face grew pastier, his shoulders more hunched, his left hand shook, and he began to drag his foot. Always a hypochondriac, he was given cocktails of drugs by his personal physician, Theodor Morell, known to the inner circle as “the Needle Chancellor” and “Minister Injector.” He couldn’t sleep. Afraid of going to bed, he pushed the evening meal with his staff later and later, until it began at 2:00 a.m. and ended at 4:00.

  As his failings mounted, Hitler clung ever tighter to his practiced, artist-in-chief persona. It was what had elevated him, after all, above the many higher-born, better-educated, and more capable people around him. What was the wisdom of the Wehrmacht, the logic of the military academy, of supply lines and troop movements, compared to his vision for the new German era?

  It was an unwritten law at his nocturnal dinners that guests were not allowed to discuss events at the front or politics of any kind. Instead, Hitler would lecture his companions—doctors, secretaries, adjutants, press chiefs, and often a high-ranking visitor such as Goebbels, Himmler, or Speer—on a range of subjects on which he considered himself expert. Speer, who was made armaments minister in 1942, noted that the Führer appeared “slightly unbalanced” during these conversations. There were “painful spells of monologuing” as his captive audience laughed at familiar jokes and feigned interest in the stories of his troubled youth and the “days of struggle.”

  The “table talks,” as they were known, were recorded, both at dinner and in his situation conferences, by stenographers drafted from the Reichstag. Sometimes, when Hitler thought he had made a particularly brilliant point, he would address the note-takers directly. Speer felt sorry for these “envoys from the populace,” who were condemned to witness the tragedy from front-row seats. He suspected they had envisioned the Führer as a superior genius, as Goebbels had taught them, and now they were shown the reality of life in the “madhouse.”

  As the horror in the east escalated and his troops committed atrocity after atrocity, Hitler’s need to define his mission in artistic terms increased. On October 13, 1941, the day after the “Bloody Sunday” massacre in the Stanislawów ghetto in Poland, when between ten thousand and twelve thousand Jewish civilians were stripped, shot, and pushed into mass graves, he was found reiterating that “a war commander must have imagination and foresight…so it’s not extraordinary that our people is at once a people of soldiers and artists.” A week later, he was protesting that he would prefer to be a “builder” than a war leader, and asserting that “the power we today enjoy cannot be justified…except by the establishment and expansion of a mighty culture.” On October 25, as Einsatzgruppen commandos in Odessa forced thousands of Jewish civilians into a series of barracks and then set the buildings on fire, he was complaining about the system of art academies. And on the night of January 25–26, 1942, five days after his ministers had agreed on details of the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee conference, he was announcing that “wars pass, only the works of culture never pass away. Hence my love of art.”

  There was little new in what Hitler said about art: Much of it would have been familiar to his childhood friend Kubizek. The academies had “nothing to tell me that’s worth listening to,” he explained to his followers that March, since the profess
ors were in large part “failures,” or “weary old men.” Later that year, he was complaining that the “filthy Jews” had “succeeded in condemning nearly everything that was healthy in art as junk and trash.” They had mocked such greats as Makart while advancing the works of true madmen. Those who created this stuff were either swindlers who should be in jail, lunatics who should be in asylums, or degenerates who must be sent to concentration camps “to be ‘re-educated’ and taught the dignity of honest labor.”

  As Europe burned; as the dive-bombers screamed; as death squads dragged civilians from their homes, shot them, and pushed them into freshly dug pits; as patients were starved to death by their nurses; as psychiatrists picked out disabled children for murder so they could use their body parts for research; as cattle trucks carried terrified populations to their doom; as mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters were ushered naked into gas chambers; as “disinfectors” separated tens of thousands of stiffening corpses, wrenched out their gold teeth, and lugged them toward incinerators at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—as these horrors unfolded, their architect sat at the dinner table and bored his guests with his secret, never-rusting love for art, which was the “truly stable pole in the flux of all other phenomena,” his “escape from confusion and distress,” a source of “the eternal, magic strength.”