The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  One by one, the German army soldiers abandoned their posts. They headed for rural hamlets where SS officers were burning their uniforms and Nazi identification cards, reinventing their pasts and even their names.

  Upstairs, in a castle tower, stood the Klimt paintings. Men had come and hastily picked up some of the Belvedere paintings. But, curiously, they left the Klimts behind.

  Members of cashiered SS units began streaming in from the SS headquarters at nearby Hollabrunn. The belligerence of defeat stared out from their ruddy faces. They barged into the castle, their alcohol-soaked breath reeking of failure. They helped themselves to the baron’s liquor and emptied his wine cellar.

  Then, according to a police report, the SS officers began an all-night “orgy.” At some point during the bacchanalia, the terrified cook ran out of the castle. The military nurse was seen fleeing across the lawn and into the darkness. The police report said the baron himself finally “had to leave” his besieged castle, although according to other accounts he had fled with his children long before. Then it was just the drunken SS officers, fueled by the collapse of the Reich, the memories of the unspeakable things they had done for their Führer, and the price they might pay.

  In the morning, the hungover SS men wandered out of the castle, leaving its great wooden door ajar. An hour later an SS officer returned on a bicycle. He ran into the castle. A few minutes later, he reappeared outside, mounted his bicycle, and sped away. The townspeople were startled by loud explosions in the castle towers. Smoke poured from the windows.

  Flames began to lick through the turrets where little Baron Johannes had loved to linger. The townspeople saw the blaze against the sky and rushed to the castle with washtubs of water. But as they threw water on the flames, a terrible blast erupted inside, then another, blowing out the walls and making the ground tremble. Heavy stones rained down, and everyone fled. As the townspeople watched, the castle that had cradled the Lederer Klimts became a furnace.

  The fire ate away the prized Faculty Paintings that had scandalized officialdom with their images of nude pregnant women. This was the triptych that had gotten Klimt expelled from the academy and pushed him into the embrace of the enlightened Jewish elite.

  Now his prescient vision of dystopia had arrived. The “dark powers” were incinerating his art. As the castle caved in, the heat consumed the delicate masterpiece depicting Schubert at the piano, with the apprehensive face of poor Mizzi Zimmermann, now a seraphim of flame and ash floating off in the wind.

  The Klimt portrait of Valerie Neuzil, a teenage mistress of Egon Schiele who died of scarlet fever as a nurse in World War I, now turned red in the flames and blackened to ash. So did Girl Friends, Klimt’s rendering of two women who seemed languidly in love. The ethereal lute-strumming maiden with almond eyes of his Music II also ignited into searing flames.

  This was believed to have been the fate of as many as fourteen spectacular Klimt paintings.

  The Schloss Immendorf was not the only castle burned. Across Nazi Germany, a bizarre ritual was taking place. Retreating SS officers threw themselves into drunken binges. Concentration camp guards killed the exhausted skeletal prisoners who had witnessed their terrible crimes. The Countess Margit Batthyany, née Thyssen-Bornemisza, threw a lavish black-tie goodbye party for the SS officers in residence at her castle near the Hungarian border, where she had been reportedly cuckolding her husband with a Gestapo officer. At some point during the evening, the SS men reportedly marched out some Jewish slave laborers. They invited guests to shoot them for a while, and then returned to the dance.

  In Klimt country—the magical, wildflower-carpeted Salzkammergut where the Bloch-Bauers had summered—“ordinary people bore witness to the random slaughter and mass murder of parents and children, clubbed or shot to death before their very eyes” by cashiered SS men who marched starving Jews out of the concentration camp at Mauthausen.

  For four or five weeks, roving bands of Hitler Youth, demobilized Wehrmacht, and even firemen joined in the sporadic violence. In the pretty iron-mining mountain village of Eisenerz, two hundred exhausted Jewish slave laborers were machine-gunned by a randomly assembled mob. In Wiener Neudorf, on the outskirts of Vienna, a woman persuaded her SS boyfriend to hand over his gun so she could shoot some Jews.

  A scorched-earth farewell was Hitler’s idea. Just as the Roman emperor Nero had burned villages and farms, and seventeenth-century Vienna had burned palaces and houses outside the city walls as the Turks advanced. Hitler had issued his “Demolitions on Reich Territory” order in March. Its nickname, the “Nero Decree,” betrayed its malice and final mendaciousness. Millions of people had died for the sins of the Reich. Now the SS was to mount a final orgy of destruction.

  But Hitler was dead. Albert Speer, the Nazi architect Hitler had ordered to execute this order, began to lose his nerve.

  Deep in the mountains of the Austrian village of Alt Aussee was the salt mine that cradled a precious repository of stolen European art once destined for Hitler’s planned grandiose Führermuseum in Linz. This hidden treasure trove of Western civilization held more than 6,577 paintings, from Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece to Vermeer’s The Artist in His Studio and a Michelangelo sculpture, Bruges Madonna.

  The conservator of this fragile patrimony was August Eigruber, the Nazi governor who had ruled the region like a king. As American troops approached, Eigruber had feverishly called for popular resistance to the last man, woman, and child. The contents of the Alt Aussee crypt were to be destroyed. Five-hundred-pound bombs were hauled into the cavern in wooden crates marked “Fragile.” Eigruber’s guards were to see that the bombs were detonated as the Nazis retreated. But others were aghast at the plan. By some accounts, an adjutant to Hitler’s personal secretary, SS Hauptsturmführer Helmut von Hummel, began to contact mine officials and senior officers. It seemed terrible to smash the artistic treasures of an entire civilization to smithereens.

  The day before Allied forces arrived, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the SS intelligence chief, ordered the bombs removed. Then he kissed his young mistress goodbye and made his way up the steep terrain toward the snow-covered Alpine peaks that cradle Lake Attersee like a little blue cup. On May 5, the mines were safely sealed with explosives to protect the art.

  At Schloss Immendorf, the damage was done. Red Army troops arrived the afternoon of May 8. They were greeted by blackened rubble. Flames roared from the depths of the old stone basement. The fire burned for days. Russian troops tried to extinguish the fire and salvage valuables. They ended up with two smoke-drenched Persian carpets. The Lederers’ famous Klimt collection, the most important single collection of the artist’s work, was reduced to wavy figures on charred canvases that crumbled when wind blew through the smoldering ruin.

  Johannes, the little baron, came to survey the wreckage with his father. Baron Freudenthal was adjusting to life as a widower with five children. He had lost his wife to typhus in 1943. He said he had been purged from the officers’ corps in the aftermath of the 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler.

  Johannes was twelve now. He watched his father’s face carefully. His father didn’t cry. But from then on he was a broken man.

  In Vienna, the Nazi governor Baldur von Schirach had called on Vienna to take arms against the “latest horde of barbarians” to protect the “land of our ancestors,” just as Vienna had fended off the Turks. He had posters put up all over the city, proclaiming that Vienna was once again a fortress city to be defended to the last man. Then he too fled the Red Army.

  The Secession building had endured the battering of Allied bombs in 1945, but “these damages could have been restored,” according to the daily Arbeiter Zeitung. “Unfortunately,” the last exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers were using the scarred Secession to store tires for automobiles and transport trucks, the newspaper said.

  Two days before Red Army soldiers arrived, the German army troops set the tires on fire, “in order not to leave the victors a bundle of tires as a bounty of captur
ed material,” the Arbeiter Zeitung reported. The fire roared out of the basement, blackening the gold leaf and the famous cupola of golden laurels. The temple to new art collapsed into the inferno. Even the iron frame of the building melted in the heat. “A very precious building was destroyed, because the heat of this fire destroyed the architecture almost down to the foundation,” the paper reported. The Secession was reduced to charred smoking rubble—a final cremation of Vienna’s artistic belle époque.

  In the coming days, Allied forces freed emaciated prisoners from concentration camps, fed exhausted refugees, and hunted notorious Nazis. One day, the U.S. soldiers opened a door in the mountainside at Alt Aussee. They trudged carefully into the dark cavern, in case it had been rigged with explosives.

  To their amazement, their lanterns shone on seemingly endless paintings and statues, packed deep into the mountain passage.

  Against the backdrop of so many lives destroyed, these fragments of creativity and brilliance paled. Yet the soldiers paused in awe.

  When American soldiers caught up with Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, he was fleeing with baggage stuffed with looted art.

  Klimt’s gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer did make it through the war. She survived the Götterdämmerung deep in the former Carthusian monastery at Gaming, a mountain stronghold, founded in the 1330s and once known for the intellectual distinction of its holy men. Here, as bombs fell on Vienna, the pale, fragile face of Vienna’s golden moment endured her stint in hell. Klimt’s painted mosaic had been shattered. But his majestic empress had survived.

  Her family and friends had been insulted, murdered, driven to suicide. Her name had been erased. Now Adele emerged to join Europe’s survivors, the glittering key to an undeniable past.

  Restitution

  Ferdinand, too, survived the war. But he had lost too much. Luise was trapped in Communist Yugoslavia. The rest of his family was either in Canada or dead. Berta Zuckerkandl had turned her Algiers home into a salon for American military commanders, but then a throat infection killed her, almost overnight. Ferdinand’s friend turned Nazi acolyte, Carl Moll, had died in a suicide pact with his daughter and Nazi son-in-law.

  Ferdinand’s loss did not end with the defeat of the Nazis. His world had been betrayed. Another former friend, Karl Renner, who would now lead the postwar government, opined in April 1945 that “restitution of property stolen from Jews” should go “not to the individual victims, but to a collective restitution fund . . . to prevent a massive, sudden flow of returning exiles. “The entire nation should not be made liable for damages to Jews,” Renner said.

  So restitution would not be automatic? This was alarming. How would Ferdinand move back home? Elisabethstrasse was still functioning as a railway headquarters. Jews who returned to Vienna were telling of people living in their homes and refusing to leave.

  Ferdinand’s fellow exile Erich Lederer had lost his mother and sister. Erich was beside himself with grief and fury. Austrians had torched the family Klimt collection at Schloss Immendorf. Officials refused to give Erich an exit permit for the Beethoven Frieze. They had the delicate fresco stashed in the chapel of a damp, drafty castle. The Klimt portraits of Erich’s sister Elisabeth and his mother, Serena, mysteriously resurfaced—for sale at the Dorotheum. The Klimt portrait of Serena’s frail mother, Charlotte, had vanished.

  The war was over. But there was little contrition.

  In May 1945, the Nazi-era director of the Belvedere, Bruno Grimschitz, reported that the museum had gained “between 1938 and 1945 over two hundred high-class works of art . . . by means of an uncommonly prolific acquisition policy”—a euphemism for the wartime ransacking of Jewish collections.

  The Austrian Gallery had amassed an excellent Klimt collection during the war, and they did not intend to give it back.

  In October 1945, Ferdinand wearily rewrote his will. He had few possessions to leave his heirs. Erich Führer was hanging on to the Klimt painting he had stolen from Ferdinand, Houses in Unterach on Lake Attersee, and even the books Adele had willed to the workers. Ferdinand could not move back to Elisabethstrasse. The administration of the onetime German railway that deported Jews was still housed in his home. Ferdinand knew the Belvedere had the Klimt gold portrait of his wife, and his Apple Tree. He didn’t know it also had Adele’s second portrait.

  The war was over. But the people and the life that Ferdinand had treasured were gone, leaving him, at eighty-two, an old man alone in a hotel room. On October 22, 1945, Ferdinand signed his final will and testament. He left half of his estate to his niece Luise and a quarter each to Maria and her brother, Robert. In mid-November, as the darkening days signaled the approach of winter, a hotel maid came in to make up the room and discovered Ferdinand’s body.

  Liberation

  In Yugoslavia, Tito’s victorious partisans marched into Zagreb in May 1945. Nelly’s father shot photo after photo of the troops marching down the streets, as crowds cheered. Free at last! Maria’s brother Leo-pold begged Viktor and Luise to come to Canada. But Viktor wanted to be part of the reconstruction. His family had built railroads and been pioneers of industry. The Gutmanns belonged here. They would help build the new Yugoslavia. Leopold thought Viktor and Luise were mad.

  The new Communist government praised Viktor’s skills, promising him a job as an engineer. Nelly and Franz returned to school. The Gutmanns breathed a sigh of relief.

  They had survived.

  Ferdinand never got to say goodbye to Luise. She would have told him they were finally safe.

  Nelly, sixteen, now reveled in strolling in the open air, without fear. Nelly felt almost euphoric one November day after she walked home from school and opened the door to their apartment, a real home.

  But her father wasn’t there. A family friend was there to tell her that he was under arrest. Nelly panicked. Her mother was on vacation at Split.

  No lawyer would take her father’s case. The postwar show trials were just beginning. In the next few months, hundreds of Yugoslavs, guilty and innocent, would be condemned to death for collaboration, as members of the new Communist society jockeyed for position. Lawyers feared ending up like Viktor, facing the hasty revolutionary trials where former partisans proved their revolutionary zeal. Yet notorious Nazis like Ante Pavelic escaped.

  Only one man dared to defend Nelly’s father: a Serbian lawyer who, as a member of an ethnicity the Nazis had tried to exterminate, had some immunity. He had only a day to prepare for the November 20 trial, and only an hour to brief Viktor.

  At Viktor’s trial, the prosecutor opened with a rambling discourse on how since the days of the French Revolution, wealthy men like Baron Gutmann had been “parasites” who “exploited the working classes of their societies.” He accused Viktor of helping “the German war economy” achieve the “industrial takeover of Croatia” with a major share transfer in 1941. Viktor said the transfer was arranged by relatives abroad, without his knowledge. The prosecutor also claimed that Viktor had orchestrated the deaths of several hundred partisans who battled Nazi forces near Belisce in 1943.

  Viktor argued that as a Jew, jailed in Zagreb with political prisoners, he was not in a position to plot a fascist attack on partisans in Belisce.

  “Gutmann is one of the worst war criminals and collaborators,” the prosecuting attorney insisted. “Only the maximum punishment can be applied.”

  Viktor Gutmann had outlasted the Nazis. Now, the new self-appointed prophets of history hastily sentenced him to death.

  His Serbian attorney had a desperate idea. Since the new Yugoslavia was a proletarian workers’ republic, Nelly should go to Belisce and collect signatures from the Gutmann workers. If the workers spoke, surely judicial authorities would listen. Alone, the shy, skinny teenager rode the train to Belisce.

  The war-ravaged little town was much quieter than Nelly remembered it.

  Nelly knocked on the doors of her father’s former white-collar workers. At the first house, the father o
f one of her former playmates stared at her in alarm. Nelly blurted out the story, holding up her petition. The man had heard all about Viktor’s problems. He shut the door in her face. Another woman opened her door a crack, recognized Nelly, and closed it. No one would let Nelly into the house.

  In despair, Nelly trudged up the road to the lumber factory. The workers were getting off a shift. One of them, a big older man, recognized Nelly. He hugged her warmly, and proudly led her to his house. He set a plate of fresh sausage before her, then rushed to tell his neighbors that the baron’s daughter was alive.

  As the men filed in, Nelly’s burly host drew up a petition declaring that the “workers of Belisce” supported Baron Gutmann. The old man was excited: Tito’s Yugoslavia was now a Communist workers’ state, and he had a say. The other workers weren’t so sure. You sign it, one said. No, you sign it. Finally, the old man picked up a pen, and with the grandiose flourish of a man who felt his opinion finally counted, he signed his name. One after another, the other workers signed on the kitchen table.

  Then the old man took Nelly by the arm and led her up the rutted dirt road to other workers’ houses. It was pig-slaughtering time. Each family sat the baron’s pretty daughter down and served her sausage as the workers washed their hands and signed the petition. Nelly gingerly ate platter after platter of greasy sausage, feeling increasingly sick to her stomach.

  At the train station, Nelly was met by a demonstration of Communist youth militants who knew the daughter of the “Jewish collaborator” was coming. Her father’s former manservant, Jozo, waited with Nelly behind some bushes near the train station. When the train passed, Jozo helped Nelly board the slowly moving train, with the signatures in her pocket.