Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  22

  SWALLOWING THE TREASURE

  Character is simply a habit long continued.

  —PLUTARCH

  Hildebrand Gurlitt had been beavering away from 1938 for the Third Reich, ranging from the seemingly innocuous “museum commissions” on up to the Propagandaministerium, the Abwehr (Military Intelligence), and the Sonderauftrag Linz. While his claim to Reemtsma’s secretary that he worked for Hitler may appear to have been a boast, it was the truth. From the moment Hitler appointed Posse, there was no difference made ever between the führer’s private collection and the one intended for Linz.1

  Gurlitt’s and Hermsen’s laissez-passer, signed by Posse, was issued along with directives to the Nazi occupation forces to provide adequate means to transport the paintings back to Germany. Gurlitt’s international banking arrangements to pay for any art acquired from one of the “provinces” of the Nazi occupation were handled by Linz in conjunction with Dr. Hans-Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. Where possible, Gurlitt bought inexpensively in reichsmarks or local currency, selling on in dollars, Swiss francs, or British pounds and making a double killing on the transaction. His operations expanded rapidly, with Hermsen running things from Paris in conjunction with the larger transports handled by Gustav Knauer, located at 8 rue Halévy. Over the next few years, Hermsen, an expatriate Dutchman who had been living in Germany, would also need a guardian angel—a role Gurlitt was destined to fulfill.

  * * *

  Since Holland and Belgium had fallen to the advancing war machine within days,* only France remained free from Hitler’s sway on the Continent. Rotterdam was still burning when Kajetan Mühlmann, in full SS regalia, swooped down on the Netherlands with his team of dealers and art historians to begin thieving.2 Rather than consolidate the new territories in northern Europe as in the East, Hitler’s forces simultaneously attacked France. A piecemeal approach to conquering Western Europe would not be tolerated.

  The shock and awe that the blitzkrieg created was legend. There would be no heroic Battle of the Marne in this war, Commander in Chief Weygand told the government. Maréchal Pétain agreed. By three a.m. on June 10, outriders had cleared the way for the government cavalcade to reach the small town of Gien on the River Loire, following the national art collection into exile. In the six weeks since the Western Campaign had begun, over 112,000 French soldiers had died and another estimated 225,000 were wounded.3

  The gains made by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were so rapid that millions fled with less than an hour to spare before the front line engulfed their homes. Those who had the time packed up scant belongings onto carts or took to the roads acting as their own packhorses. Others left unfinished meals on the table, grabbing a cherished family photograph as they escaped. The northeast city of Lille, with its bustling industrial population of 200,000, lost over 90 percent of its residents in an afternoon.

  The British Expeditionary Force, along with surviving French and Belgian fighters, retreated helter-skelter to Dunkirk, where, miraculously, a ragtag flotilla of small ships had joined ships of the Royal Navy and merchant marine. The vessels were commanded by their courageous owners—ordinary British men and women—who had answered the SOS from radio broadcasts.* Amazingly, they managed to rescue some 340,000 men. An estimated forty thousand were sadly left behind—killed or captured by the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe. Somehow, the British convoys had snatched a moral victory from the jaws of defeat.4

  Everywhere, the main roads were choked with millions of refugees. The days of early June were called “the Exodus,” with the displaced achieving biblical proportions. People from all walks of life crisscrossed the country searching for safety and escape. One week after the last of the Dunkirk soldiers were rescued, Goebbels authorized his first propaganda broadcast of German radio in French.5

  Despite the terrible news, it was a stupefied country that heard the voice of Maréchal Henri Pétain—the old hero of Verdun in the last war—crackle over the airwaves on June 17, 1940, as if reading from a crumpled piece of paper. At the request of the president, he had taken over the leadership of the government of France. “It is with a heavy heart,” Pétain continued, “that I tell you today that it is necessary to cease fighting” and that France was prepared to agree an armistice with Germany.6 Pétain had made the announcement without consulting his generals in the field, not to mention Churchill, who had flown to France to meet the French leaders in person five days earlier.7 The government fled into exile again, this time in French North Africa.

  * * *

  Many believed that Paris had already lost two-thirds of its population. More than two million inhabitants had taken to the roads by the time the armistice was signed, on the evening of June 24.8 Hitler reveled in the symbolism of forcing France to sign the armistice in the same railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne where Germany had been compelled to sign its humiliating surrender that led to the Diktat of Versailles.

  The armistice agreement came into effect at 12:35 a.m. the next day. A separate armistice had been signed in which Pétain agreed that two-thirds of the country would be occupied by the Reich. A straight line from west of Cheverny at the Loire was drawn southward to the Spanish border. Bordeaux and the Atlantic and Channel coasts of France were to remain part of the Occupied Zone.

  France’s Free Zone—or Vichy, as it was also known—would comprise, in geographic terms, approximately one-third of the country, extending eastward from the Loire River west of Cheverny to Switzerland, then south to the Mediterranean. The French regime was named after its capital, the spa town of Vichy, some sixty kilometers from Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Centrale. Vichy had been chosen over Clermont-Ferrand itself because Vichy had enough hotels and cafés to accommodate the disheveled new racketeer government under the dubious auspices of Pétain and his shabby lieutenant, Pierre Laval.9

  * * *

  For Gurlitt, the armistice provided one significant clause: No assets could be transferred from the Occupied Zone to the Free Zone. The U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt, observed that the Nazis’ “hope is that France may become Germany’s favorite province—a new Gau which will develop into a new Gaul.”10

  Paris was infested with the leaders of each division of the armed forces and foreign services. The Luftwaffe took over the Ritz Hotel, the Gestapo the Hotel Le Meurice, across from the Jardins des Tuileries. The Kunstschutz and the Military Authority were headquartered at Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kléber. The office of the authorities to handle the Jewish question (IEQJ*) was safely ensconced at the former headquarters of the Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg at 21 rue de la Boétie. German ambassador Otto Abetz, theoretically a Francophile with a French wife, was assigned to the German embassy in Paris by Ribbentrop.

  As in Vienna, the Rothschild collection was the first to be summoned to the ambassador’s attention. The distinctive black cases with the Rothschild golden monogram soon arrived bearing their priceless “gifts.” Indeed, the observant curator of the emptied Jeu de Paume Museum wrote in her journal, “The inestimable artistic treasures of Baron Edouard de Rothschild, torn from the Château de Ferrières or Hôtel de Tallyrand, soon joined other masterpieces from the collections of Seligmann, Wildenstein, Alphonse Kann, Rosenberg and Bernheim, whose names and addresses were placed on the list handed over to the Gestapo.”11 The observant curator’s name was Rose Valland.

  Abetz immediately charged three of his embassy employees—Karl Epting, Carl-Theodor Zeitschel, and Eberhard Freiherr von Künsberg—with the task of securing and transporting back to the Louvre all art belonging to French Jews which had been thoughtlessly stored among the national treasures in the French châteaus.12 Both Zeitschel and Künsberg were agents of the military police and had strict instructions that any suitable works of art from these “safeguarded” Jewish collections would find homes in Germany.

  The re-creation of the German 1914–18 Art and Monuments Protection Office, the Kunstschutz, was headed by the distinguished art histo
rian Count Franz Wolff-Metternich. He had most recently been the provincial curator of the Rhine-Westphalia Museums, and was a direct descendant of the famous statesman who was so instrumental in the restructuring of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat. Advised that he would be put in charge of preservation of monuments in Western Europe, Wolff-Metternich was rather surprised to learn that he would be responsible only to the Supreme Command.13

  What no one in Germany realized was that Wolff-Metternich was strictly from the old school of thought. Private property was protected under article 47 of the 1907 Hague Convention and must be respected. Wolff-Metternich undertook his task with a diligence that befitted his highly respected name. Lists of monuments to be protected were drawn up; owners of châteaus were told to keep their valuable furniture securely under lock and key and safe from bombardments; riflemen were sent to protect the châteaus. Wolff-Metternich worked with the Duke of Noailles, head of historic buildings (Demeures Historiques), and the head of the Musées Nationaux, Jacques Jaujard.14

  Yet even Wolff-Metternich hadn’t bargained on the covetousness of his assistant Hermann Bunjes, an art historian who had previously studied sculpture under Louvre curator Marcel Aubert. Wolff-Metternich had also been unaware of Otto Kümmel’s activities in Paris. From 1939, Kümmel was ordered by Goebbels to research all artworks and artifacts that might conceivably have been sold under duress or looted from Germany since Napoleon’s day. Kümmel’s lengthy tome was entitled Memorandum and Lists of Art Looted by the French in the Rhineland in 1794. It was deemed such a success that a follow-up project was commissioned for all art in foreign ownership since 1500.15

  In August 1940, Goebbels, acting with Hitler’s express authorization, had taken over a project from Education Minister Rust to reclaim all German art in the West under an act called Reclamation of Cultural Goods from Enemy States (Rückforderung von Kulturgütern von Feindstaaten). Goebbels would personally oversee Kümmel’s follow-on assignment and wrote to all foreign representatives of the Education Ministry, the Foreign Office, and Gaue branches of the RBK on August 13, 1940, that this relentless search for cultural objects of importance “which … have found their way into the hands of our present enemy” was essential in the conclusion of “upcoming treaties” and feasibly “all … the conditions of a lawful change of ownership.” Essentially, Goebbels planned to take Kümmel’s work beyond the research phase into seizure of all art of German origin or deemed Germanic in character from the Napoleonic Wars.16

  * * *

  Vying for his own position in France, Alfred Rosenberg, who had been repeatedly discredited by Goebbels in his attempts to head Hitler’s cultural ideology if not its bureaucracy, finally found his niche. Under a direct order from the führer on July 5, 1940, Rosenberg was authorized to collect all archives and libraries of the declared enemies of the Third Reich. When Rosenberg tried to stretch the order to apply to artworks, Wolff-Metternich’s Kunstschutz became alarmed, and issued a prohibition to move any artwork without the written permission of the regional military commander.17 Undeterred, Rosenberg reorganized his staff into one of the most effective wartime plundering organizations, called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Action Staff of Reichsleiter Rosenberg), or ERR.

  Gerhard Utikal emerged as Rosenberg’s bureaucratic mastermind headquartered in Berlin, weaving an intricate web of handpicked staff and special commandos to loot art. The Dienststelle Westen (Western Office), headed by Kurt von Behr, in France, soon became all-powerful. By the end of August 1940, some 1,244 cases of written material from the Jewish, Polish, Turgenev, and Rothschild archives and libraries were transported to ideological training centers in Germany.18

  Evidently, there were conflicting forces at work in occupied France, but that was to be expected from Hitler whose modus operandi consistently set his divisional chiefs against one another. From the outset, Ambassador Abetz told his agents to ignore Wolff-Metternich. Wolff-Metternich, in turn, ordered his people to beware of the art booty that the Foreign Office and its ambassador seemed determined to take. Then, on September 17, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel empowered the ERR to secure all “ownerless” cultural property—including any object given to the French by the enemies of the Third Reich since the outbreak of the war—on the führer’s personal order. The same order was given to several German occupying departments charged with plundering Belgium and Holland. The word “ownerless” was of course another euphemism for property-left-behind-by-fleeing-imprisoned-or-dead-people.

  Yet at the heart of this descent into barbarity was Hitler’s utter and steely determination to control the confiscation of all the art in the occupied territories. Just as he had controlled the Kulturpolitik in Germany since 1933, he must do the same in the countries he’d acquired. Hitler knew that he could never achieve this with Wolff-Metternich, who by virtue of his name alone was absolutely unassailable to the aristocracy serving in the army and air force. Rosenberg and his associate Kurt von Behr, on the other hand, were ruthless and eager to be Hitler’s creatures. While Wolff-Metternich had limited success in protecting French patrimony, he would prove less fortunate with private collections.

  * * *

  First located at the Louvre, Behr’s ERR operations soon moved to the Jeu de Paume Museum nearby.* There, collections belonging to fifteen dealers and Jewish collectors were hastily unpacked.19 Jaujard asked Rose Valland, who had been the volunteer guardian of the empty modern-art museum, to make as complete an inventory as possible of the art passing through the museum, noting, in particular, where the pieces were subsequently expedited. It was a difficult task for anyone trained in espionage—an impossible one for an ordinary civilian curator on no pay.

  “I didn’t as yet understand quite clearly the reasons which pushed me toward my decision,” Valland wrote on November 1, 1940, when Hermann Bunjes ordered her to stop taking a French inventory. “I hadn’t the slightest notion of how I could justify my presence.… I was overtaken by my determination not to leave my post. The agreement of my bosses took away the last of my doubts, and I knew what to do.”20

  Bunjes had already been seduced by the idea of working for Reichsmarschall Göring, for whom, unknown to Valland, an art exhibition was being prepared. Nonetheless, she dutifully noted down that the artworks were transported by the Luftwaffe at the end of October, and that Behr wore a Red Cross uniform. She also saw that the paintings were arranged as if for an exhibition. Then, on November 3, a vast array of chrysanthemums—the flower of funerals in France—was brought in, as well as potted palms, rugs, decorative arts, and champagne to celebrate the arrival of Reichsmarschall Göring himself. Appearing in a long cashmere coat and fedora hat, Göring seemed an odd fat figure standing near the magnificent French treasures and the impeccably dressed German officers who cowered before him.21

  Göring’s personal art dealers, Walter Andreas Hofer and Sepp Angerer, had reconnoitered Paris earlier, and ordered their selections be taken to the Jeu de Paume. Even Göring was stunned by what he saw, and spent the whole day at the museum. When he asked if that was all and was told that there was more in storage, Göring delayed his departure until he could see all the treasures. It came as an absolute surprise that there were even more masterpieces than he had seen during his “buying spree” in Holland.22

  Here were riches simply beyond his imagining. Vermeer’s Astronomer, owned by the Rothschilds, Rembrandt’s Boy with a Red Beret, van Dyck’s Portrait of a Lady, and other artworks had him drooling with greed. On the afternoon of November 5, Göring issued an order declaring that the “safeguarded artworks” which the Wehrmacht and ERR had protected were henceforth divided into several groupings. The führer’s choices would always come first—whether for the führer personally or for the Sonderauftrag Linz. Next the reichsmarschall as second-in-command would have the right to “objects which would complete” his collections at Carinhall, which would one day, too, become a national museum. The third category would be made available as “useful” objects for Rosenberg�
�s anti-Semitic think tanks. Next, the German museums could look at acquiring what remained, with the dregs left over going to the French museums or sold on the open market.23 Of course, that wasn’t what happened next.

  By the time the Nazi gift-giving season began in December 1940, Göring had forbidden Count Wolff-Metternich or his assistant Dr. Bernhard von Tieschowitz from interfering any further with his activities in France. He even amended his November 5 order to read, “Further confiscation of Jewish art property will be effected in the manner heretofore adopted by the ERR under my [Göring’s] direction.” Wolff-Metternich immediately fired Bunjes, who had been so obviously favored by the reichsmarschall. He was promptly rehired by the ERR.

  While Göring made his selection of an initial lot of fifty-nine paintings, Hitler did not officially authorize the removal of any artworks from France until New Year’s Eve 1940. Hans Posse selected the Vermeer Astronomer and Boucher’s famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour, as well as works by Franz Hals and Rembrandt. All of Hitler’s and Göring’s choices were transported to Germany on February 9, 1941, on Göring’s private train. Göring would make nineteen more plundering visits to Paris prior to the liberation.24

  Even Maréchal Pétain joined in the gift-giving spirit. He had decided to give Francisco Franco a number of Spanish masterpieces from the French national collections as a gesture of goodwill, a gesture meant to send a message that Franco should remain neutral in matters concerning France. Nonetheless, Jaujard was having none of it. Instead, he arranged for several Visigothic crowns found near Toledo, a Murillo painting, and an ancient statue, the Dama de Elche, to be exchanged for items of similar value from the Spanish collections. Pétain was furious that his gift had been subsumed into a squalid trade by the traitorous Jaujard and his associates.25