Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  Hildebrand Gurlitt, like dozens of other German dealers, had been active in this period, too. At the end of September 1940, Bunjes approved the resumption of auctions in Paris on three conditions: (a) that all artworks valued in excess of FF 100,000 be specifically highlighted in the catalogue, (b) that the names and addresses of the buyers of such items be reported to him in a timely manner, and (c) that he receive a copy of every catalogue from every sale.

  What is striking is that Bunjes had allowed auctions to resume without the usual Aryanization of Jewish art galleries having been approved by the military occupiers. All known Jewish art-gallery owners and dealers had been targeted, with their galleries effectively impounded by the Gestapo from July 4, 1940, when Otto Abetz took up his ambassadorship.26 Yet it would be another two years before the Wildenstein Gallery would be Aryanized by Roger Dequoy with the assistance of Karl Haberstock.27 Granted, many Jewish art dealers and artists had fled before the occupation, but their galleries’ new Aryan owners or mere managers had not necessarily been those whom the Nazis would have wanted.

  Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, formerly of Galerie Simon and an ex-trading partner of both Alfred Flechtheim and Paul Rosenberg, had sold his gallery to his sister-in-law, Louise Leiris, a good Catholic from Burgundy who managed the business while Kahnweiler hid in Vichy until the liberation. Nonetheless, Kahnweiler kept abreast of the art world through correspondence with friends like Curt Valentin in New York.28 Interestingly, in one of Kahnweiler’s letters he laments the “death of poor Bettie,” referring to Betty Flechtheim’s suicide just before her deportation to a concentration camp.29 Flechtheim himself had died a haunted and broken man in London in 1937.

  The occupiers lamented that there was often little choice but to accept a French person as an Aryan, despite the fact that they were patently not of German descent. Many were appointed as provisional managers or directors of firms where the Jewish owner had died or fled, like Claude Charpentier in the case of Galerie Bernheim & Cie. Charpentier also owned a lucrative auction business a stone’s throw from the larger, state-owned Hôtel Drouot, and had become good friends with Gurlitt, Goepel, and the new associate, Hermsen.

  Charpentier was advised that the death of Bernheim, in 1939, and the disappearance of his partner Levy, in June 1940, meant that there were many unpaid debts that needed his immediate attention, including FF 56,000 in unpaid rent. The building had been damaged by the occupation of young Communists in 1941, and repairs were required, too. The only paintings that remained in the gallery were apparently not the property of Mr. Levy, but had been left there instead for safekeeping by the various artists Levy represented.30 It was left up to Charpentier to clear up the mess. Naturally, the artists’ paintings were sold without consulting them.

  Incredibly, refugee German Jewish art dealers continued to make a killing in the French market, too. Among them were Hugo Engel and Allan Loebl. Gurlitt worked extensively with both men in Paris, as well as with Engel’s son Hubert in Nice (in the Free Zone). So did members of the ERR, including Gustav Rochlitz and Bruno Lohse, who took over the running of the ERR from Behr in 1942.

  Both Engel and Loebl were exempted from wearing the yellow Star of David by the order of Hans Posse. In fact, both had been working in France, according to Posse, for “ten long years” and had provided him with very useful information regarding the whereabouts of certain paintings.31 After the war, Gurlitt freely admitted during his interrogations that he’d worked with both men. Why not? They had been made to suffer, just as he had, he claimed, because they were Jews. What Gurlitt omitted to say was that their status as exempt from wearing the yellow Star of David had been arranged through Haberstock—with whom he also swore he had never done business—on behalf of Posse.32

  Haberstock personally had a bit of a false start to his Parisian operations. He had hooked his star to Maria Almas-Dietrich’s, since she was the only art dealer who could sell directly to the führer without the prior approval of Hitler’s increasingly powerful deputy, Martin Bormann, or Hans Posse.* Maria Dietrich’s daughter and Dietrich, too, were close personal friends of Eva Braun, who had protected them both from the ignominy of Dietrich’s ex-husband being a Turkish Jew. Dietrich also had the foresight to become Heinrich Hoffmann’s mistress.

  Still, Almas-Dietrich knew little about art, being more inclined to enjoying a whale of a time living the high life in Paris. She bought fake Guardi oil sketches, paintings, and much more. Many were obvious fakes—like the Vigée-LeBrun, Guardi, School of David, and Rottenhammer, which were returned to the art dealer Roger Dequoy by an irate Bormann.33 Many others were of poor quality or badly restored.

  * * *

  Like artists living in Holland and Belgium, those living in France were not prevented from painting. Indeed, Picasso, who had initially taken to the roads like millions of others, felt the unrelenting cry of Paris and could not resist returning. Whereas Matisse, in ill health and unable to work in the Free Zone, described the German occupation of Paris as a type of narcosis deadening French artists into a stupor. Pierre Bonnard said he returned to Nice to recover his equilibrium.34

  Picasso, on the other hand, had a different nemesis than Hitler—Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain. Although Picasso’s work was highly rated on the degenerate-art scales, even the ERR recognized that a Picasso had tremendous worth in terms of foreign exchange or artistic swaps. Picasso, too, was cognizant that he was an international figure of enormous stature. So long as his work held its value, he would be allowed to paint. In fact, he painted some 1,473 artworks between the outbreak of the war and the liberation of Paris.35

  Yet artists and collectors faced other dangers, too. When the Devisenschutzkommando (Currency Control Command Unit) prized open his bank vault, Picasso confounded the soldiers so much with his outrageous stories that they took nothing. He then persuaded them that the neighboring vault belonging to Georges Braques was also his. The sister of the world-famous Art-Nouveau jeweler Henri Vever stood silently as she observed the soldiers’ bemusement at the hundreds of Rembrandt etchings that her brother had collected when they came to plunder his vault. The Devisenschutzkommando concluded in its report that Vever’s vault contained so many etchings that they simply had to be fakes. Once again, they had walked away empty-handed.36

  As for exhibitions, the Nazis took an entirely different view in France than they had elsewhere. Only Jewish or Masonic artists were in danger, meaning that Chagall and Modigliani were generally not shown. No German degenerate artists could be shown publicly either, nor were any anti-German works. Yet the Musée National d’Art Moderne was opened in August 1942 with works by Braque, Dufy, Léger, and Matisse alongside sculptures by the French collaborationist Aristide Maillol. Cubist exhibitions took place at Galerie Charpentier and the Salon des Tuileries. Of course, any works available for sale on the black market by German Expressionists or other outlawed artists sold well, if quietly.37 The occupiers were determined that the cultural life of Paris should not be diminished by their presence.

  23

  VIAU

  Opportunity makes a Thief.

  —FRANCIS BACON

  The art market in Paris throughout 1941 was positively booming. In the winter season of 1941–42, Hôtel Drouot alone sold over a million objects for the highest prices since its records began, in 1824.1 Gurlitt had made his first sales to Posse: the stained-glass window and a Hobbema from the Sedelmeyer collection with a manuscript from Hofstede de Groot.2 The year 1942 promised to be even better.

  Yet 1942 was a personal watershed for Gurlitt, too. In the bombing raids by the British RAF during the night of July 26–27, his home and private gallery were destroyed.3 It would prove a providential loss. Though he would claim in 1946 that everything had been destroyed—from papers to paintings—he also claimed that all the furniture and priceless rugs that had been moved to safety in the closing months of the war had belonged to him in Hamburg.4

  Given Gurlitt’s uncanny f
oresight and will to do more than merely survive, once the bombing of Hamburg had begun, in January 1942, he almost certainly moved his family and valuables to the relative safety of Dresden. There, the armaments industry was insignificant, and Helene and the children could live with his aged mother in relative peace. Besides, while Gurlitt traveled in search of booty, his father figure Kurt Kirchbach could also look in on the family whenever possible.

  Nineteen forty-two offered other horizons, too. Gurlitt knew that Hans Posse was terminally ill with cancer. It was imperative that he make a big splash in the Paris market to be able to trump Haberstock and gain preeminence before Posse’s successor was named. Gurlitt had his chance on December 11, when the most spectacular auction took place at Hôtel Drouot. The entire collection of the deceased dentist Georges Viau was on sale. Everyone who was anyone simply had to be there.

  Viau had grown up at the Romanov imperial court, where his father was the imperial dentist. Working and living in Paris as an adult, he collected, sold, and collected ever more Impressionists. He was personal friends with many artists, such as Degas and Sisley. In provenance terms, his works were without fault, since he often bought from the artist directly. Viau was famous for his exquisite taste, and Paris had been waiting for his collection to come to market since his death, in 1939.

  Finally the day arrived. Gurlitt stayed at the Hotel Saint Simon, as usual,* while Hermsen, who was not as yet known, stayed at a discreet pension at 8 rue de la Grange Batalière, just one block away from the auction house.5 They arrived in plenty of time for the viewings on Thursday, December 10, most likely ignoring one another, so Hermsen could pick up on gossip kept from Gurlitt. Besides, Hermsen’s French was more than likely better than Gurlitt’s.6

  Some six hundred people were seated in high expectation on the Friday. Soon they were hemmed in by hundreds of others standing and gawping around the fringes of the cavernous auction room. Of course, no Jews had been allowed to attend. That interdiction had been firmly understood by Étienne Ader, the Viau auctioneer, after his earlier auction at Versailles had been halted for selling Jewish collections and allowing the Jews themselves to attend.7

  Since the matter of writing to the Kunstschutz† notifying them of sales in excess of FF 100,000 had become a daily routine, Étienne Ader had previously agreed with Bunjes that only items exceeding FF 1 million would require notification. Gurlitt acquired the following lots in his own name:

  Lot 78

  Cézanne—Vallée de l’Arc de la Montagne—St Victoire

  FF 5,000,000

  Lot 81

  Corot—Landscape

  FF 1,210,000

  Lot 83

  Daumier—Portrait d’un ami de l’artiste

  FF 1,320,000

  Lot 109

  Pissarro—Route de Coeur-Volant—à Louveciennes

  FF 1,610,000

  All of these paintings were considered degenerate art by the Nazis. According to the required export-licenses, these were not the only paintings that had been purchased by Gurlitt that day. Several more under the million-franc reportable purchase price were bought by Gurlitt and Hermsen, too.8 An estimated 12 million francs in all had been splurged in one auction by the pair.9 Even more extraordinary was that there were no other major works acquired by other Nazi art agents—not even Haberstock—although Böhmer was certainly a buyer of art below the million-franc mark.

  The Viau sale was big news, smashing all previous records, netting some FF 53.8 million in total before taxes. The most expensive painting in the sale was the Cézanne bought by Gurlitt.10 Where it had been valued by Ader only for somewhere between FF 800,000 and FF 1 million, it sold for five times its estimated maximum worth. Gurlitt was certainly facing some stiff competition from another bidder.

  Yet who was Gurlitt representing? He had spent over FF 9 million on just four paintings. When taking into account that another fifteen drawings and eleven paintings were also bought (two of which on behalf of Hans W. Lange in Berlin), Gurlitt was the single largest buyer at the Viau auction.11 The sums he was paying—and the amounts in excess of market value—could have been authorized by Posse on behalf of Sonderauftrag Linz or a consortium of wealthy industrialists. After all, Gurlitt had been introduced by Kirchbach to the cream of German industrial society and had been buying on their behalf for years.

  According to the new protocols, Gurlitt had to submit the artworks to the Louvre’s Fine Arts Department for inspection prior to any export license being granted. Jaujard’s team alone could determine if the art impinged on France’s patrimony. A negative opinion theoretically meant that the art would not be able to leave the country. Yet when Louis Hautecoeur, one of Jaujard’s curators, tried to examine Gurlitt’s purchases, he discovered that Gurlitt had already packed them in crates for shipment back to Germany.

  Then Hautecoeur was advised that Gurlitt was planning to take the paintings as part of his personal baggage immediately. Hautecoeur knew that one simply did not argue with Nazi efficiency in person without suffering the consequences. Instead, he fulminated in a two-page letter back to Hermann Bunjes of the ERR. “You have guaranteed that we will be granted a minimum access to the artworks to be inspected,” he wrote, and yet in the case of these paintings “they had already been crated and loaded onto trucks. I am therefore confirming the contents of our letter dated January 14, 1943, in which I made it clear” that if these minimum guaranteed conditions for inspection were not met, the artworks in question would receive an “unfavorable opinion of the Department of Fine Art. These inspections must be carried out under the supervision of customs officials. However, most of these exporters refuse to comply. It is unacceptable that these inspections are carried out at the exporters’ residences since substitutions may be made.”12

  Around the same time, in February 1943, Gurlitt submitted the fifteen drawings to inspector Michel Martin of the Fine Arts Department of the French Museums, and received his export authorization. Evidently, he never intended to submit the fifteen paintings he had purchased at the Viau auction to the scrutiny of Hautecoeur.

  As was so often the case over the next two years, Gurlitt and Hermsen were highly selective in what they chose to share with the authorities. In 1943 alone, they would “officially” buy some forty-six artworks in Paris. Yet the words “officially” and “buy” carry a somewhat woolly warning: Gurlitt hadn’t paid for any of the artworks at the Viau auction.

  As auctioneer Ader explained in his January 26, 1943, letter to Jaujard and Hautecoeur, “The delivery of the authorization to export is principally intended as payment for monies received by me from Société Générale and Crédit Lyonnais for Mr. Gurlitt’s (and Lange’s) purchases. It appears that this authorization is not indispensable to Mr. Gurlitt to transport the paintings.”13 As Hautecoeur would write in the margin of the letter, “Alors?”—“So?”

  Ader continues in an apologetic rather than unctuous tone. “In these conditions would it not be possible to exceptionally grant the export-license without these formalities of inspecting the pictures at customs, so that I could regularize the funds received from the banks?”14 In other words, without the delivery of the export-license, Ader would be unable to have the “payment” released to him by the two banks for his own account.

  Today in these circumstances, the auction house sells subject to obtaining an export-license from the government authorities concerned and does not release the artwork to the new owner without it. In the event the license is not forthcoming because the object is deemed too significant to the patrimony of the country, then the government procures the resident new buyer to match or better the offer within a specific time frame. In this case, without the paintings, Ader was out of luck. He could, however, demand payment for the drawings which had received their export-license. Whether Ader created a scene at Gurlitt’s hotel, pleading with him to unpack the paintings and let Ader negotiate obtaining the export-licenses, or even at the customs yard on rue Halévy where Gustav Knauer’s trucks we
re preparing to depart, is sadly unknown.

  Undoubtedly, Gurlitt was made aware of Ader’s plight and most likely shrugged and said that these events were most unfortunate, yet beyond his control. After all, Gurlitt would have argued, he had a timetable to keep—there was a war on—and it was the transport companies that dictated the movement of goods. No export-license was ever granted for the paintings, and Ader was never paid the FF 9.1 million owed to him. The additional 15 percent sales tax and 10 percent luxury tax, too, were in doubt.

  There is another bizarre twist to the tale. Mrs. Louis Viau, the daughter-in-law of the deceased, purchased an artwork for over a million francs: lot 74, a Corot pastel, for FF 2.23 million.15 This raises the question as to who the real seller was and the circumstances of the sale. Had the Viau heirs been taxed beyond endurance by the Nazi occupiers and forced to sell the artworks? Naturally, whoever the seller of the art was—whether the Nazi occupation officials or the estate of Georges Viau—that seller was nine million francs the poorer and the auctioneers suffered tremendous losses of commission.

  * * *

  The Viau auction marked a turning point for Gurlitt. Not only had he left the country without payment or export-license, but he was also officially buying for Linz. Posse may have initially commissioned him to buy the paintings—presumably for swap purposes at Linz—but Posse had died in Berlin on December 7, when Gurlitt was already in Paris.

  For reasons that have never adequately been explained, a noted anti-Nazi and friend of Gurlitt, Dr. Hermann Voss, was selected personally by the führer and Martin Bormann to replace Posse.16 Earlier, Voss had been rejected for the position as director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum on the grounds of his “cosmopolitan and democratic tendencies, and friendship with many Jewish colleagues.” He was antiwar and had even uttered the blasphemous plea for God to deliver an “unfortunate France from the Teutons.”17