Hitler's Art Thief

by Susan Ronald

  Voss and Gurlitt had known each other for many years, with Gurlitt selling art to Voss’s museum at Wiesbaden.18 They both adored Botticelli above all other classical artists, and had a similar Weltanschauung. Like Gurlitt, Voss did not trust Karl Haberstock. A new era was dawning. A question remained, however: Did Gurlitt deliver any of those unlikely fifteen paintings to Linz, or barter or keep them, or deliver them to one or more of his industrialist clients? The answer could mean that Voss knew from the outset what Gurlitt had planned and either turned a blind eye, was too busy, or was part of Gurlitt’s postwar plan.

  24

  KING RAFFKE

  For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Voss’s appointment had been announced before Gurlitt returned to Germany. He would formally take over as head of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie and Sonderauftrag Linz from March 1943 on a monthly salary of RM 1,000, while also maintaining his directorship at the Wiesbaden Museum without salary. Still, Voss had been keen to get his feet under the table.

  Only four days after Posse’s death and the same day as the Viau auction in Paris, a letter was sent from the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden on behalf of Voss asking Gurlitt to keep Gottfried Reimer informed of the status of ongoing assignments, including the payments received. The letter asked Gurlitt to “be specific”1 when Gurlitt and Voss finally met up officially. In February, there was a great deal to discuss, not the least of which was how they could work most effectively together.

  While 1942 had been a bumper year for the European and American art markets, it had also brought the United States firmly into the war, and heralded Rommel’s rout in North Africa and the Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad. After the Wehrmacht’s storming through Europe without loss of territory since 1939, these events should have been enough to give anyone as insightful as Gurlitt pause and ask, What if…?

  While Gurlitt may have keenly anticipated events during the war of 1914–18, in this second war he had focused his mind exclusively on a killing of another sort. Despite the Reich’s military setbacks—foreshadowed by the failure of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and Churchill’s success at engineering lend-lease with Roosevelt—Gurlitt was too busy climbing the proverbial greasy pole over the backs of his competitors to allow the war to stop him.

  In this war, Gurlitt grew a rhinoceros’s hide and donned blinkers to the horrors that surrounded him. He ignored his part in stealing riches from tortured men and women forced to sell their treasures for the price of mere trinkets. After all, he had, in his own mind, been a victim, too. First he was ousted by the fanatical Gauleiter Mutschmann from his museum directorship at Zwickau. Then he was “forced” to resign from the Hamburg Kunstverein as a second-degree Mischling. Still, he’d allowed himself to be contaminated by the regime’s lawlessness, brutalizing others, and had no idea that he, too, had become one of the arts army perpetrating Nazi criminality. His goal was to lead that army. Simply put, Gurlitt had become dehumanized.

  Even so, Gurlitt’s corruption began in childhood with the misguided principle that he came from a family that knew best how to safeguard art for art’s sake. In the 1914–18 war, this wrongheaded idea was reinforced by his stint working as a German Monuments Man in Belgium and giving lectures on the superiority of German art. Then, in strict contravention of his father’s wishes, and as a means of survival, Gurlitt had metaphorically folded his poker hand within months of his finally getting his first job as a museum curator, and turned his back on any notions of becoming a great scholar for the financial rewards of being an art dealer. What he never admitted was that once he’d begun to act as dealer for Kurt Kirchbach, in the mid-1920s, he’d felt the exhilaration of power. With power came the craving to greedily nurture it.

  In fact, from 1929 throughout the Depression, when so many people were forced to sell their valuables for a pittance, Gurlitt had exploited their situations without mercy, believing that he simply scented a fine deal. He had become an adept art plunderer before Hitler’s rise. When the anti-Semitic racial restrictions became clear in 1935, they created an art market for the taking, literally. Gurlitt not only painlessly renegotiated his personal position, but protected his wider family from threats, arrests, intimidation, humiliation, and loss of their personal property and private treasures. How? While hundreds of Jewish and politically undesirable art dealers had their lives stolen, Gurlitt prospered. Even his cousin Wolfgang had suffered no negative repercussions, whereas Wolfgang’s younger brother, Manfred, had been targeted until he became a member of the Nazi Party. Why?

  The answer to both questions is: friends in high places. Kirchbach, the surrogate father figure, was the only manufacturer of brake pads and linings for the transportation industry, feeding the insatiable Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe with their needs. He was essential to the war effort. Other key industrialists, too, were Gurlitt’s clients. Yet the most significant friendship came from his father’s former student of architecture, and Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. Through his vast knowledge of art and the market, his charm and intellect, Gurlitt had assured his place among the victors, not the victims.

  * * *

  As the deportations began eastward, Gurlitt took to his role as art plunderer for the state with the zeal of the converted. When the rafles—lightning raids on homes displacing frightened people and their valuable property—began in France in May 1941, Gurlitt was buying art at auctions that were forbidden to Jews. Yet they sold Jewish valuables. He also traveled freely between the Free Zone of Vichy and occupied France. His second-degree-Mischling status gave him a good cover story with vulnerable sellers, was airbrushed as required with prospective buyers, and—importantly for him—provided his conscience with a plausible salve for his treachery. Even the officials of the Musées Nationaux who frequently condemned him thought that Gurlitt was most charming.2

  With Hermann Voss as the new director of Linz, Gurlitt saw the unique opportunity to dominate the entire art market. Voss held the largest purse strings, and trusted him. Through his cousin Wolfgang, who was friendly with August Eigruber, the mobster gauleiter of Oberdonau, which included Linz, Hildebrand had unprecedented access to knowledge of the Reich’s plans to safeguard the looted art. Posse had set him up in opposition to Haberstock in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands; then Voss refused to countenance any dealings with the old fox Haberstock. At last, Gurlitt could be the king Raffke—the king profiteer—and could successfully feather his own nest for what was promising to be an increasingly precarious future.

  * * *

  Before November 1941, there is little official correspondence to link Gurlitt with widespread plundering operations in France. Nonetheless, he had been actively selling to French clients since his appointment to the German purges of art in 1938 and had significant contacts there.

  Given the running battles between Wolff-Metternich’s Kunstschutz and the ERR, it was only a matter of time before the names ERR and Kunstschutz became interchangeable, on Wolf-Metternich’s reassignment in 1942. As French Jews were arrested or fled for their lives, their belongings—irrespective of any fail-safe hiding places—were systematically looted. Even the most miserable possessions found a home at the M-Aktion division of the ERR—from children’s toys to hairbrushes. The more valuable assets were raked through by the ERR in the name of Hitler, under the ubiquitous and rapacious eye of Göring.3

  From September 1941, Gestapo looting sorties with specially coopted Luftwaffe officers were made into Vichy France. According to the traitorous French admiral Darlan, “The seizure of Jewish possessions is a political and nonmilitary decision.”4 The valuables of the dispossessed in Vichy were safeguarded as part of the “punitive measures” legally put in place by the French.5

  One of the more notorious examples of such a punitive measure was Göring’s seizure of the world’s most unique collection of priceless enamel and gold miniature boxes and gilded miniatu
re paintings, along with the Rothschild jewels, under special Luftwaffe guard. As Bunjes reported in an outright lie, “We have not discovered amid the art objects on deposit with the state, one which belonged to the Jews, even one of the great Jewish collections known throughout the entire world.”6

  By the middle of 1941, Göring’s dominance of the ERR meant that the organization held all other offices competing for France’s riches in its sway—from the Foreign Office to the Gestapo and Kunstschutz. Art was successfully torn from the safe depositories in the Loire châteaus where the national collections and the great private collections were held. Eventually many collections were taken to the Jeu de Paume. In almost all cases, Göring’s Luftwaffe or the Gestapo provided the transportation. A veritable factory “manufacturing” looted art was in full flow, with German experts supplying professional triage services for the wounded artworks, the degenerate art going to Göring or the likes of Gurlitt for swaps with the treasured art reserved according to Göring’s November 1940 instructions—enshrining Hitler’s and Linz’s primacy.

  During 1940–42, much of the stolen art was recorded by the tenacious Rose Valland under the noses of her Gestapo guards and vigilant eyes of Bunjes and Behr. By the time Voss made his first trip to Paris, in early April 1943, Walter Borchers had been appointed Germany’s head of the Jeu de Paume. The imposing and tremendously plausible liar Bruno Lohse, Göring’s personal friend, was appointed as head of the Special Commission (Leiter des Sonderstabs) in Paris. Oddly, despite their apparent conflicting duties, Valland overheard Lohse whisper to Borchers to hide a painting from the school of Gérard of Léda au cygne* from the Walter Strauss collection, closing with the remark “It will be for just us.”7 Valland scribbled this in her journal above the entry that a famous drawing by Rembrandt, Portrait du père de l’artiste,† previously noted in the collection, had vanished. Valland suspected Lohse.

  The rabidly anti-Semitic art critic Robert Scholz was their superior, working alongside Utikal, primarily from Berlin. In 1943, it was Scholz’s Parisian poodle, Günther Schiedlausky, who finally raised the alarm about Lohse. Documented inventories left the Jeu de Paume, but never arrived in Germany. Among the missing paintings were two from the Seligmann collection.8 Voss’s April visit resulted in Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, personally intervening. Sideswiping the ERR and Göring with a series of orders, Bormann transferred the plundering operations from the ERR to the agents of the Linz staff for further processing and observation.9 Henceforth, Gurlitt’s exalted position put him in indirect conflict or contact, depending on the viewpoint, with Bruno Lohse and the ERR in France. Even Lohse’s actions, in theory only, would have to be approved by Gurlitt.10

  * * *

  In the distant village of Laguenne, located in the Limousin region of Vichy, one of the most treasured collections of Dutch old masters had been hidden away in the local branch of Banque Jordaan, some two kilometers from Tulle. On April 10, 1943, the bank’s director was ordered to contact the prefecture of the Departement of Corrèze. None other than Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the Vichy director of Jewish Affairs, had ordered the removal of the world-renowned Schloss Collection and its deposit in his bank. Apparently, even Vichy’s head of government, Pierre Laval, the fat racketeer always sporting a white tie, had his fingers in this rich pie.

  The bank director hesitated and bravely replied that he’d have to notify his superiors, which he did by coded message. Five days later, the police commissioner presented himself at the bank with five gendarmes in tow, notifying the manager of his mission to “safeguard” the premises and not allow either person or property to enter or leave. At seven a.m. the next day, a relief guard was placed around the bank. Then, at two p.m., a German truck with armed soldiers from Paris pulled in to take away the priceless collection. The hapless bank director watched, powerless, as the truck headed off in the direction of Limoges.11

  “The Schloss Collection,” so the telegram number 2603 stated, “is currently the richest collection of fine Old Dutch Masters in the world. It has six Rembrandts, masterpieces painted by Rubens, van Dyck, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hoch and several other revered artists. It has been developed over many long years and enjoys an international reputation. Its acquisition for the Linz museum would be an extraordinary gain.”12 In fact there were exactly 568 Old Masters: 262 were designated for Linz, only after 284 were safeguarded by the Louvre. An additional twenty-two had simply vanished.13

  Officially, Voss had been the head of Linz for six weeks. The telegram was sent from the German embassy in Paris only days after his first visit there. The heist, however, had been in the making for some while. Haberstock had been scouring France since 1940, and even had a meeting with a “strange lady with a German-Jewish name” at the Hotel Negresco, overlooking the Baie des Anges, in the winter of 1940–41. Gurlitt, too, had set Herbert Engel on the trail of the collection, also in Nice. Gurlitt’s associate and subordinate art dealer in France, Erhard Goepel,* had been in the hunt, too; and it was Goepel who finally located it. Yet it was Lohse who would handle the division of the spoils once it reached the vault of Banque Dreyfus in Paris.

  This heist cemented Gurlitt’s relationship with Lohse. Goepel had already been working with Gurlitt in acquiring early Italian Renaissance artworks valued at over 2.5 million Belgian francs from the time of the country’s occupation.14 Though Gurlitt was never specifically named as the one involved in the selection of art to be given to Linz or which “lesser” works would go up for auction, Gurlitt’s fingerprints are all over the transactions that followed.15 Besides, France was officially his bailiwick.

  Cleverly, the method of “payment” was levied against the “occupation credits” that France had to pay Germany. The amount payable was round-tripped from the French Treasury to the occupiers and back again. Some FF 42 million was paid in this way against the total FF 50 million purchase price. This was a favored method that Gurlitt used for payments if required. It was an extension of the preferred blocked and unblocked reichsmarks used in the Swiss trades.

  * * *

  Lohse, as the new head of the ERR Paris, needed to negotiate his way through the highly charged interests on behalf of Göring, Bormann (for Hitler), Ambassador Abetz, and Abel Bonnard, minister of fine art for Vichy. Since Lohse had his heart set on larceny rather than administration, purloining a landscape by van Goyen on April 6 in the backseat of his car,16 he had entirely misread the situation.

  Essentially, Hitler was furious about two matters. First, there was absolutely no legal pretext—always dear to Hitler’s heart—for the outright seizure of the Schloss Collection in Vichy. More worrying, Lohse had permitted the Musées Nationaux the “pick of the litter”—leaving Hitler with the sour taste that he had been granted the gristled leftovers. For the most powerful man in Europe, it was an insult beyond imagining.

  From Berlin, Utikal abandoned Goepel and Lohse. So did Göring, since his fortunes had begun to wane with Hitler over his own art plundering. Even Alfred Rosenberg entered into the fray, disowning Lohse and Goepel, calling them “overzealous representatives.”17 Voss, however, received only a slap on the wrist for his part in the caper. It was only the method of payment that rescued him from further admonition. Secretly, however, the audacious coup was admired, and would trailblaze new pastures in Vichy.

  Once the 262 Dutch old masters from the Schloss Collection arrived at the Führerbau in Munich, on May 27, 1943, they were never recovered. Only those acquired in the preemptive strike by Jaujard at the Louvre would be returned to their owner, Alphonse Schloss, after the war.18

  * * *

  On the same day the Führerbau accepted the Schloss Collection, a plume of noxious smoke billowed high above the Jeu de Paume. It was the first bonfire of the vanities raging on the terraces of the Tuileries. Just as in Florence in 1497, when the Dominican priest Savonarola decided that the Florentines had become degenerate in their worship of cosmetics, art, and even printed books, so seemingly the ERR had determined
that the art of Klee, Picasso, Léger, Ernst, and others was unfit to see the light of another day. Anything that played to the artist’s vanity rather than exhibit good artistic taste was doomed and burned that May afternoon. Or so the ERR claimed. Rose Valland believed that between five hundred and six hundred modern artworks were lost that day, but all she saw—or was allowed to see—was the smoky column rising far above Cleopatra’s Needle in Place de la Concorde. No reliable witness to the conflagration has ever come forward.19

  Apparently, it all began with a damning interim report penned by Scholz to Hitler for his birthday on April 20, 1943. Scholz wrote that the ERR must continue their custodianship of safeguarded assets from French Jews under his guidance. Scholz—the great Nazi editor and keeper of purity of art in the Reich since the mid-1930s—stated that he would come to Paris and set their house in order. Scholz may have been the first to suspect that Lohse and his associates had taken it upon themselves to “destroy” facsimiles of modern art and their frames so the originals could be sold for their private accounts in a discreet neutral locale, like Switzerland, Portugal, or Spain.*

  On July 19, French and German directors and curators were convened at the Louvre, including Dr. Borchers and others stationed at the Jeu de Paume. A mock trial, again reminiscent of Savonarola’s public sermons, dictated that the masterpieces of Courbet, Monet, Degas, Manet would be spared—by Hitler’s personal order—but only to serve as swaps to bolster the economy of the Third Reich. Pragmatically, they were commodities superior to reichsmarks.

  The artworks of Bonnard and Vuillard, Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, and Derain were evaluated by Scholz for their commercial rather than aesthetic value. The sentences were then passed and the men of the ERR brandished their knives, mercilessly slashing the condemned enemy alien art. Once their destruction was complete, the shreds were shipped in dozens of truckloads and set alight in the garden of the Jeu de Paume.20