by Susan Ronald
Searle states that there were “345 specialists attached to this outfit which is considerable, even taking into account the thousands of paintings etc. stolen.”42 Gurlitt was not interviewed directly by the one person who could have proven his lies—Rose Valland.
Searle’s criticism continues:
This statement would be severely criticized today without a backup financial statement done by the investigating officer. More figures should have been given for the sale of paintings. There are very few and it reads like a financial black hole. It must be said that modern police investigation, certainly since the 1980s, is particularly geared toward financial investigation with specially trained “financial investigators” attached to every serious CID* team or squad—I was one myself. But this is just a fancy name for something that has always been looked into in the past. I should have thought it was obvious to a trained lawyer.43
As a former investment banker, I can attest that Searle’s comments address many of the questions that I had as well during my research.
* * *
In CIR no. 4, Faison went to great lengths to highlight that the files contain “complete statements of the special Linz accounts in Holland and Italy” and that the “exhaustive reports of the purchases made by H. GURLITT, GOEPEL, and the Dorotheum (Dr. HERBST) in France, Holland and Belgium” are included.44
Faison shared McKay’s and Plaut’s scepticism. There was something not quite right about Gurlitt’s story. The main thrust of their findings concluded that Sonderauftrag Linz was a criminal organization and its adherents should be tried for war crimes.45 Hildebrand Gurlitt would be held over under house arrest at Aschbach. The smidgen of information fed to Faison and his team in 1945 had shown Gurlitt to be a consummate liar. Finding the truth, however, would be another issue.
Jim Plaut and Theodore Rousseau believed that the answers were to be found in Switzerland, and so they set out to discover what really happened.
28
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Edward C. Acheson, chief of economic intelligence of the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS, wrote a letter dated April 9, 1945, classified “most secret” regarding Switzerland. Acheson, the younger brother of the American assistant secretary of state for economic affairs Dean G. Acheson, was no slouch. “There is an unsubstantiated rumor that some Top Secret material has been received concerning the holdings of some highly placed Nazis in Switzerland. How unsubstantiated is this rumor?”1
That same day, Acheson penned a second letter, regarding Lichtenstein. There were three query categories: how Swiss law applied there; what holding companies had been or were being whitewashed; and how to get to the ultimate beneficiaries of any holding company.2 Acheson was on the scent of the strict Swiss secrecy laws, which blanketed all bank transactions for individuals, companies, and assets that could benefit the fallen Reich.
Acheson’s role differed from that of Monuments Men Plaut, Faison, and Rousseau. His task was to make sure that the stolen artworks would not be used as part of some unknown German financial network to fund another war. The Monuments Men wanted restitution and punishment, in that order. Inevitable conflicts arose from the outset between the two groups. To complicate matters further, Project Safehaven itself, as an interagency endeavor, was torn between its various agency overlords. Even the American embassies in Europe had incompatible aims with the other government bodies where looted art was concerned.
Though written on March 17, another unsigned attachment from the US embassy in London arrived on Acheson’s desk in Bern on May 3, 1945. Apparently, a Matisse painting—The Open Window—had been tracked to Switzerland. The Monuments Men believed that Max Stocklin, a convicted art dealer imprisoned in Paris, had imported the painting stolen from the Paul Rosenberg collection at Floriac, near Bordeaux. Stocklin worked closely with the German occupation authorities and was particularly chummy with Rochlitz and Lohse. In fact, prior to the war, Stocklin and Rochlitz had assessed a range of highly valuable Jewish collections in France and Germany with an eye to confiscation.3 Along with Lohse, they would collectively “buy” considerable quantities of valuables, with and without the knowledge of the Nazis in France.4
One of the most coveted of the collections assessed belonged to Paul Rosenberg. The author of the letter to Acheson* recounted his interview with the sculptor André Martin, who was then employed at the Galerie Neupert, in Zurich. The painting had been imported to Switzerland in an apparently legal manner by Stocklin, with the duty paid, approximately two years earlier. Stocklin assured Martin that the painting had been purchased at a Parisian gallery, but alas, he could not recall which one. Martin was to sell it on behalf of Stocklin, and so it was offered to the Bern Kunstmuseum and a Dr. Trussel, who was known to Acheson. The museum would purchase the painting only if it had a clear provenance proving that it was sold prior to the occupation of Paris in June 1940. Clearly, the museum suspected that it had been in the Rosenberg collection. Martin claimed he had no interest in the painting other than his commission in the event of a sale.5
Wing Commander Douglas Cooper, art historian, modern art collector, and indefatigable British Monuments Man, took over the file from there. His twenty-six-page report Looted Works of Art in Switzerland and his follow-on work with Paul Rosenberg personally in the days immediately after the war show Cooper’s doggedness and determination to help Rosenberg reclaim his looted art.6 Cooper traced Matisse’s Open Window through a series of twenty-eight exchanges made in Switzerland—all with the full knowledge of Hermann Göring.
Ten of these exchanges—with dealers Adolf Wuester, Max Stocklin, Arthur Pfannstiel, Galerie Neupert on behalf of Alfred Boedecker; Dr. Alexander von Frey; Galerie Almas-Dietrich, in Munich; and the Dik Gallery in Amsterdam—were for Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Bormann. The exchanges were designed to avoid the contravention of an edict issued by the Reich Chancellery minister Lammers on November 18, 1940, at the behest of Hitler, which decreed that all confiscated works of art were to be sent to Germany and placed at the disposal of the führer.7
As the armistice with France was signed with the French people—not with Freemasons or Jews who no longer enjoyed the French nationality—Jewish property was deemed “ownerless.” Jewish assets were thereby free of any encumbrance and could be shipped to the Reich. Nevertheless, in the case of the outlawed modern art, importation to Germany simply would not do.
Still, why should valuable art “lie fallow” when such an “abundance of highly salable material” should go to the greater Nazi good? Ideology could be bent, Göring believed, as had often been the case in the interests of commercial realities that would better serve the Reich.8 So the exchanges took place. The twenty-eight forensically examined by Cooper occurred between February 1941 and the end of 1943. All of these were fully disclosed to Göring, with eighteen of the twenty-eight exchanges arranged on his behalf with Gustav Rochlitz in Paris.
The exchanges were both direct and indirect and provide a useful catalogue of how things worked. The first of them involved Göring and Hofer on one side and the ubiquitous Swiss auctioneer Theodor Fischer, his Darmstadt partner Carl Buemming, and the firm of Bronner in Basel on the other. Göring and Hofer traded twenty-five Impressionist paintings, all withdrawn from the depository at Neuschwanstein, near Füssen, by Göring personally on July 12, 1941. These paintings were variously by Corot, Courbet, Cottet, Degas, van Gogh, Lucas, Manet, Monnier, Renoir, Rousseau, Rodin, and Sisley.
Fischer had selected all twenty-five paintings in Berlin. British collector Alphonse Kann owned the Daumier, all the works by Degas, the Manet, the Rodin, the Renoir, and the Rousseau. The van Gogh belonged to British collector Alfred Lindon. In exchange, Fischer gave Göring six paintings: four Cranachs, a triptych by a Frankfurt master, and a painting of the Nuremberg school.
The second exchange, also a straight swap, was between Fischer’s French agent,
Hans Wendland, and Göring. Wendland gave a Rembrandt purchased in Marseilles in 1941 and two sixteenth-century Brussels tapestries in exchange for twenty-five Impressionist paintings.
The third exchange also involved Fischer, as did the fourth and eighth. The close financial connection between Wendland, Fischer, and Emil Bührle, at Galerie Neupert, was also detailed.9
Yet it was the sixth exchange that would embroil Gurlitt—albeit posthumously:
EXCHANGE No. 6 MAX STOECKLIN*[sic] of Paris with ERR (for the Reichs [sic] Chancellery):
STOECKLIN gave:-
WINANTS.
Woodland landscape.
ZEEMAN.
Small Fishing Harbour.
STOECKLIN received:-
MATISSE.
The open window[sic].
Coll. Rosenberg10
Cooper had interviewed André Martin of Zurich and knew that the painting was currently on sale at the Galerie Neupert there. The contract for the exchange was drawn up, without appraisal, on June 15, 1942, on behalf of the Reich Chancellery. Officially, the picture still “belonged” to Stocklin, who remained in a French prison. Cooper ended his report on the swap with the hopeful note, “There would seem to be no reason why it should not be seized.”11 Cooper naturally made Paul Rosenberg aware of the situation, and the latter planned to travel to Switzerland from New York as soon as the peace permitted.
* * *
By spring 1945, Plaut, Faison, and Rousseau had the chief function of finding the stolen art and working toward its restitution. Once they were back in their home countries, it became the national governments’ task to return the loot to its rightful owners—an often arduous and thankless job, particularly when the owners had been murdered.
Yet the Monuments Men’s work became increasingly embroiled with Edward Acheson’s duty to his Project Safehaven remit hunting for hidden enemy assets. On June 21, Acheson disseminated a report to the Western Allies entitled Methods of Concealing German Capital, pertaining specifically to Switzerland. Through the legal entity of a foundation “the transfer by a single person of legal identity to an association of individuals (fondation)” was permitted. The fondation had the right to manage all property, “and one single individual can have the right to execute all administrative acts on its behalf.”12 What Acheson’s report does not state was that the fondation also created preferential tax status and was impossible to penetrate. This was the formula used both in Switzerland and in Germany after the war to protect looted art.
* * *
Throughout 1945, OSS Safehaven reports flooded the desks of the Macmillan Committee in London and the Roberts Commission in Washington, DC, regarding looted art in Argentina, Tunisia, Sweden, and Switzerland. Breughel and Rembrandt paintings were discovered in neutral Sweden amid myriad caches of other priceless artworks, gold, and cash.13
Plaut and Rousseau were more attuned, however, to “straw men” who were happy to act as a front for the German collectors and dealers hiding their booty in Switzerland.14 These men would operate the vaults, bank accounts, fondations, or other means of investment on behalf of their German clients for a hefty monthly fee. It was this route that found personal favor with Hildebrand Gurlitt among others.
Simultaneously, that October, the French and British were closing in on Hugo Engel, one of Gurlitt’s main negotiators in Paris. Engel had been reported as having sold five paintings to Karl Haberstock for FF 180,000 and several drawings to Maria Dietrich for FF 15,000 each. Other transactions were said to have occurred with a dealer called Kuetgens, who had sidelined a painting bound for the museum at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). Engel had also sold a Tiepolo to the Würzburg Museum through the dealer Moebuis for FF 30,000.15 The investigation was ongoing, and the French officers would inform Cooper as soon as they had the names of other dealers with whom Engel worked.*
Plaut and Rousseau filed their report on looted art in Switzerland on December 9, 1945, based on their investigations between November 20 and the date of filing. Douglas Cooper was instrumental in helping them with their inquiries by introducing the pair to a certain Dr. Vodo of the Ministry of the Interior, who pledged to investigate the Fischer Gallery imports from France and Germany. Additionally, Plaut interviewed Oswald Rieckmann, who had been the chief of courier services at the German legation in Bern during the war. Rieckmann had delivered the diplomatic bags containing looted art to Göring’s agent Hofer on arrival in Bern. Hofer would then pass on the art to Wendland and Fischer in Lucerne for sale or exchange.16
Plaut summoned Wendland, a German national, to the American embassy in Bern and made Wendland’s precarious position abundantly clear—in particular that he could become the scapegoat for those art dealers holding Swiss passports. Wendland cooperated to the extent of providing Plaut with an introduction to Theodor Fischer and his two sons.
On meeting Fischer, Plaut felt that while no interrogation per se could take place, the outcome was “salutary.” Fischer freely showed Plaut the confidential Allied report Looted Works of Art in Switzerland, dated October 1945, which the Americans and British had given in confidence to the Swiss government for action. It had been freely passed on to Fischer by a Mr. de Rahm of the Swiss Federal Political Department, Fischer said, who had proven most sympathetic to Fischer’s current difficulties.17
Then the ax fell. Nine days after Plaut filed his report, he received a very cordial yet unwelcomed letter from Acheson. “Dear Jimmy,” Acheson began, “the purpose of these lines is to bring you up to date concerning our recent activities. In view of the fact that it was agreed essentially in Washington to terminate the project in the first months of 1946, we have concentrated since mid-October on two principal objectives.”
Was Acheson referring to Project Safehaven? Or was he specifically calling an end to the efforts of the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU), which he now headed? As the letter continued, Plaut was left in no doubt. It was the latter. He had a month to complete all outstanding investigations in Europe and prepare material “for transmission, on termination of the project, to whatever agency is designated to carry on this work. This material will consist chiefly of a Primer of personalities with whom the project has been concerned.”18
Faison’s CIR no. 4 was due for release just before Christmas. This letter ordered CIR no. 3 to be incorporated into the “Primer” of personalities. Acheson acknowledged that the ALIU’s work was far from finished, and that there were “pressing investigations which we will not even be able to touch, and it is going to be a real struggle to wind up satisfactorily those now in progress. The essential point is,” Acheson lamented, “that the problem as a whole cannot possibly be unravelled [sic] fully in less than six months to a year.… There are strong grounds for our believing that the State Department has taken a receptive attitude toward the continuation of this work.”19
What made Acheson think that there were “strong grounds” for believing that the ALIU’s work would be allowed to continue? Could he have had a conversation with his brother, Dean, the assistant secretary of state for economic affairs, on the subject? Effectively, Plaut and the other American Monuments Men who remained in Europe were stood down from opening any further investigations. Continued follow-up of those files which had been opened would soon fall to others in the Office of the Military Government of the United States (OMGUS).
Edward Acheson, despite his lofty position within the OSS, hadn’t the foresight to realize that the death of Roosevelt in April 1945 and the main crimes-against-humanity trials under way in Nuremberg had deadened the appetite for vengeance against mere racketeers like Gurlitt in the new Truman administration. Genocide and slave labor were the administration’s main targets, with the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials dragging on through October 1948. Only the Flick Trial (April–December 1947), the IG Farben Trial (August 1947–July 1948), the Krupp Trial (December 1947–July 1948), and the Ministries Trial (January 1948–April 1949) had the possibility of revealing Gurlitt’s shady activities.20 Gurlitt sh
ould have felt threatened, even though none of the art-historian mobsters had been put on trial. He had no way of knowing that the Truman administration did not wish to understand that art theft and genocide were intrinsically linked.
The ALIU was wound up in 1946—as was Project Safehaven. The many thousands of looted artworks in the American zone fell under the jurisdiction of the individual collecting point officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives division of OMGUS. Faison’s and Plaut’s hopes of bringing the Sonderauftrag Linz into the limelight of an international war-crimes trial had been worn away to dust.
* * *
At the same time as Plaut was reading Acheson’s letter, Martin Bormann’s wife, Gerda, had been found at the small village of Wolkenstein in the South Tyrol. It was only twenty-odd kilometers from General Karl Wolff’s lair at Bolzano.* When she was arrested, the children whom her husband had kidnapped were, thankfully, returned to their parents, and her own children taken into care. During her interrogation, it was apparent that Gerda was extremely ill. She was taken to hospital after Christmas and diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died in April 1946 without referring to her husband’s whereabouts or, indeed, making her husband’s wishes clear regarding his art collection. This was extremely significant to the outcome of the Gurlitt investigation, as well as to Gurlitt’s personal outlook for the future.
Separately, the nasty chief murderous looter of Austria, Poland, Holland, and Belgium, Kajetan Mühlmann, claimed that Bormann was uninterested in art. However, Gurlitt and others had sold art to him, and Bormann’s collection was brought to safety at Altaussee before it was secreted in Switzerland. Bormann had approved Gurlitt’s movements in the closing days of the war over any objections of Dr. Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. Most significantly, by virtue of the will Hitler signed in the bunker the day before his death, Bormann had total control over the entire Hitler collection, including that of Linz, on behalf of the Party.