by Susan Ronald
* * *
Despite the decision to disband the ALIU, 1946 brought new demands on Gurlitt to bear out his claims to innocence. The Culture Property Adviser’s Office, a subsection of the US High Commissioner’s Office in Germany, wanted him to confirm people with whom he’d conducted business, and who would be happy to put their own reputations on the line with regard to Gurlitt’s character. The problem for Gurlitt was who to choose?
The Nuremberg trials were daily headlines until October that year. Like the rest of the world, Gurlitt claimed revulsion at the barbarism of the Third Reich. Moreover, it came as no surprise when Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia. Göring had famously committed suicide the day before he was to be hanged, and Gurlitt’s friend Albert Speer—the architect who had become the minister for armaments and war production—had been sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison. Arrangements regarding Speer’s collection in Switzerland would need to be made.
Whatever remained of Hitler’s Reich was now run by the Allies, and Germany would become a divided nation for the next forty-five years. Relations between the Soviet Union and the British, French, and American zones were increasingly icy, too.21 Western Allied military legislation overrode German laws—except, seemingly, the Nazi law of May 31, 1938, enacted retrospectively, regarding “the confiscation of products of degenerate art” by the Third Reich. Perhaps the Americans, the British, and the French believed that this law would allow them to legally confiscate whatever suspected looted art they found? Or, equally possible, perhaps the Allies simply believed that whatever legal structure existed before was null and void. It was a decision that would have a bearing on Gurlitt’s son, Cornelius.
Gurlitt had been unaware until his house arrest that the Allies, including the Soviet Union, had signed the London Declaration on January 5, 1943, specifying that they would no longer recognize the transfer of property and valuables which had taken place in the occupied territories of the Third Reich, even if they seemed legal.22 Gurlitt became anxious when he was advised that he needed to provide references before his case could be settled. He had the wit to recognize that he had been firmly placed within the denazification process for lesser criminals, and knew the danger that the choice of the “wrong” references represented. As each day brought new threats of war-crimes trials, and as Allied Control Council directives cascaded through the German legal system, Gurlitt became frozen with indecision regarding the people he should ask to stand up for him. He had every reason to be concerned, though he had no real insight to the fact that denazification of Germany depended heavily on former Nazis vouching for those who served them.
* * *
Then, on October 15, 1946, Captain Jean Vlug, the Dutch Monuments Man associated with Faison, Plaut, and Rousseau, delivered a report to London Station. It seemed that Vlug didn’t trust his report to be filed through normal channels, because he insisted that Faison’s copy be hand-delivered to him personally. The report was a stunning piece of work detailing operations of Dienststelle Mühlmann in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, with nearly 150 pages itemizing stolen property and where to find it.23
Like the ERR in France, the Dienststelle Mühlmann was a highly organized and ruthless art-looting operation, specializing in the removal of art objects from the Feindvermögen (Enemy Property Control). Various German art historians and experts performed triage operations, pooling their booty for sale in Germany to Hitler, Göring, Baldur von Schirach, Schirach’s father-in-law and Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Fritz Todt, General Karl Wolff, Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank, General Kaltenbrunner, and Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart.24
A letter from Hans Posse to Martin Bormann dated June 10, 1940, greedily noted, “Dr. Mühlmann, who in his capacity as special delegate for the safeguarding of art and cultural goods, has just returned from Holland and notified me to-day by telephone from Berlin that there is at present a particularly favorable opportunity to purchase valuable works of art from Dutch art-dealers and private property in German currency.”25
The report also highlighted Erhard Goepel as working directly for Seyss-Inquart’s adjutant, Schmidt. The vile and mendacious Kajetan Mühlmann was said to frequently visit Behr and Lohse in Paris. Mühlmann’s equally ghastly half brother, Joseph, headed up the Paris operations of the Dienststelle, and was often seen in the company of Gurlitt’s cohorts Goepel, Gustav Rochlitz, and Hugo Engel. Similarly, Mühlmann sent several artworks to Herbst at the Dorotheum in Vienna. Vlug concluded that the activities of the Dienststelle Mühlmann constituted a war-crimes case.26 Of course, Gurlitt was in the thick of this network.
It was Vlug who established that a number of French artworks pillaged from Paris were at Altaussee and Salzburg.27 The Vlug report should have set alarm bells ringing with regard to Gurlitt, as Salzburg was another of his hideaways. Still, by the time it was received, the ALIU was disbanded, and winning the peace was deemed more important than an endless continuation of Nazi war-crimes trials.
* * *
Amazingly, Gurlitt engineered the release of some of his sequestered artwork after he made a final statement under oath regarding the buying and selling of art during the war. Of course, the fact that he declared that much of his collection had been verbrannt (burned) in the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden is now known to be utter fiction. Somehow he had made Edwin Rae, the chief of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section in Munich, believe that four of his paintings in fact belonged to his cousin Brigitta. These were released for her collection on November 7, 1946.28 By the time Brigitta took possession, Gurlitt’s antique furniture and tapestries had been added to the list of valuables to take away.
Toward the end of 1946, Gurlitt’s references willing to attest to his good character were asked to respond to his pleas. Those whom he already knew to be safe—like Max Beckmann and several museum directors who had cleared the denazification processing—were among the fourteen names given. The best one was the lawyer Walter Clemens, in Hamburg. Maya Gotthelf, his former secretary in Dresden, who was half Jewish, made a fine case for his kindness to Jews. Yet Gurlitt knew, on reflection, that it would look odd if he didn’t include the various museum directors for whom he bought art. So, he expanded his list to the museum directors at Kassel, Chemnitz, Karlsruhe, Cologne, and Zwickau. It was no accident that he omitted the Folkwang in Essen.
Naturally, Max Beckmann felt obliged to write on Gurlitt’s behalf, since Gurlitt had shown and sold some of Beckmann’s paintings after he’d been forbidden to paint under the Malverbot. Even Gurlitt’s pastor at Saint Peter’s Church in Hamburg was asked to give a glowing report.29 Still, it rankled with Gurlitt that he was alleged to be a Nazi. In his mind, he was an “art historian” and the Nazis took advantage of his situation. It was a story he had been telling himself and his children for so long that it had become the truth.
* * *
Understandably, Voss’s statement made to Faison at Altaussee in 1945 had not implicated Gurlitt. On the contrary, Voss claimed that Gurlitt wanted to save the art belonging to Voss’s Wiesbaden museum when he fled to Aschbach.30 While Faison’s original recommendation was that Voss be held over for trial as a war criminal, he also recommended that Voss be put to work with the art inventory at Munich—hardly a position for a man who was not to be trusted.31
The general feeling between the detainee Gurlitt and his jailers was that Gurlitt should be released from house arrest before Christmas; however, many of his references arrived only in January. Yet when January came and went without his freedom granted, Gurlitt decided on a bold action. Expecting he would be released in 1946, Gurlitt’s minders agreed to allow him to apply for work. If the paperwork came through, once a job offer was made and accepted, his house arrest would be at an end. Still, Gurlitt also knew it would take more than a mere job to regain his sequestered collection. He’d need to prove that it hadn’t been looted.
Then Gurlitt had a brainstorm. He decided to write to Rose Valland, who as Captain Vall
and and French Monuments Woman was instrumental in the return to France of thousands of works of looted art. His letter dated February 10, 1947, not only showed his fears of imprisonment as a Nazi but also requested that Valland provide him with a reference for a job in the Rhineland. Apparently, they had met and spoken at some length during one of Gurlitt’s many interrogations at the Munich Collecting Point.
“As you know, I was left bereft of my position as the director of the Hamburg Kunstverein when Hitler took power in 1933, particularly as I championed degenerate art,” Gurlitt began in poor French. “I have recently been asked to apply as a candidate for the directorship of the Museum of Krefeld in the Rhineland, an industrial town which was utterly annihilated in the war. Thus, at last I will have the possibility to resume my old career as a museum director, which I was forced to leave since I was forbidden work as a lecturer or writer.”32 Since Krefeld was in the French zone, he hoped she would write him a fulsome reference.
Of course, work as a writer had not been forbidden to him and he had entered the trade of art dealer long before he went to Hamburg with the backing of Kurt Kirchbach. Still, memories tend to play nasty tricks with the truth.
Unctuously, desperately, Gurlitt spun his hard luck story to Valland. “You would be in a position to help a faithful friend of France and a true enemy of the Nazi regime. I have always intervened by word and deed for French art.” He rambled on about how he loved Paris, how he admired French art. His plea to Valland included statements like “it is not without reason that my sister lived in Paris as a painter and artist” and similar pro-French irrelevancies about Wilibald’s career and how “he’s recently been asked to go to Bern” to work “in close cooperation with his French colleagues.” Finally, Gurlitt delivered his pièce de résistance: “I am the son of Cornelius Gurlitt who wrote the first book in German about French baroque architecture and who edited several texts on French art.”33
Valland had heard it all before. The soft strains of Gurlitt’s violins playing a Hebraic theme continued: “All of us were attacked and hunted down during the period of the Third Reich and it is only through incomprehensible circumstances that I was able to save myself in France as an art dealer. In this manner I was able to avoid forced labor in the war industries or to be incorporated into the feared battalions of slave laborers in the Organization Todt.… I only want to be remembered for this [saving the art].”34
It is easy to understand why Rose Valland refused to reply, and why the job at Krefeld never came through. So, the search for gainful employment continued throughout 1947.
By this point, his father figure Kirchbach had resettled in Düsseldorf. As an archcapitalist and a man who had kept his hands clean of genocide during the war, Kirchbach had no intention of returning home to a bombed-out Dresden or his Soviet-held Coswig factory to live under a socialist regime. Fortunately, in the main through Gurlitt, Kirchbach had been able to bring his vast collection to safety in Basel before the war’s end. The avaricious dealers Christoph Bernoulli and Alex Vömel, the “heir” to Flechtheim’s business, naturally took a special interest in Kirchbach as a new arrival in Düsseldorf with a substantial art collection. These men, so crucial to the Buchholz escape route into Switzerland which then fed art through to Valentin in New York and South America, would soon be obliged, quite reluctantly, to include Gurlitt in their future thinking.
By 1947, Kirchbach made sufficient headway in revived industrialist circles to arrange Gurlitt’s appointment as director of the Westphalian Kunstverein. It would be like old times. Gurlitt was delighted. Alex Vömel, the confirmed Nazi who never faced denazification queries, had reigned supreme in the industrial city for quite long enough. Vömel’s mentor, Karl Buchholz, had escaped scottfree to Madrid, spared the ignominy of house arrest or questioning by lawyers or Monuments Men or Women. Unknown to Gurlitt or, indeed, Buchholz himself, the tall, distinguished-looking art dealer with his readily recognizable shock of gray hair, was seen by a French spy disembarking Göring’s private plane in Madrid with enough art to begin yet another German bookshop in the Spanish capital. The French espionage report went on to state that Buchholz lived up the road from his proposed commercial premises, albeit without declaring himself to the authorities.35 In Madrid, Buchholz was blessed with a significant former-Nazi network, including Göring’s old school chum Alois Miedl, the Aryan owner of Jacques Goudstikker’s fabulous art business in Amsterdam. Miedl was, of course, on the list of art dealers most wanted by the Dutch.
* * *
Just as Gurlitt hoped to pack his bags, a supplementary police report arrived on the desk of the OMGUS. It was damning:
Gurlitt had confessed relationships with Party [NSDAP] offices and from the time of the domination of the Third Reich derived tremendous benefit. Irrespective of his fanciful legal incapacity, he had throughout the state of emergency preyed on the Jews and had sophisticated dealings with men belonging to the Espionage and Abwehr ministries. In the wider interest, he deserves further detention while investigations are underway relating to his acquisition practices of art abroad, notably in France.36
Ingeborg Hertmann, Gurlitt’s Hamburg assistant, had told all she knew about his dealings until the end of 1942. However, the revelation had come too late. There would be no more trials for crimes against humanity. No new investigations. The only work that would be carried out now was that of restitution.
Gurlitt had been saved by heading to the American zone. The American OSS was the first organization to decide to cease operations with the intent of prosecution for vandalism against national patrimonies. Perhaps it was because of the growing hostility between the Soviets and the Western Allies, already engaged in the Cold War. Perhaps not. At the end of the day, by the time Gurlitt was released from his Aschbach aerie, the Iron Curtain had descended upon what was now called the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Access to any art or paperwork in the east of the country was out of the question.
During his captivity, it seems that Gurlitt had become quite chummy with the Monuments Men Breitenbach and Kormendi looking after him. Nothing had been proven against him, and so when he requested to move to the British zone for employment at the Düsseldorf Kunstverein, the request was granted. Kormendi made the handwritten notation on Gurlitt’s file on March 22, 1948, that Gurlitt planned to move there.
Nonetheless, his collection was still held hostage, pending potential claims by France. On June 18, 1948, Gurlitt signed another oath—Declaration Number 01 345—which may have made his heart flutter: “One of the Art Officers of the Collecting Point Munich, whom I met last week in Munich, told me of his intention to visit me at Aschbach in a few days concerning this matter after his return from a trip to the former occupied areas in order to supply me with records.”37
Still, Gurlitt knew where his real records were—and that they were safe. After three long years, he was a free man at last.
29
DÜSSELDORF
Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II
The Gurlitts’ Düsseldorf home at Rotterdamer Strasse 35 was understated and elegant. The children had been sent to board at their Steiner/Waldorf school near Stuttgart from 1945, thanks to efforts of their friend Karl Ballmer, a Swiss artist. Ballmer, along with his partner and collector Edith van Cleef, had met the Gurlitts in Hamburg, but the pair returned to Switzerland in 1938 after the Anschluss. Ballmer had made an easy convert of the Gurlitts to anthroposophy, the slightly perplexing philosophy Rudolf Steiner first put into practice forty years earlier. The philosophy, which advances the theory of an intellectually comprehensible spiritual world that is accessible through direct experience and inner development, spawned a gentler form of education in the postwar period.1
Meanwhile, the Gurlitt collection was still held hostage. Another inventory, in 1948–49, and more months of questioning still brought the property-control officers of the Collecting Point no closer to discovering the provenance of mu
ch of Gurlitt’s art. They, like Plaut before them, knew that Gurlitt was covering something up, but couldn’t prove it. Claims by the French had been either fulfilled or dismissed, except for two artworks. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by more than seven million art claims from survivors, collectors, and museums. Or maybe Gurlitt had simply proved too cunning. It would be more than five long years before Hildebrand Gurlitt would see much of his collection—but by then no one feared further punishment against those who had served Hitler’s deadly whims.
* * *
Düsseldorf provided the family with a new life, uncannily similar to the one at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. Old friendships were renewed, like the highly competitive one with Vömel, who had proudly served in the SA during the war.2 Equally, new relationships were made. Young artists were sought out to exhibit.
Family and friends, too, had new lives. Wilibald was once more a university lecturer. Wolfgang had barely suffered—having agreed to lend his “entire collection” to the city of Linz in exchange for opening a gallery at the museum.3 Surprisingly, Hermann Voss backed up Wolfgang’s statement that he had never sold anything to Linz, demonstrating either a severe lapse of memory or, more likely, an unwillingness to point the finger.4
Manfred Gurlitt, Wolfgang’s younger brother, had immigrated to Japan in 1939, working there as a conductor and composer. He remained there for the rest of his life. Dresden, Hitler, and the frenzied days at the end of the war were barely memories. Although he headed the “criminal organization” of Sonderauftrag Linz, Hermann Voss was set free in 1945. He lived in Munich writing about art, but would never again be a museum curator. Gurlitt’s fellow dealers Böhmer and Möller met different ends. Böhmer committed suicide as the Soviets approached Güstrow. Möller protected his collection and opened a gallery in Cologne in 1949. Theo Hermsen, on the sole testimony of Gurlitt, was presumed dead.