Breaking van Gogh

by James Grundvig

  When I drove up to this Shangri-La in my Army jeep in the middle of a fine day in July 1945, I had no idea what I was going to find. A farmhand directed me to the manor house, a two-story modern stone building occupying one side of a huge yard. Upon entering by the front door I found myself in a large vestibule with a marble floor, an open stairway to the second floor and on the wall—to my amazement—both a Van Gogh and a Cézanne that I recognized from my grandparents’ house in Berlin. Leading off the vestibule were four wooden doors, all closed, suggesting secrecy. I had a flash recall that Germans keep interior doors of private houses closed. With a pounding heart I opened a door closest to the sound of people talking. For a moment there was total silence as they were wondering what this soldier was doing interrupting their lunch and I was staring at them, looking for a familiar face. Out of the crowd of some fifteen people I suddenly recognized my mother’s sister and said: Tante Emma (Witt), Fritz Kempner.

  I shall never forget the shouts of joyous recognition that this simple statement elicited.258

  Coming to that farmhouse and reconnecting with family members was only the first step in rebuilding one’s life. A country like Germany that was going to rebuild, deal with food rations, and bear the fallout of war was no place to begin a new life. Since Peter Witt was young at the time, his life and career lay in front of him—but he had to get educated first.

  In 1949, Dr. Peter Witt, together with his new wife, would take Wheat Field with Cypresses, along with twelve other von Mendelssohn-owned paintings, over the German border near their summerhouse into Switzerland, as Dr. Witt’s daughter Elise Witt recalled in a 2013 telephone interview, adding, “He was going to start a family.” Emil G. Bührle acquired the painting soon after.

  In 1998, articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal noted the provenance issues of the Met’s recently acquired van Gogh, a part of Walter Annenberg’s 1993 donation. Was the landscape painting stolen by the Nazis and used as barter with arms dealer Emil G. Bührle during the war, some wondered. Finally, the Met’s Gary Tinterow was able to reach out to the heir of Franz von Mendelssohn, Dr. Peter Witt, who would become the missing link in the story of what had happened to the van Gogh masterpiece during and right after the war.

  Dr. Witt and Gary Tinterow spoke by telephone. Tinterow asked Dr. Witt, who lived in North Carolina at the time, to come to New York City, offering to take him out for lunch to hear his story. But that day never came to pass, since Peter Nikolaus Witt would die later that September.259

  Dr. Witt represented the intellectual side of the Moses Mendelssohn triangle of family traits: talent, business acumen, and philosophy. After the war, he would coauthor and produce more than 150 studies, most of them on spiders and their webs, from the “possible genetic component in web building” to LSD’s alteration of web-spinning spiders. His talent didn’t go unnoticed; he was recruited, rumor has it, by the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. By the late 1950s, Dr. Witt took his family to America, where they settled in the south, and he continued his research.

  Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of sixty paintings in the Franz and Paul von Mendelssohn collections. But unlike three-quarters of the artwork, Wheat Field was never used as barter for goods or money—at least the cousins didn’t lose or have to sell all of their artwork.

  It’s a marvel that the heirs kept the remaining paintings out of the hands of Nazi General Hermann Göring and his lust to loot European-master art from Jewish art dealers and compromised art collectors—all despite Adolph Hitler labeling the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists “degenerate art.”

  Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy would die in May 1935 at sixty. The liquidation of the fifth generation family bank, Mendelssohn and Company, was too much for him to bear. One month later, Franz died in Berlin. He was seventy years old. He, too, could be said to have died of a broken heart.

  They both were consumed by a Germany they no longer recognized.

  The deaths of Franz and Paul von Mendelssohn and the takeover four years later of their banking dynasty foreshadowed horrific days for German-Jewish people.

  24

  A Deal with the Devil

  Before Emil G. Bührle enriched himself with the spoils of war, purchasing the majority of his art collection (including Wheat Field with Cypresses, acquired from Dr. Peter Witt) right after the European conflict up until his death ten years later, the richest man in Europe during World War II was a major armament manufacturer supplying both sides with arms and munitions.

  Because he was operating out of neutral Switzerland, Bührle’s business-first approach allowed him to not choose sides during the fighting. Like many people at the start of World War II, he didn’t know which side would come out victorious. Would it be Hitler’s Germany? Stalin’s Russia? Or America and its allies? Without choosing sides, Bührle kept his German roots in check while the “Brown Sauce” poisoned German citizens and troops with nationalist fervor, exploited by Adolf Hitler.

  Emil Bührle focused on enriching himself at the expense of others, no matter the moral implications, blood spilt, or lives lost. In the end, it didn’t mean anything to him, as long as he and his family business survived and kept growing. But few people really knew who Emil Bührle was and whether he looted art from Jewish art dealers, owners, or collectors. That would only become clear in the years and decades after World War II, when the CIA declassified “Project SafeHaven.”

  The secret US operation to track Nazi gold after the war was first revealed to the public in the mid-1990s, though rumors had existed for years. With the declassification of “Project SafeHaven” came Switzerland’s own end-of-the-century investigation into such war crimes. Switzerland launched the Independent Commission of Experts (ICE), which published its final report in 2002. That, in turn, led to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s publishing its 165-page report on the Nazi looting of art—The Hunt Controversy: A Shadow Report, researched and written by Erin Gibbons in 2006.

  Not one of those documents painted a favorable portrait of Bührle. That led to a change of perception—some of the paintings in the arms manufacturer’s possession were not just “suspect”; they were also “tainted.”

  From the ICE report, it is crystal clear which company dominated business in “neutral” Switzerland over the five years of the war. Oerlikon-Bührle & Co. had 490.5 million francs in export permits; the next closest company, Tavaro SA, Geneva, brought in one-fifth of that amount at 105.6 million francs. To give real perspective on how well Bührle’s company did during the war as an arms supplier, it suffices to mention that it outperformed the next thirty-eight companies on that list combined, including Tavaro, which cumulatively grossed 455.5 million francs, or 45 million francs less than Oerlikon-Bührle’s dominant, monster-sized company.260

  But when Oerlikon-Bührle, Switzerland’s largest arms exporting company, went on the record long after the war stating that its annual reports went missing from 1939 to 1945, the entire duration of World War II, it showed that Emil could still cast a long shadow over his company a half-century after his death.261

  In its investigation of the looting or buying of stolen European art during the war, the ICE Report raised several issues with Emil G. Bührle. In Table 9, “Restitution claims involving cultural assets before the Chamber of Looted Assets,” it pointed to the Vincent van Gogh drawing, Paysage—Landschaft in German, Landscape in English—as being looted during the war from Alexandrine de Rothschild, perhaps the only family with more combined wealth than Emil Bührle. It was taken from Alexandrine de Rothschild’s home on 2 rue Léonard de Vinci, Paris, by agents of Hermann Göring during the war, who sold it directly to Emil Bührle.262

  The date of action in Switzerland for that drawing was November 13, 1947; the restitution of the object “as per judgement” came the following year, on July 5, 1948.263

  Bührle, as the three investigations would show, was no saint. In fact, he was a known buyer of looted Nazi art.

  Cou
ld Vincent have imagined that one of his masterpieces would run through two world wars? Or that the biggest European arms dealer after the war would own one version, some version, of his magnificent Wheat Field with Cypresses landscape painting?

  In the Simon Wiesenthal Center–sponsored report, an entire chapter—“Herr Buhl and his associates in Lucerne”—was dedicated to Emil Georg Bührle. Herr Buhl, whose identity remains otherwise elusive, was identified as an art trafficker who both sold and commissioned a number of forgeries during the war. The report rhetorically asked whether this Swiss art dealer’s name, “Herr Buhl,” was in fact mistranslated from the original source material by Irish military intelligence officers.264 With clues such as “an unreliable dealer who sells forgeries,” who isn’t a “prompt payer in money matters and is unreliable as well,”265 one starts to see Buhl as Bührle when all of his other moral, ethical, greedy, and power-hungry issues are looked at in concert.

  Another thoroughly researched, well-documented source points to the Göring-Bührle connection of stolen Nazi art. It comes from the 2013 book Hermann Göring and the Nazi Art Collection, written by Kenneth Alford:

  Three French Impressionist paintings were also included as well two or possibly three pictures bought by the Swiss arms manufacturer Bührle from Dequoy in Paris.

  Wendland claimed to be unable to remember the method by which Bührle’s pictures were transmitted so conveniently from Paris, but it is possible that Wendland had begged this favor his good friend and powerful protector [Göring.]

  When the Impressionist pictures arrived in Lucerne late in 1941, Wendland noted that four of the finest pictures he had chosen were missing.

  In 1943 Wendland accompanied Bührle and a Zurich lawyer to a bank vault in Zurich for the purpose of viewing some paintings, which according to the lawyer who was the custodian of the key of the vault, were being offered for sale by a Dutch firm.

  The paintings were recognized by Wendland as the four missing paintings which were supposed to be adorning Göring’s bedroom walls, as he advised Bührle against buying them.

  Göring himself never went to Switzerland. Hofer and Angerer were the only two agents active there and, of the two, Hofer was the more significant as he had lived there and was closely associated with the two most important figures, Fischer and Wendland.266

  After the war, Hermann Göring was tried and sentenced to be executed at the Nuremberg Trial for war crimes against humanity (he committed suicide on the eve of his execution). With the loss of Göring, Emil Bührle needed new agents to search, locate, and secure the best artworks across Europe. (After the war, only seventeen art historians emigrated to Switzerland, while the rest of the experts left Europe and emigrated abroad, about 85 percent of the total before the war. Among them was Paul Rosenberg, who moved to New York City.)267

  Dr. Fritz Nathan, one of the leading Jewish architects before the rise of Adolf Hitler, moved to Holland, the land of van Gogh, in 1938.268 He would become the de facto go-between on several acquisitions made by Emil Bührle after the war, since art deals between wealthy buyers like Bührle needed a trusted broker, a middleman who would find the sellers, vetting the works of art for sale, their condition, the names of the artists, whether the paintings were authentic or crude forgeries, and whether there was a paper trail of past owners.

  Dr. Fritz Nathan would represent Dr. Peter Witt on more than one sale, with Nathan’s name on the Met’s provenance and not that of Peter Witt himself.

  As discussed earlier, Peter Nikolaus Witt, the Mendelssohn family heir, carried Schuffenecker’s Wheat Field with Cypresses across the Swiss border to freedom in the aftermath of Nazi Germany. His scholarship eventually enabled him to move to America, which he saw as the land of opportunity. In order to move his family there, he needed money. It so happened that both he and Emil G. Bührle, whose wealth and love of art were well known, lived in Switzerland.

  In 1951, Peter Witt gave two inherited Vincent van Gogh paintings to Dr. Fritz Nathan to broker a sale to Bührle: Blossoming Chestnut Branches269 and the well-traveled Wheat Field with Cypresses.270

  In the 1998 interview with the New York Times, in the months before his death, Dr. Witt revealed his reason for selling the van Goghs: “‘We needed money, and he was the only person who had the cash in his pocket,’ Dr. Witt recalled. He said he could not remember how much Bührle had paid, except that ‘it was quite a large sum.’”271 That “large sum” of money allowed Peter Witt to leave Europe with his family and continue his stellar career for the next three decades.

  As for Emil G. Bührle, he got what he wanted—more priceless van Goghs—for what would become easily the best and most impressive private collection in Europe, as Charles Moffett, Walter Annenberg, and NGA Director J. Carter Brown would see firsthand. But without the expertise to detect a forgery or the ability to identify the real version by comparing and contrasting the condition and quality of the different versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses, Bührle had no idea that he had been sold a forgery. There was no way of telling.

  Visiting the E. G. Bührle Foundation online, one reads that the arms dealer to the Nazis had bought three-quarters of his vast collection of artwork from 1951 to 1956. Not a bad haul for the start of the Cold War. Did he really do that? That would have been 75 percent of the final tally of 155 paintings, two gothic altarpieces, and two dozen medieval sculptures. With a grand total of 181 works of art, it meant that he had purchased 136 of those pieces over the scant last six years of his life. The more likely scenario is that Bührle acquired most of his paintings during or right after the war. And just like the Oerlikon’s financial records, which magically disappeared, any records Bührle might have kept on the purchase, barter, or theft of the paintings were long gone.

  25

  The Holocaust Clawback

  On September 18, 1946, the US Office of Military Government for Germany, Economics Division, Restitution Branch Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section, together with the US Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) in Washington, released a detailed report on art dealer Dr. Hans Adolf Wendland. He was a key figure in Nazi-looted art during the war and was connected to the regime. Knowing this, the ALIU team knew it would be imperative to interrogate him if they were to swiftly and successfully recover the art stolen from mostly Jewish dealers, owners, and collectors after the war.

  In September 1946, ALIU investigators brought in Dr. Wendland and interrogated him over a ten-day period. During those grilling sessions, they uncovered his ties with Göring art spook Hofer, stating he was part of a

  complex web of art looting and acquisition spun by the Nazis, the most important German figure whose base of operations was a neutral country—Switzerland. He was one of the most agile and informed contacts of Walter Andres HOFER, “Director of the Art Collection of the Reichsmarshall.” He figured, whether wittingly or not, as the receiver of confiscated art in the first exchange of paintings from French private collections effected by the Einsatstab Rosenberg, and subsequently participated in three other exchanges with GOERING’s agent, playing an important role in the importation of these works of art into Switzerland.272

  The declassified brief went on to state, “Wendland was arrested in Rome by the American Forces on July 25, 1946, at the request of the American Legation, Berne.” He was subsequently sent to the Wannsee Internment Camp near Berlin.273

  During the joint interrogation, Wendland admitted that he had become a “moral outcast in Switzerland” and that he feared to be linked in a deeper investigation with Theodor Fischer of Lucerne.274 But he and Fischer had met in Berlin in 1920 as part of the rising avant-garde art scene, even as Germany was licking its wounds from the fallout of World War I.

  Before and during the war, Theodor Fischer was one of the greatest and wealthiest art dealers in Switzerland. “In an auction in June 1939 in Lucerne gallery owner Theodor Fischer auctioned approximately 125 paintings and sculptures by great modern artists such as Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh, Klee,
and Kokoschka.”275 ALIU investigators were keenly aware that Hans Wendland and Theodor Fischer knew each other as far back as 1920. With that insight, the ALIU investigation continued to challenge Wendland’s assertion that he was merely a “consultant,” that he aided Jews, and that Fischer did not incorporate his business until January 1, 1945.276

  ALIU came back and laid out the facts to Dr. Wendland, pointing out that he had traveled to France six times between 1941 and 1943. The first trip was to secure his belongings, which had been blocked; he admitted to making three trips “between occupied and unoccupied France during the occupation.”277

  In the fourth section of the ALIU report, “Business Ethics,” Wendland admitted to producing false receipts and then submitting them for payment that would be made by Hofer to him—a clever trick for the books. Some of those paintings sold by Wendland to Hofer would find their way into the hands of Hermann Göring. Those receipts enabled Hofer to receive payment from Göring in Swiss francs, which he would settle for French francs.278

  ALIU’s probe further uncovered that in the first exchange with Herr Hofer, “the chief reason for the exchanges on Göring’s side was the lack of foreign currency.” The investigators could then connect the dots from Hans Wendland to Herr Hofer; from then, the looted art made its way into Göring’s hands or to Emil Bührle by way of Dr. Fritz Nathan, who as far back as 1942 was already the arms dealer’s art advisor and specialist on modern art.279

  The ALIU report also delved into the “Four Missing Pictures” that were supposed to hang on Göring’s bedroom wall, but somehow ended up with Emil G. Bührle. They included van Gogh’s Landscape drawing (Paysage, Landschaft), his painting Green Wheat Field, Jan Steen’s Marriage of Cana, and a pair of Cézanne portraits, Nos. 67 and 69, all on the Allied list of looted artworks.280