The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  The French also feared that the Italians might now reclaim works taken in the Napoleonic Wars, such as Veronese’s Wedding at Cana. This was considered enough of a possibility that the Louvre archivist, Lucie Mazauric, had been sent back to Chambord only days after the fall of France to retrieve the documents proving the French right of ownership that had been granted by various treaties signed during the Revolution and the Empire and by the exchange of certain works with Italy and Austria in 1815. For Mlle Mazauric it was a frightening and humiliating journey through the new German checkpoints. Once at Chambord, she did not dare put the bulky documents in her car, and instead spent forty-eight sleepless hours copying the information, after which she scattered the originals among less interesting files. This labor of love was never put to the test.58

  Soon after the fall of France, Jaujard had persuaded the sympathetic Metternich to allow the works evacuated to Loc-Dieu to be placed in other repositories with better conditions. Above all they needed space. At Loc-Dieu the hastily delivered cases were so crowded that they could not be opened, and every attempt at an inventory had resulted in a different total. In good weather the guardians resorted to spreading the pictures out on the lawns of the abbey, giving a never-before-seen vision of their Lorrains and Poussins. By September 1940 it was decided to move the three thousand paintings to the Ingres Museum at Montauban, a good location, dry and roomy. But having their masterpieces together in one place where fire could destroy them all was nerve-wracking. Intermittent crises such as leaks and a threatened roof cave-in kept everyone alert, as did a visit by Metternich. Pétain came too, and made museum history by exclaiming, when shown Murillo’s Assumption of the Virgin, in which the Blessed Mother is surrounded by a host of little angels, “What a lot of children for a Virgin!”59

  Looking at the art was not, however, his real reason for being there. Pétain had decided in December 1940 to reward his neighbor General Franco for his continued neutrality by giving him some of the Spanish masterpieces in the French collections. One of these was the Murillo; also on the list were the ancient statue called the Dama de Elche and several Visigothic crowns found near Toledo by a French archaeologist who had sold them to the Cluny Museum.

  The administrators of the Musées were helpless to prevent this entirely, but cleverly devised a strategy which would set an important precedent for the future: they would persuade Spain to accept the works in exchange for items of similar value from the Spanish collections. Jacques Jaujard, René Huyghe, and several others set off to negotiate with Madrid. To his credit, Franco immediately agreed to this proposal by the men who had, after all, helped save the entire Prado collection only a few years before. After months of agonizing, the Spanish museums sent a Greco portrait of Covarrubias, a Velázquez, and a number of drawings to France. Pétain was not entirely happy that his “gift” had become a trade. A Greco Adoration, which the Spanish were about to throw in, was removed from the list by a peremptory telegram from Vichy.60

  The resolution of this deal came just in time to counter an attempt by von Ribbentrop to appropriate Boucher’s Diana Bathing, one of the Louvre’s greatest masterpieces. The Foreign Minister had hinted at his desire to possess the picture in the fall of 1940, and left negotiations in the hands of Ambassador Abetz, who by now had been pushed out of the confiscation business by the ERR. But Abetz had enough influence at Vichy to order the picture brought to Paris from Montauban. From there it was whisked off to Berlin. In exchange, Abetz offered the French an Impressionist painting from the confiscated stores he had held back from the ERR. This was not considered an adequate trade. To be fair, the Louvre argued, a picture of the same period and quality, such as Watteau’s incomparable Gersaint’s Shopsign from the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, should replace the Boucher.

  The idea was immediately rejected by the German museum administration, who were not inclined to diminish their collections for von Ribbentrop’s pleasure. The Foreign Minister felt constrained to return the picture, but wrote huffily to Abetz that the German museums might consider the exchange on their own “so that this example of eighteenth-century French painting would not be lost to Germany.” Abetz was instructed to keep track of the whereabouts of the Boucher at all times. He reassured his nervous boss that a simple phone call would suffice if he really wanted the picture, after which they could decide if “they should give the French anything in exchange.”61

  Hitler had fewer qualms about this sort of thing than von Ribbentrop. In June 1942 his power was at its apogee. German forces were winning in North Africa, had reached the Black Sea, and were approaching Stalingrad, the important industrial city on the Volga. He envisioned nothing less than a meeting of his armies in the Middle East, and total control of the Eastern Mediterranean. Mussolini was so excited that he flew to Tripoli to get ready for the victory parade in Cairo.

  It was in this mood that the Führer decided to erase the last vestiges of the Versailles Treaty and begin the recovery of the treasures stolen from the German nation. At the top of the list were the Ghent altarpiece by Jan van Eyck and the Dirk Bouts Last Supper from Louvain, elements of both of which had been claimed by Belgium from Germany in 1918. The retrievals were entrusted to Hitler’s early adviser, Dr. Ernst Buchner, head of the Bavarian Museums, and not to any of the established Nazi art-gathering agencies. The whole enterprise was undertaken in strictest secrecy. Correspondence implies that the reason for the removals was protection from air raids, but constant mention of the Versailles Treaty in the letters betrays the truth. For the van Eyck sortie, Dr. Buchner put together his own team in Munich. One week before departure Buchner wrote to ask the Führer if he was to bring back only the panels which had previously belonged to Berlin, or the whole thing. The answer does not survive, but after Buchner had arrived home with the whole altarpiece he wrote excitedly to his colleague Dr. Zimmermann in Berlin to tell him the good news, adding that “on the express orders of the Führerkanzlei” the “panels which were not earlier the property of the Berlin museum” had been brought back too.

  The little convoy of one truck and one car crossed into Vichy France just east of Bayonne on July 29. M. Molle, the French curator in charge of the repository at Pau, refused to hand over the altarpiece, having been told that three authorizations, from the Direction des Musées, the director of Beaux-Arts in Belgium, and the Kunstschutz, were necessary for its release. Buchner’s escort called Vichy and the German embassy, but it was surely Buchner’s own call to the Reichschancellery which had the most effect. A few hours later a telegram arrived from Vichy chief of government Pierre Laval himself ordering the transfer. The panels were carefully examined, packed, and loaded on the truck. Buchner gave Molle a receipt and left. The altarpiece was well on its way to storage at Neuschwanstein before any of the French museum authorities or the Kunstschutz could be alerted. Conveniently enough, Count Metternich, who had so consistently recommended that nothing be removed “until the Peace Conference,” had been sent on permanent leave only a few weeks before.

  A similar operation was carried out a month later in Louvain to retrieve the Bouts Last Supper. After the war Buchner claimed that he had been “surprised” by these missions and had never found out whose idea they were. Be that as it may, he did not recommend against them, and a memo from the Reichschancellery regarding the Louvain operation notes that “General Director Buchner, in a letter to Dr. Hansen of the Party Chancellery, suggested that the four panels of the Louvain altarpiece, which are in danger of bomb damage there, be, in the process of compensation for the injustices inflicted on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, taken to a safe place in Bavaria.”62

  Reaction to these thefts, if somewhat delayed by the secrecy surrounding the events, was dramatic. The Belgians protested strongly. Jaujard wrote to Beaux-Arts director Louis Hautecoeur that every rule and arrangement to which the Belgians and the Kunstschutz had agreed had been violated, which would give the French museums a bad name. In November a meeting of the Comité des Musées, m
ade up of representatives of all the Musées Nationaux, was called to protest the action further. Despite the dangers of such a gathering, which clearly had political overtones, not a single curator stayed away. A petition was drawn up demanding the return of the altarpieces. The Belgians, somewhat rashly, declared they would send curators to Pau to retrieve other works stored there, implying that the French were not to be trusted, though they did have the grace to thank Jaujard and his staff for their courage.

  Faced with all this, the Vichy Minister of Education, Abel Bonnard, who also had not been informed by the Germans, while condemning the petition of his curators, allowed some sympathy to creep into his correspondence. To Jaujard he wrote that he should control his emotions, “natural though they might be,” and he told the Belgian consul that the altarpiece had been handed over “not by my order, but by order of the Chief of State,” adding that the consul should consider “the general circumstances in which France and Belgium find themselves” before allowing himself to be “bitter.”

  More important was the propaganda effect abroad. The New York Herald Tribune ran a long article with an entirely false headline proclaiming, “Van Eyck Art Believed Vichy Gift to Goering,” assuming that it had been intended as a birthday present for the Reichsmarschall, and enumerating other dubious gifts such as the Sterzing altarpiece given to him by Mussolini.63 For Goering, who indeed had his eye on various items in French museums and private non-Jewish collections, a different technique of acquisition would now clearly be needed.

  On November 11, 1942, Hitler, who did love to rub in that date, ordered his armies to take over unoccupied France in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8. Pétain, Laval, and their cronies were left in office for the time being, but there was not much doubt about their future. As Hitler jovially told Laval, “You are the last government of France. After you there will be a Gauleiter.”64 Goering was perhaps less sure of this. In the Soviet Union, German progress had again been halted, and Allied forces were doing rather well in North Africa. A negotiated peace treaty with France seemed remote. It seemed best to get anything he particularly wanted safely within the confines of the Reich as soon as possible.

  The Reichsmarschall started with a private collection, making it known that he would welcome the gift of two fifteenth-century tapestries spotted early in 1942 in the remote Château de Bort by dealers pretending to be Beaux-Arts officials. The extraordinary hangings, each more than thirty feet long, were indeed magnificent. Their owner, the Marquise de Sèze, suspicious of the “inspectors,” had reported their visit to the local police. When questioned they were found to be carrying large sums of money and admitted that they were in Goering’s employ.

  Alarmed Beaux-Arts officials immediately asked the de Sèzes to agree to the classification of the tapestries as national treasures. To this they consented, and to be doubly safe donated them to the Musées Nationaux, which promptly whisked the hangings away to Aubusson for restoration. This did not at all suit Dr. Funk, the German Minister of Finance, who had planned to buy them for Goering’s fiftieth birthday. Direct pressure was put on Laval to reject the gift. A special decree was issued to “declassify” the tapestries, and they were returned to the owners. When the de Sèzes still refused to sell, the tapestries were removed from their château by police and sent to Carinhall. Funk did pay, but not directly to the recalcitrant Marquise. He sent funds to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, an account used by the occupation administrators for expenses.65

  The works Goering desired from the national collections were all of the German schools. For propaganda purposes any raid on the French patrimony would have to be billed as a “cultural exchange” as any more outright “gifts” would, after the Ghent altarpiece flap, be bound to excite further negative press. In late November 1942 Goering approached Laval himself on the subject. Laval, who despite all was still eager to please the Germans, approved the idea. The details were left to Dr. Bunjes, now head of the German Institute in Paris, who would negotiate with the French authorities—a grave tactical error.

  Jaujard was informed of the “exchange project” by Bunjes, who unconvincingly emphasized the “European” cultural aspects of it. A few days later the museum direction was given the first summary of desired objects. From the Louvre were listed a triptych by the Master of the Holy Family and a fifteenth-century wooden figure of St. Mary Magdalene, known as La Belle Allemande, by Gregor Erhardt. This, in the words of a later report, was particularly suited to Goering’s taste, “being both German and nude.” Especially for the Führer the Rheims Museum was asked to contribute three Cranach drawings representing German nobles, and from two private collections, those of M. Martin-Leroy and M. Robert de Ganay, were to come medieval objects. To this, a bit later, Goering added one of France’s rarest treasures, the Cluny Museum’s solid gold eleventh-century bas-relief known as the Antependium of Bale, a part of the Basel altar which depicted the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II and his Luxembourgeois wife, Kunigunde, praying at the feet of St. Benedict. Most of these items were on Kümmel’s list. In return, the Germans offered a number of works from public and private collections in the Reich.

  Resistance by the Musées, which had adamantly opposed the idea of such exchanges since the Ribbentrop fiasco, was immediate. Their very considerable bureaucratic energies were mobilized to the hilt in order to delay and obstruct the transfer of each item. Germain Bazin produced a long and complicated report in which the mayor of Rheims stated that he could not part with his drawings as they were an eighteenth-century legacy to the city which he was not empowered to change. To this the mayor adhered despite pressure by Vichy, and promises of two other Cranachs, not representing German luminaries, as replacements.

  From then on things did not improve much for Bunjes. In March, Goering, visiting Paris, expressed a desire to see the Basel altar, which was kept at Chambord. The museums regretted that it was very fragile, and could only be brought to Paris by direct order of Pétain. Goering’s curator Hofer and Posse’s successor, Hermann Voss, were forced to go to Chambord to inspect it. There, despite the representation of the indubitably German Henry II, French curators challenged the idea that it was Germanic in origin, claiming that it was “a Benedictine work of international character.” They also mentioned that any unequal exchanges would have a bad effect on public opinion in France. Voss and Hofer again left without the prize, but it was clear that the French arguments had not been taken seriously. Goering meanwhile increased the pressure on the Vichy government, which ordered the Musées to take the Basel altar to Paris. It came accompanied by three curators and Minister Bonnard himself, who astonished everyone by saying that the altar could only go to Germany as a personal gift from Marshal Pétain to Reichsmarschall Goering, just what the latter wished to avoid.

  From the anteroom the waiting curators could hear Goering’s screams of rage and accusations, quite true, of obstruction by the French museum administration. Not to be defeated, he demanded that the altar, the Belle Allemande, and the triptych be delivered to Carinhall by René Huyghe and Marcel Aubert, chief curators of painting and sculpture, respectively, of the Louvre, who would then choose the objects they would like in return, and thereby be seen as consenting to the exchange. Jaujard again called a meeting of the Comité des Musées. There, on December 30, after an impassioned speech from Huyghe, the curators declared that they would give up the Basel altar only to an armed force. The other objects they would allow to be traded for items to be negotiated with Bunjes.

  Bonnard was in a fix. He would have loved to fire Jaujard, and threatened to put Huyghe “below ground.” But the possible resignation of all his museum personnel restrained him. Jaujard, Huyghe, and Aubert were allowed to meet with Bunjes. Before getting down to business, Jaujard managed to disconcert the German by asking politely what had happened to a former colleague whose photograph was displayed on the wall. The sly director knew full well that this unfortunate Nazi, who had displeased the Party, had be
en sent to the Eastern Front, where he had been killed, but he murmured sympathetically as Bunjes explained. There followed two hours of discussion during which it was made clear that further efforts to take the altar would lead to the resignation of the entire Louvre staff, and that “the English will find out.” Jaujard and Huyghe, active in the Resistance, would make sure of that. Furthermore, all exchanges would have to be approved by the Comité des Musées. Bunjes conceded. The altar was saved, but the other two works did go, unaccompanied, to Carinhall.

  The Musées now waited for the objects promised from Germany. Instead of the objects promised from German museums, the Louvre received a number of second-class works from Goering’s collection, all of which had been acquired outside Germany by Hofer during the war. The most cynical stroke was the inclusion of a work entitled Renaud et Armide by Coypel, which amazed French officials immediately recognized as having been confiscated from the Seligmann collection in Paris. This exchange was never formally accepted by the Louvre, and although Bunjes continued to talk vaguely of some arrangement whereby the French would be given the much-discussed Gersaint’s Shopsign, no other works left France in this manner. Perhaps to console himself, Goering ordered copies in bronze or plaster of some of the most famous sculptures in the French collections, and thus could gaze out at his own Winged Victory and Diana of Fontainebleau from the terraces of Carinhall.66

  The ever-increasing penetration of the Unoccupied Zone by German agencies after November 1942 was a terrible blow to those who had taken refuge there and after the fall of France become accustomed to their secretive lifestyles. Their ranks had gradually thinned as one after another found a way out. Never easy, these escapes soon went from bureaucratic nightmares to physical ones. It had taken some time for the realities of the situation to sink in. Certainly no one had expected things to go on for so long. The first shock was the German ordinance of September 17, 1940, forbidding all Jews to return to the Occupied Zone. This was followed by the enforcement of the Armistice provision requiring the surrender of refugee German nationals to their countrymen. All travellers were subjected to constant and unpleasant document checks. By late fall of 1940, food, even in restaurants, could only be obtained with ration stamps, for which proof of permanent domicile was needed. Nonresidents were driven to shady black-market dealings or reliance on friends.