The Rape of Europa

  In Italy the Nazi collectors had the great advantage of the cooperation of a sympathetic head of state who could help them circumvent the annoying export laws meant to protect the national patrimony. In 1942 Minister of Education Bottai vainly published and tried to enforce stricter export regulations to stop their depredations, but he need not have bothered: when Mussolini or his Foreign Minister, Ciano, tired of these objections they simply presented the work in question to Hitler or Goering as a gift.

  France was far more complicated. When in Paris, Goering did not limit himself to the staff of the ERR, but regularly shopped on the open market in perfectly aboveboard transactions, sometimes accompanied by such major buyers as Walter Bornheim of the Galerie der Alte Kunst (formerly A. S. Drey) in Munich. Bornheim also bought for Linz, various German museums, and many private collectors. He was particularly good at choosing the birthday presents those wishing to ingratiate themselves needed for Hitler and Goering. All the French dealers loved him, as he always paid in untraceable cash, carrying hundreds of thousands of francs in his briefcase. By war’s end he had dispensed some 100 million of them.10

  The dealer who bought the most for Hitler in France, and who clearly had the most fun doing it, was Frau Dietrich. Her very special relationship with him through Eva Braun is the only possible explanation for the amazing leeway she was given in her dealings. Between 1940 and 1944 she bought some 320 paintings in Paris, of which 80 went to the Linz collection. A lot of these were bad pictures, and no small number were fakes. But Frau Dietrich was the only dealer who could sell directly to the Führer without the approval of Posse or Bormann. In Paris she had a wonderful time, having created a network of finders, ranging from a Russian princess to Goering’s man at the ERR, Bruno Lohse. She was just as welcome at some Parisian galleries as Bornheim. Martin Fabiani sold her four dubious Guardi oil sketches, and ninety-nine other dealers sold her much more.

  Frau Dietrich’s impeccable expense accounts not only enumerate all her acquisitions but show that she truly knew how to enjoy Paris life. She may not have known much about pictures but she certainly knew her wines. On December 14, 1940, she lunched at a restaurant suitably called Chez Elle, where she consumed a filet and washed down with a nice Pomerol ’29. It must have been a good day, for she dined that night at Prunier on caviar, lobster, and a little Moët. The next night she ordered Veuve Clicquot (FFr 520) at a cabaret called Don Juan in the rue Fromentin, and on the sixteenth went all out at La Crémaillière, feasting on more caviar, soup, and duck à l’orange, accompanied by a fine Château Latour. All this was subsidized by a steady flow, in the hundreds of thousands, of reichsmarks to her Crédit Lyonnais account.

  Some deals did not turn out well, but Frau Dietrich was never discouraged. In July 1941 she cheerfully returned four pictures to the dealer Roger Dequoy, two of which had been judged fakes by Buchner and Voss, one as having been cut down, and the fourth as being “school of.” Dequoy replaced them with three presumably better pictures for the same price. It was a scenario frequently repeated, but Frau Dietrich could afford to be cheerful, her yearly income having by then reached more than RM 500,000 ($200,000).11

  Receipt for Frau Dietrich from Roger Dequoy

  Karl Haberstock took it all much more seriously. Though initially he was prevented by Reichschancellery officials wary of his dishonesty from going to Holland with Posse, the Linz director’s requests that the dealer be allowed to do business in the occupied nations could not be denied forever. By the fall of 1940 Posse had so many countries to deal with that he welcomed Haberstock’s interest in acting on his behalf in France, as Prince Philip of Hesse was doing in Italy. Through Posse’s influence the all-important travel documents were provided. Haberstock obtained an authorization from Goering as well. These passes gave him the great advantage of early access to the Unoccupied Zone, in which, as Posse put it, “there is much to be gotten in future, since this area for the moment had been spared from the many other German dealers.”12

  In 1940–1941 the Free Zone had also still been spared the inroads of the ERR and other agencies implementing Jewish confiscation, and was full of refugee dealers and collectors with whom Haberstock had dealt in the past. He arrived in Paris with Posse in October 1940, set himself up in great style at the Ritz, and sent out cards soliciting business from the principal dealers still in town, Jewish or not. Some of them must have been surprised. Duveen’s wrote back a polite note saying they were “closed at present” and Léonce Rosenberg replied that he had only works by living painters, which were probably not suitable.

  At Wildenstein’s, Haberstock found only longtime employee Roger Dequoy presiding over the house and galleries, from which Abetz and the ERR had already removed the remaining stock, and would later remove even the furniture. But Haberstock was sure that Georges Wildenstein, awaiting passage to the United States in Aix-en-Provence, had other assets which would be of use to him. In November he and Dequoy went to Aix, where they met Wildenstein and came to certain agreements. Haberstock recalled this as a friendly meeting; Wildenstein, in his later conversations with the T-men in New York, did not, and said that Haberstock had been accompanied by a high-ranking German officer and had brandished a letter of recommendation from Pierre Laval.13 Be that as it may, the French dealer was as anxious as Haberstock to make the most advantageous arrangements possible.

  It was proposed that Wildenstein would exchange “acceptable” pictures from his stock for the modern works so unacceptable to the Nazis, which Haberstock would send to him in the United States. Wildenstein would sell them through the New York branch of his firm, as he had done so successfully with the Gauguin before the war. In November 1940 this was not so far-fetched: it seemed likely that the war would soon be over and Haberstock could then simply ship items to New York. The German dealer also proposed that Wildenstein buy things for him from the refugees crowded into the Unoccupied Zone, for which he would pay in francs, marks, or lire. When Wildenstein suggested that dollars would be better, Haberstock declared that dollars would not be a desirable currency after the Germans “had finished with America.” To this Wildenstein retorted, “Do you think the US is going to be such an easy job?” and Haberstock replied, “It will be an easier inside job than France was.” It was further suggested that if Haberstock could somehow recover the Wildenstein pictures held by the Louvre at Sourches, which the ERR also wanted, these too would be available for the market.

  Haberstock indicated that he had a German buyer for Wildenstein’s weekly, Beaux Arts, which he urged him to sell before it was confiscated or Aryanized. At the same time Wildenstein made certain private arrangements with Dequoy, who was to continue to oversee the firm’s interests in Paris and try to use its European assets to buy locally, in the hope that these stocks too might be somehow transported to the Americas. Letters containing Wildenstein’s instructions would be sent care of Dequoy’s father-in-law in Marseilles.14 The French dealer himself left for the United States on January 29, 1941.

  While he was in the Unoccupied Zone, Haberstock made contact with a number of other refugees. From former Berlin colleague Arthur Goldschmidt he bought a Brouwer and a van Ostade, which he sold to Linz. Herbert Engel (son of the Austrian refugee dealer Hugo, who would later become part of Haberstock’s Paris operations) was recruited to watch for available works in the south of France. From the brothers Ball, Alexander and Richard, originally of Berlin, who soon left for America, Haberstock gleaned vital tidbits of information on the exact location of various prominent private collections. For appraisals he found yet another person in limbo, a German expert on Spanish painting and former director of a Munich museum, August Meyer (referred to in correspondence by the code name “Henri Antoine”), whose wife and child had remained in occupied Paris.15

  Haberstock was not the only one arranging things in this hotbed of survival intrigue. Martin Fabiani, on his way back from sending his pictures off from Lisbon, found an escaping dealer with whom he made a happy agreement: Fabiani w
ould take over the fugitive’s premises in the rue Matignon for the duration of the war, and return the business to him when it was over. This worked out very well for Fabiani, a self-confessed opportunist who, through his friendship with Dequoy, would be privy to some of the occupation’s bigger deals. Louis Carré made a similar arrangement with André Weil, also of the rue Matignon, who stayed in hiding in the country while Carré did an excellent business in French modern works.16

  On his return to Paris, Haberstock duly arranged for Beaux Arts to be sold to a Herr Brauer, the publisher of the German magazine Weltkunst. From then on the periodical kindly gave Dequoy a discount on advertising. The problem now was how to keep the Wildenstein firm going and get hold of the stocks belonging to it which were held by the Louvre—before the ERR did. On April 2 Wildenstein impatiently wrote to Dequoy to say that “there were doubtless ways and means of so doing.”17 And indeed there were. Haberstock once again would use his government’s ideology to his own advantage. This time it was “Aryanization.”

  The program so successful in Holland was first proposed for France in late October 1940. In November French police prefects were instructed to begin listing Jewish enterprises, which were to be put under “provisional administrators.” By December 4, 1940, a French agency, the Société du Contrôle-Administrateurs Provisoires, was set up to run this program under the aegis of a M. Fournier, former director of the Banque de France and president of the French Railroads.18 Soon the premises and remaining assets of Paul Rosenberg, Bernheim-Jeune, Léonce Rosenberg, and many more were being run by government-appointed administrators whose duty it was to “suppress Jewish influence in the French economy.” Attempts to circumvent such takeovers could be most unpleasant. Permission for the transfer of title to the Galerie Simon, owned by Daniel Kahnweiler, to his French Catholic sister-in-law, Louise Leiris, was granted only after arduous negotiations and the production of innumerable documents. The process was not helped by the series of anonymous notes, made up of letters cut from newspapers, which were sent to the authorities to remind them that Mme Leiris was related to the “German Jew Kahnweiler.”19

  By early April 1941 an accountant named Gras had been appointed as administrator of Wildenstein, but the Aryan Dequoy was left in charge of day-to-day operations. This was perfect. Haberstock could now claim that the Sourches pictures were private Aryan property, and should be returned to the business which owned them. Gras, who was busily selling off the private collection of Bernheim-Jeune (of which he was also administrator) via the dealer Charles Montag (who had once been Winston Churchill’s painting teacher), did not object.

  Haberstock used all his clout for this operation. At 6 p.m. on Monday, May 12, a Kunstschutz official, Dr. Pfitzner, received a call from Haberstock in Berlin. The dealer said that the Wildenstein pictures held at Sourches would be removed, but that they were to be reserved for Posse or himself, and were not to be released or sold to anyone else. The ERR, which was planning to claim the same items on the fifteenth, was amazed. The Kunstschutz, also startled, warned Louvre officials that an “unidentified agency” was planning to remove the Wildenstein objects.

  On Tuesday, Baron von Pollnitz, an Air Force officer who was a close friend of Haberstock, appeared to make transportation arrangements. When the Kunstschutz pointed out that only the ERR could remove non-Aryan collections, von Pollnitz produced a document from Gras stating that the Wildenstein firm had been transferred to Aryan hands. The Kunstschutz, always happy to obstruct the ERR, conceded that “since the new Aryan owner wishes the return of the pictures in order to sell them” there was no reason to prevent the transfer.

  Von Behr had in the meantime asked Goering to intervene, but Goering replied that if the collection had been Aryanized he could do nothing.20 The ERR had lost this one, and Haberstock triumphantly rushed to Paris to see the collection. He was disappointed in its quality and bought only seven pictures for FFr 930,000, of which he resold five to Linz for FFr 1.27 million. Dequoy politely wrote von Pollnitz to thank him for helping to “liberate his pictures from Sourches.” But Dequoy was not liberated from Haberstock, who from then on used the Wildenstein premises and the shop of the non-Aryan Hugo Engel as his branch offices in Paris.

  To complete the “Aryanization” of the firm, Dequoy and two partners attempted to buy it outright from Gras, so that it could be operated privately in Dequoy’s name. The French Commission of Jewish Affairs and related German agencies were suspicious of this request, as they were perfectly aware of Dequoy’s long association with Wildenstein, and felt that the price Dequoy was offering for the firm was ludicrously low. It was also rumored in the more fanatic German circles that Dequoy was hiding part of the Wildenstein collection somewhere, and therefore holding Jewish property against German interests. Only after months of correspondence, in which Dequoy swore repeatedly that he had not been in touch with his former employer since 1939 and had made no secret arrangements with him, and many letters from Posse and Haberstock invoking the name of the Führer, Goering, and various other highly placed occupation figures, which described the many works of art Dequoy had procured for the Reich, did the firm finally become his in early 1943.21 This arrangement was to be short-lived. After the death of Posse and the subsequent eclipse of Haberstock the elegant galleries in the rue la Boétie were requisitioned in January 1944 by the extraordinarily optimistic German embassy for an Institute of Franco-German Cultural Exchange.

  Dequoy, nothing daunted, continued to trade in new premises in the faubourg Saint-Honoré. Throughout, he did very well, his establishment being viewed by French and Germans alike as a continuation of the famous Wildenstein house. In September 1941 the Swiss collector Emil Bührle bought two Renoirs, a Greuze, and a David, all of which he had to leave in Paris for the time being because of strict Swiss Customs laws.

  Some old clients came back too. In 1942 the wine broker Etienne Nicolas asked Dequoy to sell two major Rembrandts, the Portrait of Titus and Landscape with Castle, which he had bought in 1933 from Wildenstein, to whom they had come from Calouste Gulbenkian, who had in turn bought them from the Hermitage. This was a change of heart for Nicolas, who had promised them to the Louvre before the war, but the high prices being paid, especially for Dutch artists, were perhaps too tempting. Dequoy negotiated the sale with Haberstock for Linz, and Nicolas received the very satisfactory sum of FFr 60 million ($1.2 million) for the pair, paid through the cashier’s office at the German embassy. Dequoy got FFr 1.8 million directly from Haberstock for “having found and made arrangements for the sale of two paintings by Rembrandt.”22

  Georges Wildenstein’s hope for continuing business as usual with Haberstock’s help on an import-export basis was not destined to succeed, but it took him considerable time to grasp the true situation. The letters with which he bombarded Dequoy were full of advice and the gossipy information so vital to the art trade, all written with little codes and disguised names (Haberstock was referred to as “Oscar”). He suggested that his former employee buy “cheaply” forty pictures by Rouault, roll them up in paper, “as Rouault does,” and try to send them to New York through American Express. He urged Dequoy to keep any engravings he had as long as possible, as he had heard that prices were rising wildly. The answers came back very slowly, prompting Wildenstein to write imperiously: “I cannot understand what is happening: would you try to see if it is not possible by some means to receive your correspondence for certain?”

  The problem was partly solved by routing the letters through Switzerland, but Wildenstein clearly could not comprehend the New Order in Europe. In March 1941 he wrote indignantly to complain about three cases of works held by a transit shipper in Bordeaux, “which had been at the free disposal of this firm in November 1940” and had apparently been seized. Accusing the shipper of “extraordinary negligence,” he fumed that “if they were taken away, it was by the shipper, and not the Germans, who it cannot be believed would contradict an official ruling of their own.” Dequoy was enjoined to do
“what you can from your side.” This was precious little. Dequoy had nothing much to ship, and Haberstock, for reasons which will become clear, had not been able to obtain any modern pictures to trade. Wildenstein correctly suspected that someone else had, and wrote to ask Dequoy “to find out who Oscar’s competition is.” He also told him that he would not be interested in any items from Haberstock “unless he can guarantee shipment.”23

  There was very good reason for this proviso. The only recorded attempt to ship works to Wildenstein, like so many others, was plagued by the new legalities of the war. Seventeen French pictures by such “dead painters”—as the customs so elegantly put it—as Greuze, Watteau, Robert, Corot, and Renoir, with suspiciously low valuations, and which technically were the property of Wildenstein’s London branch, ran into the same British blockaders as had Fabiani’s lot. London had originally refused to authorize the export on grounds that “proceeds of sales made in the United States on behalf of Wildenstein’s London house were not remitted to the UK,” a reference to the firm’s problems with the David-Weill collections.

  To get around this, Wildenstein ordered Dequoy to send the pictures instead to Martinique on a French ship, the SS Carimare. This maneuver did not fool the British, who informed their American friends that Wildenstein had evaded blockade controls and did not deserve any consideration, as he had originally promised London not to ship the paintings. The entry of the pictures into the United States was now subject to agreement between the State Department and the French authorities in Martinique. The shipment was eventually allowed to enter, but was placed in a blocked account.24 The ultimate fate of these works, and others in the same situation, is most difficult to trace, not least because of the vague names assigned them by their shippers. On the bill of lading for the Carimare shipment no fewer than twelve pictures are entitled Painting of a Girl; four are Landscapes; one is a Virgin.