The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  This collection, consisting of some 330 works by mostly minor Dutch seventeenth-century artists, was especially desirable as a large percentage of the pictures were signed and dated. In 1939, like so many others, the Schloss family had entrusted their collection to a relative, a Dr. Weil, who put it away in a bank vault in the tiny village of La Guenne, near Tulle in the Limousin. Rumors about it continued to surface and in August 1942 Dequoy told Haberstock that he was going to Grenoble to talk to one of the “heirs” about a possible sale. In December of the same year a dealer reported hearing that the family “needed money and might well sell part of their holdings.” Haberstock wrote back to say he would like the whole thing but added that he would only “pay he who actually delivers it.”

  The ripples of German desire for such collections had not gone unnoticed by Laval, who was desperately trying to appease the ever-growing Nazi encroachment on Vichy France. He was more than happy to try to exploit the “sale” of the Schloss collection, so deeply coveted by Hitler and Goering. Through the sale of the pictures, worth upwards of FFr 50 million, he might also recoup a small percentage of the crippling occupation payments levied by the Germans. Early in March 1943, therefore, Darquier de Pellepoix set to work to locate, seize, and market the collection.

  On April 6 Henry Schloss, son of the collector, and his wife were preparing to go to a funeral. For some time they had lived in a villa high above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the Chemin des Moulins, accessible only on foot. They had that day made their way to the bus station in Nice when three men approached them and forced them into a car. The party returned to the villa, where the Schlosses were told that their abduction had been ordered by Laval himself, who wished to know the whereabouts of their collection. The three men were not ordinary policemen, but the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs for Marseilles, a police inspector, and a dealer by the name of Lefranc. The house was searched and Schloss was put in jail. Two days later his brother Lucien was arrested by German policemen who ransacked his rooms and took all his papers.

  In Paris, Darquier was already making arrangements to sell the collection. Bruno Lohse was amazed to find the Vichy official present at a meeting in von Behr’s office, along with Lefranc, who had been made “provisional administrator” of the Schloss collection. The Nazis were told that they could buy paintings from the collection under certain conditions: they must promise not to confiscate it outright once it arrived in Paris, but leave it under French control, and the Louvre must be given first choice before any sales took place. After this brave beginning Darquier was forced to admit that German transport would be needed in order to move the collection to Paris.

  Lohse reported all this to Goering, who agreed to the conditions, but said German trucks could technically not be employed. Von Behr remedied this by calling on one of his shady M-Aktion colleagues to provide transport. Meanwhile, Darquier’s informants had done good work, and two days after the meeting Lefranc and Co. appeared at the bank in La Guenne and loaded the cases onto trucks. After the convoy—entirely German—left, the local police prefect, spurred on by angry bank officials, sent an armed French patrol to intercept the collection just south of Limoges. This was reported to Goering, who ordered the collection returned to the French immediately. But the German interest had been revealed, and the confiscation was now widely regarded as a Nazi operation. Back home Utikal wrote to the Reichschancellery denying that the fiasco, which had caused embarrassment at Hitler’s headquarters, had been ordered by the ERR, and protested to Goering.

  The collection did not get to Paris until October 1943, this time in French trucks. By then word of the terms of the deal had reached Hitler, who, outraged at the agreement made with the French, preempted any purchases by Goering but allowed the Louvre to make its choice, fuming all the while that he was getting only “leftovers.” Hermann Voss, though he had immediately heard of the confiscation from Lohse at a little dinner chez Frau Dietrich in Munich, left the arrangements entirely to subordinates, a fact considered odd by the ERR crowd. Haberstock, who had pursued the collection for so long, was completely out of the loop. The Louvre sent René Huyghe and Germain Bazin to choose their pictures. The Louvre took forty-nine works, for which they were to pay FFr 18.9 million. Two hundred sixty-two went to Linz for FFr 50 million, and twenty-two were given to “provisional administrator” Lefranc and fed into the Paris market. Needless to say, the Schloss family got nothing. The FFr 50 million went to Darquier’s agency, and Vichy never paid for the pictures “bought” by the Louvre. The part of the collection destined for Linz was photographed, a special catalogue in large type was prepared for Hitler, and the pictures were shipped to Munich in November 1943 to await the Führer’s pleasure, but as far as we know, he never found time to see them.40

  The remarkable and competitive persistence of the gatherers continued to the very end. One of the very last lots secured was that remnant of the Mannheimer collection which had been taken to Vichy France. Mme Mannheimer herself had long since gone on to Argentina. The pictures, which she had left in the care of her lawyer, were very fine, and included Crivelli’s Mary Magdalene, once in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, a lovely version of Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, and a number of Watteau drawings. All of these had been included in Mühlmann’s original deal in Holland, in which he had agreed to pay the Mannheimer creditors half a million guilders and himself the usual commission when he finally got the pictures, which were destined for Linz. But Mühlmann was not the only one who knew about the Mannheimer works. Karl Haberstock, once again, wanted the deal for himself. Having lost the support of Posse, he was now attempting to work through Fernand Niedermayer, chief of the German Administration for Reich-Seized Property in France, who was persuaded that Haberstock represented Linz. But just to be safe, Niedermayer asked Hermann Voss “to inform me by return mail which paintings are to be requested for the Führermuseum.” The answer was perfectly clear and not good news for Haberstock, who was stiffly informed that Niedermayer “was not in a position to take your purchasing wishes into consideration,” as the whole collection was going to Linz “through State Secretary Mühlmann.”41 By the time all this had transpired, the Allied armies had landed in Normandy and were well on their way to Paris. Nevertheless, in June 1944 room was found on a train which took the twenty-seven pictures to Germany to join that part of the collection bought previously in Holland. Mühlmann, true to his word, managed to extract from the depleted Reich Treasury DFl 500,000, which he paid to the Mannheimer creditors.42

  The pursuit, trading, and confiscation of works of art concerned only a small fraction of the Germans in Paris. The rest of the occupiers were more interested in entertaining themselves in the Paris of legend, and this, within limits, their masters allowed them to do. (Total contentment was expressed as being “as happy as God in France.”43) Everyone from Goering down flocked to the Folies and other more exotic night spots, shopped at Cartier, and filled the restaurants and theaters.

  The more intellectual also found plenty to do. The German writer Ernst Jünger, posted to Paris, was fascinated by the life of the city. He dined with poet Sacha Guitry, who wore an enormous diamond ring on his little finger; went to lectures at the Ritz, met Cocteau, and visited Picasso. But the pleasures were not enough to mask the reality of Jünger’s situation. A colleague asked him to keep a file on “the struggle for hegemony in France between the Commanding General and the Party” and another warned him that letters he had written to a Jewish friend had been found in a raided bank box. These he “carefully” tried to retrieve from the Devisenschutzkommando.

  Faced with the discovery of the decisions taken at the Wannsee Conference, he wrote that only those within the military government could prevent the drastic measures, but that all such efforts had to be hidden: “Above all any appearance of humanity must be avoided … to reveal this would be like waving a red flag at a bull.” The firing of the moderate commander in chief for France, Otto von Stülpnagel, who had lost the “battle against the Embass
y and the Party,” dashed any hopes that restraint would prevail. In early March 1942 news of the death camps where “certain butchers have killed with their own hand the equivalent of the population of a small town” led him to write that “often in the middle of this seething mass of lemurs and amphibians, death, it seems to me, would be a celebration.”44 There were still three years to go.

  Pangs of conscience were also felt by another member of Jünger’s circle, Gerhard Heller, who had been put in charge of literary censorship at the Propaganda Office. It was his job to prevent the publication of unsuitable books. By the time he arrived, some twenty-three hundred tons of newly published books had already been destroyed. Books by Jewish authors never reached his office; these were “self censored” by French publishers. Heller saved what he could, and hid some unacceptable manuscripts away for posterity.

  In the course of this work he gained entrée into certain French literary circles and eventually into the Salon of the young, American-born hostess Florence Gould, which amazingly went on all through the war, first in the Hotel Bristol and later in a large apartment in the rue Malakoff.45 (No one in Heller’s group knew where Mr. Gould was, but he was presumed to be in the south of France.) Here one ate so well—there was even real coffee—that some of the more deprived Parisians felt quite liverish after supper. Chez Gould, Heller met intellectuals who introduced him to the world of the “truly modern” hitherto forbidden to him at home. The Salon was for him an “island of happiness” where he could find friendship in the “ocean of mud and blood” which surrounded him, and solace for his self-loathing for not having the courage to resist more openly the atrocities being committed by his compatriots.

  Mrs. Gould’s unprecedented freedom did not come without a price. In February 1942 she was denounced for having hidden weapons in her house at Maisons-Laffitte just outside Paris. The young Wehrmacht officer responsible for the investigation nervously wrote that “the affair must be handled with the greatest delicacy on account of the citizenship of the proprietor…. Above all one must avoid giving the slightest indication that the denunciators were less interested in the weapons than in other allegedly hidden objects, viz., the art treasures and precious stocks of wine.” After telephoning Mrs. Gould he met her at the Hotel Bristol and they went to the now heavily guarded house.

  The inspection turned up no arms and revealed that the collection of a hundred thousand bottles of wine was still intact, but that three valuable works of art, a triptych and two ivories, had been removed by the ERR. Mrs. Gould “declared herself ready to donate the total stock of wine for the soldiers of the Eastern territories” but “wished to reserve for herself the right to dispose of the art objects.” After a conference with von Behr, the young officer wrote that “although the ERR had no right to seize this private property, the following was agreed: that Mrs. Gould present the triptych to Goering, who would donate it to the Cluny Museum, which had been her intention, and that she then give the ivories to the Reichsmarschall in token of her thankfulness to him for donating the triptych.” Months passed; when Goering saw the objects he liked them so much that he took all three. The young officer was shocked, but Mrs. Gould “begged me not to take any further steps in the matter in order to avoid difficulties for her, e.g., her transfer to a concentration camp.” He does not say what happened to the wine.46

  Despite all this private social and cultural activity, Paris was not the same. The City of Light had become a dark labyrinth in the evenings where “a population of the blind” groped its way about in the strictly enforced blackout. And in the day another form of blindness prevailed. The French seemed not to see the spiffy German uniforms and parades, or even notice the friendly correctness of their new rulers. The Germans soon had a new name for Paris: “Die Stadt ohne Blick”47 (the unseeing city). The new masters of France did not like this Paris; they wanted it to be the way it always had been, purified of course, but still the city of culture. To that end they attempted an extraordinarily heavy-handed program of cultural rapprochement; they could never fathom why it did not work.

  Immediately after the fall of Paris, German officials had required the Office of the Prefect of the Seine to make a list of museums and principal monuments, and supply a guide to accompany them on an automobile tour. The conquerors were distressed at the extent of evacuation of museum collections. Pressure, particularly from Ambassador Abetz, immediately began for a general revival of the arts and the return of the state collections to Paris. The French demurred, pointing out that there were still machine guns on the roof of the Crillon, and that low-flying planes passed over the Louvre daily. The lack of transport and Hitler’s freezing decree guaranteed that the national treasures would not be brought forth until the Final Victory, which everyone thought would be soon. To make themselves feel better, the Nazis ordered the sandbags removed from the various monumental sculptures of the capital.

  Meanwhile, the empty museums were all too tempting to German agencies searching for suitable offices and storage space. Each one was carefully inspected, and its remaining contents noted. Twelve hundred military vehicles were parked in the Grand Palais. The newly built museum of modern art known as the Tokyo, which had not yet opened, also seemed perfect for a parking garage and offices. The Palace of Fontainebleau was taken over for parties and troop theatricals and the Luxembourg was turned into Luftwaffe headquarters, complete with an apartment for Goering.

  The Kunstschutz was able to correct some of these excesses, but they could not prevent their colleagues from using the museums for exhibitions. It soon became clear to the French Beaux-Arts administration that use of the museums for their traditional purpose, even if ideologically unpalatable, was preferable to their transformation into garages. The need to keep the galleries busy at all times led to a most surprising combination of exhibitions in the following years.

  One of the first was at the Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, which had been the residence of the famous Mme de Sévigné. It reopened with a few objects brought in from its country repository, plus others from the storage rooms of sister institutions and a few private donations. Representatives of the German embassy and Dr. Bunjes kept a careful eye on the installation in case anything Jewish should creep in. A statue by Dantan entitled Rachel, reputed to be of the famous Jewish tragedienne of that name, had to be removed. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, curator of the show, simply changed the name to La Tragédie and put it back, but a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt lent by the Comédie-Française was rejected. The labels were carefully translated and there was a catalogue in German. Nothing could have made the Parisians more aware of their plight than references in this volume to “Gräfin von Sévigné” and “Ludwig XIV.”48

  Throughout the summer of 1940 everyone had wondered what the German policy on the exhibition of modern and contemporary art would be. All press and cultural activity was to be monitored by the Propaganda Division of the Military Government, a branch of Goebbels’ Ministry which soon boasted a thousand souls. In the first weeks of the occupation this organization had been so busy with such deeply intellectual activities as pulling down statues of French heroes of the previous World War, and of anyone British, and changing the names of streets which honored famous Jews, that it had not made any pronouncements on modern art. Nor had there been any guidance from the German Institute, which was founded to promote “European Culture” and Franco-German relations, but which had limited itself to putting on fancy receptions before concerts of German music and exhibitions of Germanic art, and to projects concerning the past such as photographing the Bayeux tapestry.

  The first to brave the occupier’s cultural controllers was a new organization called L’Entraide des Artistes, which was pledged to helping needy artists of all stripes. Funded by both government and private money, its headquarters was in a former Rothschild house, and it had miraculously managed to persuade all the competing Salons and groups of artists in Paris to cooperate in order to provide their less fortunate colleague
s with everything from free legal advice to cheap lunches.

  Since early in 1940, the Entraide had been planning a benefit show which would, for the first time, unite these disparate groups not only in charity but in the same galleries. Needless to say, this had taken considerable diplomacy, and the Entraide was determined to go ahead. They were given the Orangerie, just across the park from the Jeu de Paume, by the French. This plan was approved by the Germans, who reserved to themselves the right of censorship. To everyone’s amazement they rejected only works by Jews and by Marcel Gromaire, whose antiwar paintings had been specifically condemned by Hitler when he noticed them in a show in Germany. The exhibition opened to the culture-starved city on September 6, 1940.

  Emboldened by this, and anxious to retain control of the Orangerie, the Entraide, inspired by the Monet Waterlilies which already adorned the walls of the gallery, immediately reserved it for a Rodin-Monet show made up of the few works by the two artists which could still be found around town. Incredibly, to promote Franco-German friendship, even the Berlin and Bremen museums loaned important unpurged works by Monet.49 The crowd at the opening did not know that next door, in the heavily guarded Jeu de Paume, workmen were just as busy installing the first exhibition for Goering, and setting aside other recently confiscated Monets, which normally would have been in the Orangerie show, to be used in his exchanges.