The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  On June 22 Leningrad had lain shimmering in the strange light of the White Nights. All who write of these events are struck that the attack took place on this beautiful and festive night when Leningraders traditionally celebrate the arrival of summer. News of the invasion did not arrive at the Hermitage until noon on June 23, an hour after the vast museum had opened. As the word passed, the galleries quickly emptied. Curators were called in, and the grim processes of evacuation were set in motion.

  Although the surprise had been complete, the Russian museums had, like all others in Europe, long since ranked their objects and prepared packing materials. But evacuating the Hermitage, vast showcase of the Czarist collections, would be an incredible task at the best of times. Its holdings, some 2.5 million objects, ran the gamut: paintings, delicate porcelains, glass, coins, jewelry, massive antiquities, furniture, and every other decorative art. In the first hours director Iosif Orbeli, who had fought for years to keep the collections intact, ordered the forty most valuable items rushed to the basements. The first air raid came twenty-four hours after the notice of war. Curators patrolled the roofs ready to quench fires while their fellow citizens mobilized to build trenches and fortifications around the city.

  In the constant daylight, packing went on around the clock. Art students came in to help. Paintings separated by tissue paper were rolled twenty to sixty on one cylinder, covered with oilcloth, and packed in long coffinlike crates. Works which had to be left in their frames, such as panel paintings, were crated in bunches according to size. Only one picture, Rembrandt’s enormous Return of the Prodigal Son, got its own box. Other crates held Coptic textiles, Scythian and Hellenistic gold, eighteenth-century jewelry, snuffboxes, and even medieval German beer mugs. Specialists from the Lomonosov porcelain factory packed thousands of dishes and ornaments. To minimize shock, delicate Greek vases were painstakingly filled with crumbled cork before being wrapped. The days were hot, and work went on next to windows opened wide. The sounds of doves cooing were punctuated by the roar of aircraft over the city. As the crates were filled and sealed, relays of Red Navy sailors moved them to the entrances or basements. Soon the galleries were piled with empty frames—a sight now so familiar in the Western museums.

  The first train of twenty-two boxcars containing some half a million items left on July 1. Antiaircraft guns were attached at each end. Director Orbeli, tall, bearded, and imposing, wept as it moved out. Before each station the staff halted the train and deployed guards. Miraculously unharmed, it arrived five days later in the Siberian town of Sverdlovsk, where the objects were democratically distributed among a former Catholic church, the Museum of Atheism, and the local art museum.

  Back in Leningrad the packing went on. A second shipment left on July 20 with seven hundred thousand objects. These gigantic transports represented less than half of the museum’s holdings and preparations for a third continued, but by August their packing materials were nearly gone. Fifty tons of shavings, three tons of cotton wool, and almost ten miles of oilcloth had been consumed. Far worse was the news that German forces had begun to move again and had cut the rail link to the East. On September 4 artillery shells began to fall within the city. The German front line was only eight and a half miles from the museum. Now everything that could be taken away went down to the basements, while upstairs, the immovable, giant malachite urns, enormous marble tabletops, and magnificent panelling, floors, and mosaics of the palace itself awaited their fate.6

  Packing chandeliers at the Hermitage

  It was just as well that the exhausted citizens of Leningrad were not privy to Hitler’s thoughts about their city. In the evenings at the Wolf’s Lair the Nazi chief held forth endlessly to his staff on his view of history and his plans for Russia, monologues that were recorded at Bormann’s order. Hitler explained that Germany had missed out on the distribution of “Lebensraum” in the past because of its involvement in religious war. The founding of St. Petersburg, he mused, had been a catastrophe for Europe. It must therefore “disappear completely from the earth, as should Moscow.” Only then, he theorized, would the Slavs “retire to Siberia,” and provide Germans their needed space. The Führer was not worried about the works of art in these cities. He assumed, correctly, that they had either been taken out to the east by train or stored in castles in the countryside.7

  The scenes in these “castles” had been equally frantic as those in the Hermitage. One of the first rooms to be emptied at the palace of Catherine the Great in the town of Pushkin, formerly known as Tsarskoye Selo, was the famous Amber Room, so called because it was not only entirely panelled with delicately carved sheets of amber, but contained chairs, tables, and ornaments made of the same material. The latter were easily packed, but the panels proved too difficult to remove and were left in place.

  The palaces had far less packing material than the Hermitage. To save precious paper and shavings, some things were even packed in freshly mown hay; at the Palace of Pavlovsk the carefully preserved uniforms of Czar Nicholas II and his wife’s dresses were used as padding. At 5 a.m. on July 1 the first Pavlovsk shipment of thirty-four crates left for Gorky, accompanied by chief curator Anatoly Kuchumov. Work continued night and day, even as the artillery barrages began and the male work force, called to arms, diminished.

  One cannot rush this sort of packing. Delicate and complex objects such as chandeliers, clocks, and furniture had to be dismantled before being wrapped. Careful records of where each separate piece had been packed were necessary. When a whole set of furniture could not be taken, a sample was chosen and sent. Some things were simply too big. At Pavlovsk the fine collection of Greek and Roman statues was dragged and pushed on carpets and planks by stalwart lady packers down into a remote corner of the cellars and walled up so cleverly that they were never discovered by the Germans. The same women managed to bury without trace most of the statuary in the park, including a fourteen-foot-high work by Triscorni depicting the Three Graces.

  By August 20 three more shipments had left the palaces, which by now were filling up with refugees fleeing before the armies. Soon afterward, curator Anna Zelenova of Pavlovsk, who had directed the last operations, found that she was cut off from Leningrad. On August 31 the palace was taken over as a Red Army headquarters. Despite all, packing continued in the hope that trucks could somehow be sent from Leningrad to take the crates to safety. On September 16 Zelenova was told that Pavlovsk was within German-held territory, and that their patrols were already in the famous white birch groves of the park. She and a colleague fled on foot through the battle zone, taking the vital inventories and storage maps with them. As they made their way through the fields they could see the Chinese Theater at the neighboring Catherine Palace burning. Five harrowing hours later they arrived in Leningrad on an Army truck filled with wounded. It would not be a comfortable refuge. At Pavlovsk alone some eight thousand objects remained and now awaited the arrival of the Germans.8

  A prewar photograph of the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace. The whereabouts of the panels remains a mystery.

  The invaders were prepared. Von Kunsberg’s Second Special Battalion immediately moved into the newly conquered area. There were certain Germanic things that had been targeted for them, for the Kümmel Report which had listed such items in the West also had a Russian section. One of von Kunsberg’s first objectives was the Amber Room, which had originally adorned the Prussian palace of Mon Bijou, and which, legend has it, was given to Peter the Great by the Soldier-King Frederick William II in exchange for a battalion of large Russian mercenaries. Von Kunsberg’s well-equipped minions made short work of removing the Amber Room panels, which, dismantled and carefully packed in twenty-nine crates, were sent off to the museum at Königsberg, showplace for the top gatherings from the Eastern Territories. The museum lost no time in unpacking and installing its new acquisition. The Frankfurter Zeitung announced to the home front in a front-page article on January 3, 1942, that the unique assemblage, “saved by German soldiers from
the destroyed palace of Catherine the Great is now on exhibition.” Next was the famous Gottorp Globe, a miniature planetarium in which twelve people could sit and contemplate the arrangement of the heavens depicted on the inside. The globe, made for the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp in the seventeenth century, was greatly admired by his descendant, Czar Peter III, and eventually presented to him. Now, the Nazi press reported, “through our soldiers’ struggle this unique work of art has been obtained and will again be brought back to its old home at Gottorp.”9

  The Special Commandos did not limit themselves to these German creations. They and the rest of the Army, indeed not behaving in a “knightly fashion,” took anything they could pry loose from the myriad palaces and pavilions around Leningrad, right down to the parquet floors. They opened packed crates and helped themselves to the contents. Mirrors were smashed or machine-gunned, brocades and silks ripped from the walls. At Peterhof, just outside Leningrad, the machinery controlling the famous cascading fountains was destroyed, and the gilded bronze statues of Neptune and Samson upon which the waters played were hauled off to the smelting furnace in full view of the distraught townspeople.

  The depredations around Leningrad were just the beginning. All across the newly conquered lands those in the know went after the “Germanic” things they had long coveted. Sometimes the Germanic attribution took a bit of doing. The ubiquitous SS operative Kraut, who had worked so hard in Poland, wrote on July 18 to SS headquarters that he hoped it would be possible to “bring home” the magnificent, eleven-foot-high bronze doors of the ancient cathedral of Novgorod. These were thought to have been made originally by a Magdeburg artist in the twelfth century for the Polish cathedral of Plock, which Kraut argued was now “a town belonging to the German Reich.” The doors, after a complicated history, had arrived in Novgorod in 1187. He also warned his colleagues not to be fooled by the fact that in Novgorod the portals were referred to as the Korsun Gate, “which gives the impression that they are an ancient Greek work originating from the Crimea, thus camouflaging their German origin.” Kraut was disappointed to find later that the doors had been “dragged off” by the Russians.10 This was fortunate, as the Nazis would soon ravage the cathedral and all the city’s museums.

  In the Baltic states, a German commission that had been negotiating for months for cultural items which it claimed belonged to ethnic Germans “resettled” in the Reich and in Poland after Stalin took over, now was able to “safeguard” the disputed items and ship them off to Danzig.11 And Admiral Lorey of the Zeughaus, Berlin’s military museum, was once again informed that the Führer wished him to undertake the recovery of German weaponry lost in wars back to the Middle Ages, expense being no object.12

  The Tchaikovsky Museum: scores and motorcycles

  By late summer the SS Special Commandos had visited Minsk and removed the cream of the city’s collections. The local Reichskommissar, Wilhelm Kube, a Rosenberg appointee, wrote to his chief expressing anger that “Sonderführer whose names have not yet been reported to me” had taken so much without his permission, and dismay that the SS, once their mission had been completed, had left what remained to “the Wehrmacht for further pillaging.” A handwritten notation on this letter by Rosenberg reveals that the order to remove the Minsk treasures had come from Hitler himself. So much for the Eastern occupation chief’s decree that everything should be left in place.13

  Rosenberg’s idea of preserving Ukrainian culture and nationalism in order to turn the people against Stalin was also no match for the suicidal racial fanaticism of Hitler and Himmler. Kiev would be proof of that. After its fall on September 17 its museums, scientific institutes, libraries, churches, and universities were taken over to be exploited and stripped. Everywhere in the USSR special attention was given to the trashing of the houses and museums of great cultural figures: Pushkin’s house was ransacked, as was Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, where manuscripts were burned in the stoves and German war dead were buried all around Tolstoy’s solitary grave. The museums honoring Chekhov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky received similar attentions, the composer of the 1812 Overture being particularly honored by having a motorcycle garage installed in his former dwelling.

  In early October 1941 Hitler, anxious to finish with the USSR, launched a great offensive toward Moscow and ordered simultaneous assaults on Leningrad and the Black Sea coast and oil fields. The Luftwaffe, from its forward bases, was now able to fly missions aimed at the destruction of Russian industrial targets far into the Soviet heartlands. One such target was Gorky, which sheltered not only part of the collections of Pavlovsk and Peterhof, but those of Leningrad’s Russian Museum and many others, all of which would have to be moved once more. The icons, pictures, and folk art of the Russian Museum went six hundred miles east to Perm by the undesirable method of river barge.

  This time the Pavlovsk curators decided to be truly safe and remove their things to Tomsk in Siberia, fourteen hundred miles away. The final departure of the train, loaded amid air raids, was delayed for hours awaiting the arrival of the families and children of museum personnel who had been unable to find a passable route to the station. On November 8, in the midst of an air attack, the train, pulling twenty cars of works of art, crossed the Volga on the last remaining bridge and headed to the east. While the German offensive continued, railroad workers hid the art-laden cars on a siding deep in the forests for two weeks to wait out the bombings. Late one December night they arrived in Tomsk, where the temperature stood at −55 degrees centigrade. But there was no room in this frozen town, and the weary train went on to Novosibirsk, which also sheltered Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. There the curators were given the town’s theater for storage.

  The care of works of art in this climate presented unusual problems. The 402 crates were piled up outside the station, covered by tarpaulins and canvas scenery from the theater. Everything was moved to the new quarters on horse-drawn sleds guided by women from Leningrad still in their light city clothes and shoes. Once in the theater, the crates had to be gradually acclimatized in order to avoid condensation on the objects. This was done by first lowering and then gradually raising the temperature of the vestibule by alternately opening and closing windows and doors. The process took three weeks. The guardians and their families would live for two long years in the basement below. Despite the cold and the terrible food, being museum people, they soon organized exhibitions from their holdings to maintain morale and pass the long months of waiting.14

  Life under siege in the basements of the Hermitage (Drawing by Alexander Nikolsky)

  In Leningrad the wells of courage would be more deeply plumbed. After the rail lines had been cut, Hermitage curators continued to pack and move things into the vast cellars of the complex of palaces. Smaller museums brought their holdings in. And alongside the works of art in the bombproof cellars lived a colony of some two thousand souls. During the continuing siege these subterranean spaces became a center of intellectual resistance and survival. As the winter came on, half-frozen art historians, poets, and writers worked on their research projects. Architect Alexander Nikolsky kept a visual diary of the eerie empty spaces of the vast museum in which occasional candles flickered. Only one room had electricity and a little heat, supplied by the generators of the Pole Star, a large yacht, once the property of the Czars and now taken over by the Navy, which was tied up to the quay in front of the Winter Palace.

  Hermitage director Orbeli was undaunted. Determined to carry on as usual, he refused to cancel a long-planned program to honor the Samarkand poet Alisher Navoi. Printed invitations went out, and half-starved participants left their fortifications and trenches to make their way through deep snow and falling bombs to the event. It was a great success. But daily the terrible cold increased and the food supply diminished. Only a thin lifeline of supplies could be brought in to Leningrad’s 3 million residents on the “Road of Life,” which crossed the frozen waters of Lake Ladoga. It could not save them all: in December 1941 alone more than fif
ty thousand died of starvation. People ate remarkable things: in the Hermitage conservators produced a jellied soup made of carpenter’s glue. Soon the museum had its own infirmary for the starving and a mortuary below the library, where frozen corpses stayed for weeks until they could be removed for burial. And the shelling continued. Upstairs in the echoing palace, security was provided by a team of forty or so not-so-young ladies, who did their best to cover shell holes on the windswept roofs with sheets of plywood and deal with the snow which swirled through the shattered windows into the ice-coated galleries.

  Spring brought some relief to human beings but only made things worse in the unheated museum, where thawed pipes burst and flooded the basements, forcing weakened curators to wade about to retrieve floating pieces of Meissen. Mildew blossomed on silk furniture which had to be moved out into the sun next to the vegetable gardens being planted in every available space. The only objects completely unaffected were the well-embalmed Egyptian mummies and the prehistoric remains taken from the Siberian permafrost. The siege did not end during this spring, but went on for nearly two more years. In the first three months of 1943 alone, as the bombing continued, the staff would remove, by hand, eighty tons of mixed glass, ice, and snow, much of which had to be chipped off the mosaics and parquet floors with crowbars. The thirtieth, and last, bomb would not fall on the Hermitage until January 2, 1944, twenty-five days before Leningrad was liberated.15