The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Hitler was surprised that the Soviet Union did not succumb in the five months he had allocated for its conquest. By late November 1941, as the famous Russian winter took hold, his armies, still dressed in their summer uniforms, were being pushed back from Moscow by fresh, fur-clad troops from Siberia. The Führer had done better in the south, where he now held most of the Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, and had laid siege to Sevastopol. It was impressive, but not enough for Hitler. No retreat was allowed in the Moscow region. He would not imitate Napoleon, but would hold the line, and finish the job in the spring.

  While the miserable, freezing German armies, obeying their Commander in Chief, struggled to maintain their northern positions, their more comfortable colleagues in the south were busily setting up an occupation government and the planned “cultural” institutes. Safeguarding efforts quickly expanded. Here they did not have to worry about clearing out the houses of the nobility. This Stalin had conveniently done for them, but there was still plenty to do. Objects in private hands were seized or easily obtained by intimidation or barter. One SS officer reported to Himmler that he was sending along “several antique finds (agate necklaces, bronze figures, pearls, etc.) bought from the widow of deceased archaeologist Prof. Belaschovski, Kiev, for 8 kilograms of millet.”16 By now the SS Ahnenerbe and the ERR had joined the Special Commandos in gathering the spoils. Rosenberg, still determined to establish his ascendancy, had obtained a directive from Hitler on March 1, 1942, again ordering all agencies to cooperate with him in his confiscation of Jewish and Masonic items. Logistical support would be supplied by the Wehrmacht. This agreement left two large loopholes: it neither limited the powers of the SS nor gave the ERR any right to “safeguard” museum holdings or archaeological finds.17

  In these areas the Ahnenerbe had moved right in. As early as July 1941 this archaeological wing of the SS had urged “action in South Russia” by a group to be headed by SS Sturmbannführer Professor Herbert Jankuhn of Kiel. By February of the next year they had proposed such genteel activities as “research into the finds and monuments of the Gothic Empire of Southern Russia,” Jankuhn’s speciality. Somewhat less highbrow were projects to safeguard the holdings of the Museum of Prehistoric Art in the Lavra Monastery near Kiev, and those of “the destroyed museum at Berdichev.” Jankuhn later claimed to be acting in the spirit of the absent Kunstschutz; but the fact that he continually removed museum collections to SS Collecting Points and thence to Germany gives the lie to his claim of altruism. All this was approved by Himmler, who attached Jankuhn’s special detail to his Waffen SS Division “Viking,” which was to give it “every support possible.”18

  Other special details were proposed for the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Nazis had great plans for this sunny region. Himmler’s intellectuals envisioned the Crimea as suitable for resettlement by ethnic Germans. (Hitler, musing at his headquarters, said that although the newly conquered island of Crete was nice, it was not easily accessible, but that an autobahn could be built to the Black Sea resorts to assuage the eternal Germanic quest for the sun.19) Meanwhile, the Ahnenerbe began shipping valuables back not only for study in Berlin but to decorate Wewelsburg, Himmler’s own luxurious schloss and SS spa, where stressed officers were waited on by the inmates of a nearby concentration camp.

  Rosenberg was very unhappy with these arrangements. During the spring and summer of 1942 he vainly sent out further directives ordering that all “safeguarding” be cleared with the ERR, and that all seizures which had already taken place be reported to his staff. It was not until the end of September 1942 that he managed to have museum collections added to his authorized field of activity. This only increased the competition. One SS operative who had cleared out a cache before the arrival of his compatriots triumphantly reported home that “a Dr. Brennecke of the ERR showed up at Armavir. As the museums had already been confiscated by the SS, his excursion had no results.” Himmler’s men were not good sports when outmaneuvered: arriving too late at another site, they complained that the ERR had “taken hold of the Crimea and confiscated everything” so that it was “impossible for the Ahnenerbe to work there.”20

  What was not removed by these specialists, despite Rosenberg’s imprecations, continued to be available to the Wehrmacht and its camp followers. Entrepreneurs brought in to make the conquered territories livable for their countrymen soon had a thriving black market under way. This was often too much even for their colleagues. A building contractor from Munich was formally accused by his co-workers of taking home paintings and sculpture from the Museum of Rovno, seat of the military government for the Ukraine. He had also falsified ration cards for food and tobacco and traded army gasoline for “eggs and cognac from the natives.”21 This sort of grazing was rampant at all levels. Even Goebbels was shocked by the corruption, confiding to his diary, “Our Etappe [support] organizations have been guilty of real war crimes. There ought really to be a lot of executions to reestablish order. Unfortunately the Führer won’t agree to this.” The “war crimes” were not atrocities, but the action of the Etappe troops, who, when they retreated, had “abandoned tremendous quantities of food, weapons, and munitions” in favor of “carpets, desks, pictures, furniture, even Russian stenographers, claiming these were important war booty. One can imagine what an impression this made on the Waffen SS.”22

  A few German voices were raised in protest. One local commander, shocked that ancient tombstones on the King’s Grave at Kolonka had been vandalized by “louts” who had scratched their names and swastikas on them, ordered his officers to instruct their troops that “similar desecrations shall not be committed again on monuments of importance to cultural history.”23 But such niceties could not survive the massive extermination programs of the leadership, or the panicky greed which would be evidenced during the coming German retreat.

  The home folks in the West got quite a different picture of all this activity. The Frankfurter Zeitung piously reported that “it was more than the duty of preservation of valuable works of culture that led the German military authorities, after the entrance into Riga, to assemble all… collections … it was care for the preservation of old German works.” From Tallinn came the news that “what valuable treasures could be saved in the imperial palaces around Leningrad … are now gathered under the care of the German Army in the former Pogankin Palace in Pskov and have been made accessible to the public.”24 Another paper reported that “in Kiev a group of museums have been saved, despite the war and the Bolshevist destructions. These will be rearranged and opened soon.” This group supposedly included the house and museum of the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, later reported by the Russians as having been totally destroyed by the Germans, but from which the latter claimed “the Bolshevists have carried away the collection of manuscripts.”25

  The “Bolshevists,” who not surprisingly had done the same at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, were also blamed for burning that library and blowing up the cathedral before they left. Just exactly who was responsible for the various devastations in Kiev, which was taken and retaken twice by each side, was debated after the war, but the Ukrainians, who had received the Nazis as liberators only to find they were executioners, were made to pay dearly for this lapse by the returning Soviet regime.

  The thorny question of whether to leave things in the USSR for the delectation of the citizens of the New Order, or ship them back to the Reich, was made moot in the summer of 1943 by the need to move the entire New Order back before the oncoming Soviet forces. All factions agreed that the Bolshevists should certainly not be allowed to repossess any objects rightfully of use to the master race. From Kharkov, in August 1943, the Ahnenerbe sent what was left of the prehistoric collections back to Kiev, whence they were to go to Berlin. In his report on this matter Professor Jankuhn sniffily criticized the ERR for having “left town” during the “winter battle of 42/43” without “having made any attempts towards safeguarding the museum holdings.” The ERR had in fact removed five hundred
paintings, but had handed over the (to them) less interesting prehistoric things to the Russian caretaker. Holdings from Rostov and Poltava were also moved to Kiev. They did not stay there long. By October 1943 Western newspapers reported the city to be on fire and deserted, its suburbs a totally destroyed “dead zone.”

  ERR dispatches note that they had to abandon their offices before the removal of the materials on hand could be completed “due to lack of loading spaces” and the fact that German artillery, located in the center of the city, was firing continually over their heads. Still, they managed to send on both the paintings (279) and prehistoric “materials” which had come from Kharkov, their own library and office furniture, and the “materials” collected by their Department of Seizures, amounting to some ten thousand books and nearly a hundred cases of “Bolshevist” paintings, documents, and archives. This was in addition to the great butterfly collection of a Mr. Sheljuzkho, which had gone to Königsberg, and the holdings of the Ukrainian Museum of Kiev, which had already been sent off to Cracow. All the Nazi research institutes had to move back too, taking even more “materials” with them. In this chaos much deemed of value to the Reich was lost: one Ahnenerbe functionary sadly reported that his research group had lost “the entire Trogontherum skeleton, three giant deer skulls, three hundred stone hatchets … etc.”

  When, on October 5, the last civilians had to leave Kiev, custody of the remaining items was left to the desperate incumbent infantry division, which, all were assured, “places great value on further evacuation of precious articles.” Gerhard Utikal reported to headquarters that the ERR detachment had heroically kept working in Kiev until the Army had told them they would be “bombed out of office,” and “for the time being” had had to shift their quarters to Lvov. Another Nazi official reported reassuringly that upon arrival the Soviet troops would find “nothing of value left in the city.”26

  Kiev was not the end. The gathering of loot continued in the ever-narrowing territory held by the German armies. As late as August 1944 Utikal informed his operatives that “Reichsleiter Rosenberg had ruled that the most precious cultural riches of the Ostland could still be removed by his staff, insofar as this can be done without interfering with the interests of the fighting forces.” He even included a list of suggested objects.27

  The Red Army indeed found nothing of value left in the museums of its recaptured cities. They found instead burned and defaced buildings, ruined laboratories, books reduced to pulp, and the terrible desolation left after battles in which there was no question of surrender. New York Herald Tribune reporter Marcus Hindus reported the scene at Peterhof to the world:

  Now that the battle is over the countryside is quiet. The quiet is not peace but death. … Brick dwellings, marble castles with granite towers are leveled to the ground or are battered heaps of debris and refuse. There aren’t even the customary flocks of winter birds. … I had neither seen nor heard anything like it in France after the World War. Only windblown tall reeds rising out of deep snow give one a feeling of some life within nature itself… all Peterhof is gone. It isn’t even a ghost town like Kiev, Kharkov, Poltava, Orel or Kursk … it is a desert strewn with wreckages from which, perhaps, has been blown away some of the most exquisite and most joyful art man has created.28

  It was not a good precedent to set for the Red Army, which, despite the Germans’ refusal to admit it to themselves, would soon be on the soil of the Reich. Along with informing the foreign press, the Russians had been keeping very careful track of the damage done. An Extraordinary State Commission, established in November 1942, was systematically compiling reports which enumerated losses “in painstaking detail.” An abridged list for Kiev alone ran to three and a half single-spaced pages. American Intelligence noted that the Russians had not placed an “evaluation on the losses of cultural objects” but had simply stated that “the day is not far off when we will force Germany to restore the treasures of our museums and fully pay for the monuments of our culture destroyed by the Hitlerite vandals.”29 And that day would come in just over a year.

  The officers of the National Gallery of Art. Left to right: John Walker, Harry McBride, David Finley, Macgill James, Huntington Cairns (Photo by Irving Penn)

  VIII

  INCH BY INCH

  The Launching of the Allied Protection Effort

  I would feel like saying: “Yes, the English and Americans are neither military-minded nor war-minded.” When you make war on them you cannot crush and conquer them by surprise as the Germans have the Poles, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French even. They will take time to get ready, and when at long last they feel ready they will be cautious, make sure of their rear, and advance inch by inch, at snail’s pace—not a bit like the Russian armies you admire so much. Moral: do not go to war with the slow, stupid Anglo-Saxons, unless you feel materially and morally ready to have it long and devastating.

  —Bernard Berenson, Rumor and Reflection

  July 1944

  December 7, 1941, the day that lives in infamy, brought the American art establishment face to face with the realities of protection long since forced upon its European colleagues. If the Japanese had managed to cross thousands of miles of ocean undeterred to turn the huge military complex at Pearl Harbor into a smoking shambles, it seemed quite possible that they could do the same to San Francisco, and the increasing successes of the German U-boat fleet in the Atlantic underlined the vulnerability of the eastern seaboard. As quickly as they could arrange travel, the directors of the nation’s principal museums converged on New York to coordinate their response to the advent of war.

  Plans for this grim situation had been in the making for many months. In March 1941 the National Resources Planning Board, set up by Roosevelt to begin organizing for a possible war, had established a Committee on the Conservation of Cultural Resources, which was charged with “collecting information, preparing plans, and promoting measures for the protection of the cultural resources of the United States.”1 The blue-ribbon board included such luminaries as the Librarian of Congress, the Archivist of the United States, the directors of the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum (now called the Smithsonian Institution), and representatives of the American Association of Museums, the American Institute of Architects, the War Department, and the Civilian Defense Agency, all under the direction of Waldo Leland of the American Council of Learned Societies.

  After studying British and other European experiences, they decided that the best way to protect the nation’s collections would be to remove them to remote bombproof refuges. In October 1941 proposals for the building of special shelters for government-owned objects and papers were duly submitted to the Commissioner of Public Buildings. It soon appeared that money for such construction was nowhere to be found, though funds were later provided to individual agencies to subsidize in-house airraid shelters. The museums and libraries were thus left to improvise their own programs. To help them out, the committee had, in May, begun the preparation of a how-to booklet on the wartime storage of collections, based on advice published in a 1939 pamphlet by the British Museum. As of December 7, 1941, it had not been published.

  Fortunately, the American museums, strange amalgams that they are of private and public financing, and responsible for untold treasures, had not waited for these suggestions from on high. Funded by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, work immediately began to prepare Biltmore, a palatial French Renaissance house in Asheville, North Carolina, to receive the brand-new National Gallery of Art’s most important works. Biltmore, erected by George Vanderbilt in the 1890s as a mountain “retreat,” was fireproof, isolated, and close to a railroad, thus fulfilling Kenneth Clark’s basic requirements.2 In New York, preparations of a similar nature were made. The Metropolitan Museum, after rejecting as too damp a huge tunnel right under the building (created by the removal of water mains in 1939) and an abandoned copper mine in upstate New York, had also found an empty mansion, once the domicile of a colleagu
e of J. P. Morgan, outside Philadelphia. Though considerably less remote than Biltmore, it was also fireproof and properly air-conditioned.3 W. G. Constable, the newly appointed chief curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, wrote to a relation in England that his museum too was making “plans for evacuation,” and in the meantime was running practice removal drills in the Egyptian and Classical departments.4

  By November awareness of imminent disaster was so great that preparations for air raids were considerably advanced in most of Washington’s agencies, cultural and otherwise. But the actual outbreak of war came as a shock, and while patriotic fervor swept every field, mad ideas and semi-hysteria also flooded forth. In Seattle, crowds infuriated by shopkeepers who had not complied with the blackout went on a looting rampage. A Congressman Bradley of Michigan suggested that all the gleaming white buildings of Washington be sprayed dark gray to make them less of a target.5

  The museum directors, meeting in New York on what should have been the last festive weekend before Christmas, were fully aware of the dangers of panic; indeed, one of the main purposes of their assembly was to prepare a press release to calm hovering reporters expecting to hear that every major museum in the country would instantly be closed and stripped bare.6

  With visions of London’s blitz in their minds, the primary worry of the museum authorities was air-raid damage. In this day of remote-controlled nuclear weapons the 1941 discussion seems to emanate from a different world, but the images shown to the group in a slide show prepared by Agnes Mongan of Harvard’s Fogg Museum were all too real—the walls of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre full of empty frames, the bombed-out Tate Gallery with three acres of skylights lying shattered on its floors, and the nave of Canterbury Cathedral filled with tons of earth to absorb the shock of explosions.