The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  More complicated for the committee was the disposition of the Mannheimer and Goudstikker collections. It was all very businesslike. Although under the Dutch law declaring all transactions with the Nazis illegal the Mannheimer works were considered to have been confiscated, the proceeds of their sale had been used to settle their owner’s debts to Dutch citizens. The committee therefore felt that Mme Mannheimer had no claim on the objects that came back to Holland. The best things were taken by the Rijksmuseum, and the rest of the enormous collection was sold at auction for the profit of the Dutch state. The paintings which Mühlmann had garnered at the last moment in France had, however, gone back to that country. The Dutch were not about to give up on these works, which had been part of Mühlmann’s original contract. Representatives of the Rijksmuseum entered into negotiations with Mme Mannheimer in Paris. This was tricky, as her late husband had also had French and British interests, but in the end a deal was struck and Mme Mannheimer was allowed to keep a number of works,25 among them the charming Chardin Soap Bubbles, which eventually came to the United States and was sold to the Met.

  The Goudstikker case was equally complex. Alois Miedl had kept his word and protected Desi Goudstikker’s share of the company, which had been carefully invested in Dutch stocks and currency and not in Reichsmarks. Behind him he had left, in some disarray, what remained of the Goudstikker art and real estate. When Mrs. Goudstikker arrived back in Holland she found the old staff of the firm, including those who had sold it, there to greet her. Knowing little of what had transpired, she was unsure of how to regard them. It was up to her to prove that the sale of the firm had been forced and that the price paid was too low. The latter issue was made more difficult because Goudstikker had, in the thirties, consistently undervalued or written off works, and more than 160 pictures were on the books as having been worth one guilder. Nor were the Dutch authorities persuaded that the sale engineered by the Goudstikker employees had been forced. Mrs. Goudstikker, who had not been involved in the firm’s business affairs, was now afraid she would lose everything, and gave up her claim to the pictures sold to Goering. For a time she tried to get back the things which were still in Miedl’s name, but after six years gave that up too; all the recovered works went to the Dutch state. In the end she bought back the three houses Miedl had taken over, but soon had to sell Castle Nyenrode and the Amsterdam headquarters of the firm. Beautiful Ostermeer she offered to the Dutch government in return for permission to live in a cottage on the grounds. The gift was refused, as it was not endowed, and that house too was sold.

  The idea of a freeze on the art trade in the formerly occupied countries come the liberation, proposed by both Georges Wildenstein and Jacques Seligmann in the early days of the war, evaporated without trace. As Kenneth Clark discovered, the continental trade had continued with only slight interruption, the only place where there was a freeze being Germany. Indeed, the Wildenstein firm was one of the first to resume its international operations. Well before the fall of Germany, their man Dequoy showered both the New York and London offices with chatty cables full of news and proposed sales, and set in motion the claims process for the objects confiscated from the firm. He even became something of a Resistance hero for a time. A story in The New York Times on September 11, 1944, under the headline “Paris Gallery Foiled Nazi Art Collectors,” ran as follows:

  Frenchmen have revealed with relish how at least in one case the Nazis paid for French loot but never received the goods. Roger Dequoy, manager of the Georges Wildenstein Art Gallery, had a four-year fencing match with German art collectors ending in a complete victory for him. Nightly, during the Nazi occupation, M. Dequoy and his staff moved Renoirs, Manets, Goyas, valuable 18th century furnishings, rugs and tapestries into hiding places…. Once the Nazis learned the picture collection was stored in the vaults they demanded the right to purchase from it. Knowing he would get only a tenth of the real value of the collection, M. Dequoy managed to substitute inferior paintings before the arrival of the purchasers.

  By late 1944 not one dealer’s doors had been closed by the authorities. This seeming insouciance on the part of the French upset the OSS investigators whose mounting stacks of evidence pointed straight to numerous Paris dealers, but who could get little cooperation from their French counterparts, the Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches (DGER)—the result more of chauvinism and political turmoil than of inaction.

  Laws were, in fact, passed aimed at prosecuting those who had profited illegally from trading with the enemy. A DGER agent reported that after an official Art Dealers Association meeting in early January 1945, the principal members had met secretly to decide what their “attitude” would be toward the financial decrees. The situation of the art dealers was “delicate,” he reported, as some 80 percent of them had done significant business with the Germans, much of which had not been entered in their books. They had reckoned without the meticulous habits of the Nazis. “The secret of their operations is difficult to keep since certain operations are already known and the objects have been found in Germany.” For fear of financial reprisal, they had agreed not to provide any information at all, a situation which, the agent felt, could delay the more important objective of the recovery of confiscated works of art.26

  By April 1945 Lefranc, the Vichy agent who had engineered the Schloss affair, was in jail and others were being investigated and fined, which had the effect of depressing the auction business at the Drouot and promoting underground trading for cash. The DGER found this deplorable: the strict measures, they lamented, were driving sales abroad. Though they agreed that the worst offenders should be punished, they recommended to the Commission de Récupération Artistique that collectors and merchants should be encouraged to revive the art trade, and should especially seek out nineteenth-century French works in occupied Germany, where they could surely be obtained cheaply, and where “American artistic centers have already sent representatives.” Only by exploiting this opportunity would Paris remain “the indispensable artistic center of the entire world”; neglect of it would “condemn them to watching the center of the art trade move across the Atlantic.”27

  But the Commission de Récupération and the French representatives at the Collecting Points felt otherwise. Commandant Pierre-Louis Duchartre at Munich told Henraux that the image of a corrupt Parisian market would please those who “would be happy to see the Paris art trade damaged” and urged that the government send more help to the delegation at the Collecting Point, which the DGER had so far refused to do. Indeed, the lack of personnel had forced Duchartre to hire two slightly dubious Yugoslav refugees, who had so far been a great success and turned up twenty-one of the missing Schloss pictures in and around Munich.28

  Martin Fabiani was arrested in September 1945, but not before he too had managed to wangle a visa to go to London, where he was put up at the Wildenstein suite at the Dorchester.29 He was forced to pay a whopping FFr 146 million fine. His troubles did not end for a long time. There was still the matter of the five or six hundred (the figures vary) Vollard pictures stuck in Ottawa, where they were being carefully tended in the storerooms of the National Gallery of Canada. These he could not claim, as he had at last been put on the Allied Blacklist and could not get a visa. There was another little complication: Vollard’s will had specified that his collection be inventoried, which had never been done in his lifetime, and that it then be divided among several heirs, of which the City of Paris was one. This Fabiani and co-heir de Galea had failed to do before the outbreak of war, so that no one really knew what had been in the collection at the time of Vollard’s death.

  It was now abundantly clear why M. de Galea had not wished Rorimer to take his pictures to Paris and had instead hidden them in a duck blind. On June 2, 1949, the City of Paris put a restraining order on the Fabiani collection. They were just too late. Diplomatic inquiries revealed that the pictures had been released to Fabiani and a M. Jonas in Ottawa on May 30 and had been taken, it was thought, to London
and the USA. The French sent a note to the U.S. State Department requesting help, noting that “their sale in the United States would defraud the French Treasury of a large sum in foreign exchange.”30 Just how Fabiani had managed to get to Canada and how all was resolved among the interested parties is unclear, but he continued to trade in Paris for many more years, and even wrote a charming, if not entirely accurate, book about his dealings.

  By 1947 twenty more French dealers had been fined, among them Dequoy and Petrides. Their German colleagues Lohse and Rochlitz (the latter gleefully delivered to Paris by James Plaut after a long ride across France in an unheated Jeep) were in French jails. Efforts by the Commission de Récupération and French Customs to bring charges against the Wildenstein firm were, however, rejected in 1949 by the courts on the grounds that there was no proof of voluntary sales to the enemy.31

  Similar trials for “economic collaboration” took place in Holland. The museum community there, according to the waspish reports of British MFAA officer Ellis Waterhouse, first on the scene in 1945, was a shambles. Many of its distinguished members had died or retired. Hannema, director of the Boymans, had been thrown into jail by the citizens of Rotterdam. The Dutch restitution commission was riven by what Water-house termed “local art politics” and self-preservation tactics. Things finally settled down when two men who had been out of the country during the war, Alphons Vorenkamp and Dr. A. B. de Vries (the latter having spent the war years in Switzerland after being dismissed from the Rijksmuseum by the Nazis), were put in charge. Citizens were required to submit lists of objects taken to Germany and dealers were questioned.

  The MFAA and OSS officers in their brief time in Holland took a dim view of the Dutch dealers and their captive experts, Friedländer and Vitale Bloch, who, Waterhouse contemptuously wrote, “is now busily reinsuring by turning King’s evidence.” He was equally suspicious of the dealer de Boer, accusing him of trying to get on “any commission of Dutch experts which might eventually go to Germany to examine restitution claims” and “wishing perhaps to cover some of his own traces.” Goering’s favorite, Hoogendijk, on the other hand, he found to be “of good intentions” but “obsessed with the problem of the five religious works ascribed to Vermeer.” As well he might be: if they were fakes, which seemed more and more likely as Holland emerged from the hothouse atmosphere of the occupation and the pictures were exposed to international scrutiny, he could be liable for considerable sums.32

  Accounts of the Dutch collaboration investigations are, like those of every country, unedifying. The depositions and hearing reports are full of gossipy testimony, innuendos of anti-Semitism, Communist leanings, and cronyism. De Vries himself got into trouble for returning thirty-one pictures without the consent of his colleagues to Nathan Katz, who had helped him in Switzerland. The problem was that the Commission felt that these works had not been a “forced sale.” To make matters worse, Katz immediately shipped ten of them off to Switzerland, where they were inaccessible, and where at least one, Rembrandt’s Portrait of Saskia (ex. Ten Cate), soon appeared in the “voracious” Bührle’s collection. The matter was quietly settled by requiring Katz to give three pictures back to the Dutch state.

  De Boer hid nothing and maintained that all his sales had been forced, pointing out that his wife and many of the colleagues he had helped were Jewish. He said he had charged the Germans ridiculous prices in order to keep the good things in Holland but that they had bought anyway. He was not further prosecuted. Who after all was to say where survival ended and collaboration began?33

  The only full-fledged art trial to result from the events of the war in Holland seems to have been that of the Vermeer forger Hans van Meegeren, who was arrested not for fraud but for economic collaboration. Van Meegeren had warned his intermediaries not to sell to the Germans, but had not reckoned with Goering’s Vermeer obsession. When the Reichmarschall’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery returned to Holland, investigators naturally wished to know exactly from whence it came so that accounts could be settled. Van Meegeren, as one of the previous owners, was routinely questioned. When he refused to reveal the picture’s origin he was taken to jail, where he declared that he had painted it himself, and, furthermore, that he had done all the rest as well. Van Meegeren was acquitted of collaboration charges and became a folk hero. He was retried for forgery in 1947. The trial was quick: the experts did not much want to testify to their failings in public. The press found them anyway. It was the forger’s last moment of glory; he died soon after the trial. He had made a reputation of sorts: in November 1990 the picture he had painted for the court, the Young Christ Teaching in the Temple, was sold for $23,000 at Sotheby’s.34

  German dealers were just as eager as their colleagues to get their trade going again, but all dealing had been prohibited well before the invasion of Germany by Military Government law. Again the trade went underground. In some areas, in order to prevent underworld activity and interzonal smuggling, local commanders devised their own licensing systems and allowed dealers’ associations. They were not only thinking of stolen Old Masters: they also wished to promote opportunities for the modern painters so long suppressed by the Third Reich.35 But no one went so far as to permit the export of works from Germany, and all sales of works valued over DM 1,000 had to be reported. Those dealers known to have done business with the Nazis were not licensed, and indeed most of them were under some form of detention, but they had not given up. In 1949, when licensing requirements for most other businesses were relaxed by General Clay, the dealers were ready to start anew. The effect of this, MFAA officer Theodore Heinrich wrote from Wiesbaden, “has been the appearance in the art dealing trade in this area of several dealers previously refused licenses because of notorious malpractices during the Nazi regime.”36 The licensing and export laws were immediately reinstituted for the art trade and remained in place for the duration of the American occupation.

  The shipments out of Germany, massive though they were in the first year of occupation, in no way kept up with the “items” which continued to arrive at the Collecting Points from every conceivable quarter. To the things discovered in hiding places were added thousands of others brought forth by Military Government Law 52, which required German citizens to report all property acquired in foreign countries during the war and allowed them to return it to the authorities, no questions asked.

  By April 1, 1946, a total of 23,117 items had been logged into Munich, while 5,149 items, representing 8,284 actual objects, had been returned. The December 1950 summary for Wiesbaden reported that 340,846 items had been returned since its establishment, a rather meaningless statistic given the fact that one single “item,” a library, had contained 1.2 million objects, and another, 3 million. In the storerooms some 100,000 items still remained to be liquidated, and more would trickle in during the last two years of occupation.37

  The United States Army had certainly not planned to deal with all this. By the spring of 1946 most of the original Monuments officers who had fought across Europe and found the great caches had gone home, leaving the job of restitution to a much reduced number. The Army, assuming that the return of identifiable loot would be completed by September, at which time responsibility for the remaining items would be turned over to the German Länder, or states, planned by then to limit the number of Monuments officers to twelve. The Roberts Commission itself, which had barely survived the Congressional budget process in 1945, ended operations in June 1946, turning its records over to the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs of the State Department, headed by Miss Ardelia Hall. Before it disbanded, there still being no international agreement on the subject, the Commission went on record to say that “cultural objects … should not be considered or involved in reparations settlements growing out of World War II.”38

  But termination of operations in the fall of 1946 proved to be impossible. Indeed, many repositories had not even been revisited or emptied at that date, and the Collecting Points we
re still full of objects of unknown provenance. The Army, despite all its efforts to rid itself of the burden, had become the recuperation commission for an enormous number of works which could not simply be shipped off “in bulk,” and whose disposition the MFAA officers adamantly believed should not be left to the Germans. The very eagerness of the Military Government to be rid of the art prolonged the process, for after the euphoria of the big discoveries the old demons of lack of personnel and transportation reappeared with a vengeance, and measures such as cutting down coal allotments to the Collecting Points, which made working conditions miserable, slowed progress even more.

  By 1947 the whole picture in Germany had begun to change. The big repositories were nearly empty and the Monuments men were faced with the very different problems of tracking down individual works which had vanished into the hands of thieves and black marketeers, both Allied and German. This required a certain amount of detective work in the field, and even the use of disguise. MFAA officer Edgar Breitenbach, fluent in German, roamed the villages around Berchtesgaden dressed in lederhosen, attempting to recover objects from the Goering collections from the reluctant locals. An extensive ring of fences who had been trading in the things stolen from the Führerbau in Munich was slowly exposed by underhanded techniques. The trails sometimes led to unexpected places: it was discovered that six paintings bought for General Clay’s office had been looted from Holland, and they were quickly replaced.