Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  Goebbels’s reaction was rapturous. “What drives an ideological movement,” Goebbels argued, was not a set of facts but rather “faith,” and he further compared Hitler’s writings and speeches to Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “Self-evident truths do not have to be proven,” he argued.29 Goebbels now was so powerful in the NSDAP that he answered only to Hitler; a token of their deepening friendship was the bouquet of dark red roses and a six-seater Mercedes Benz that Hitler spontaneously gave to Goebbels around this time.30

  In late 1930 Goebbels met his future wife, Magda Quandt, whom he had employed as his secretary. Cultured, educated, and poised, twenty-nine-year-old Magda had recently divorced wealthy industrialist Günther Quandt, with whom she had a nine-year-old son, Harald. Hitler, who adored Magda, teared up when the pair announced they were engaged. Goebbels privately considered Hitler “too soft” and effeminate to marry and reproduce, so they told Hitler that they would give their future children names starting with h in his honor.31 On 19 December 1931, the pair married on the estate of Magda’s ex-husband; Hitler was the best man. By January 1933, the couple had a four-month-old named Helga and planned to give Helga’s “Uncle Adolf” many more surrogate offspring.

  After the NSDAP’s January 1933 victory, Goebbels began crafting cultural, racial, and political policy ahead of October’s Foundation Stone Ceremony to break ground on the House of German Art. To assuage the concerns of foreigners who worried that cultural censorship portended sinister political and military ambitions, Goebbels commissioned a compact book of Hitler’s speeches, titled The New Germany Desires Work and Peace, accompanied by a foreword he wrote himself. In flawlessly translated English, Goebbels asserted that Germany was not the sole aggressor of the Great War and emphasized a politicized Christianity then popular among both liberals and conservatives in Great Britain and the United States. Warning of a spiritual vacuum that could occur if communism or atheism were to triumph, Goebbels argued that Christian Germans “regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.” He added that Germans wished to be industrious and self-sufficient and had, he stressed in italics, “no aggressive intentions whatever.”32

  During meetings inside the chancellery, Goebbels urged Hitler to secure permission via legal means to conduct cultural censorship. If Hitler skipped these steps, Goebbels warned, the government risked becoming incapacitated by protests that the NSDAP was breaking the law. Goebbels also encouraged Hitler to more forcefully reiterate his party’s desire to combat the Communist movement, a talking point that resonated with middle-class Germans.

  “The parties of Marxism and those who went along with them had fourteen years to see what they could do. The result is a heap of ruins,” Hitler declaimed in his first official address. “Now, German people, give us four years and then judge and sentence us.”33 In volunteering a deadline for himself, Hitler assuaged the anxieties of those who feared that he aimed to become a dictator for life.

  Within a month of Hitler’s ascension to office, a terrorist attack provided Hitler and Goebbels with an organic and plausible reason to seize more power from the citizenry. On the evening of 27 February, Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutchman who had attempted unsuccessfully to burn three other buildings in Berlin, set fire to the Reichstag. The Führer’s strategist, Putzi Hanfstaengl, the Harvard man whose mother, Catherine, had organized the salons in Munich that expanded Hitler’s bourgeois base, saw the flames nearby. Hanfstaengl quickly telephoned Goebbels, with whom Hitler was dining.

  “Tell him the Reichstag is burning,” he uttered breathlessly.

  “Is that meant to be a joke?” Goebbels asked.

  Once Goebbels had independently verified the fire, Van der Lubbe’s execution was a foregone conclusion. The arsonist had broken with the Dutch Communist Party in 1931, but Goebbels used the connection to propose emergency legislation “for the protection of people and state.” The Nazis indefinitely suspended the freedoms of speech, association, and the press, as well as the right to uncensored postal distribution and to unsurveilled telephone calls.34 The government also took 25,000 individuals whom they deemed terrorist threats into “protective custody” at a makeshift, purpose-built prison. The public was grateful. A large number of the 10,000 potential terrorists rounded up in March and April were denounced by their own neighbors or colleagues.35 Seventy-two hours after the law passed, Hitler’s storm troopers marched into the offices of the Frankfurter Zeitung, warning its editors that their newspaper would be banned if they didn’t cease negative coverage of the Führer. The editorial staff resigned in protest, but the board of directors capitulated to the Nazi threats. It was another promise fulfilled from those that Hitler had outlined a decade before in Mein Kampf, in which he had raged against the “hellish press” as dominated by Jews who were pitted en masse against him and the NSDAP, writing articles replete with “unctuous assertions” and “spiritual pestilence” that were worse for Europe than the black plague had been for the continent.36

  The Reichstag fire and the fear of another terrorist threat helped the Nazis obtain 43.9 percent in the 4 March vote that Hitler had asked the elderly President Paul von Hindenburg to schedule. The 10 percent increase still did not produce a majority in the Reichstag, but it weakened the other parties to the point of making them impotent. On 23 March, Hitler requested that parliamentarians pass the Enabling Act, allowing his cabinet to pass laws without their involvement. When 444 representatives approved with only 94 opposing, the German parliament officially and legally made itself irrelevant.37

  Spring and summer plans to streamline power went smoothly for Hitler. On 7 April 1933, the cabinet agreed that the NSDAP would now enforce federally mandated Nazi policies at the previously independent state level; it passed the Professional Civil Service Restoration Act, permitting the party to fire non-Aryan government employees and requiring all civil servants to use the Hitlergrüß, or “Heil Hitler” greeting. The message was clear: government employees now had to pledge their loyalty to Hitler, not to the citizen or the rule of law.38

  Like those of most European countries, Germany’s Culture Ministry oversaw the nation’s museums; the supervision and stability this had granted the institutions now backfired as the Nazis were able to easily fire twenty museum directors and curators over the spring, summer, and early autumn of 1933.39 The moves aligned with Hitler’s agenda outlined in Mein Kampf to combat supposedly Jewish-driven “cultural signs of the political collapse” that had occurred during the Weimar Republic. “It is the responsibility of government to prevent its people from being driven into the arms of intellectual insanity,” he had written.

  Hitler and Goebbels began regulating reproductive rights through the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which authorized sterilization of children and adults whom the government considered at risk of producing flawed progeny. Catholic vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, now fifty-three, proposed that those whom the government flagged for sterilization should give consent or at least have a guardian provide consent. Goebbels, thirty-five, and Hitler, forty-three, simply ignored him.

  Germans with darker skin were swiftly targeted. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that nonwhites lacked inherent intelligence and could only be programmed for “tricks” as one teaches a dog. It “is training, exactly as that of the Poodle, and not a scientific ‘education,’” wrote Hitler.40 Goebbels concurrently published a five-point manifesto titled “What German Artists Expect from the New Government,” which in reality laid out what the government expected from them. Museum directors promoting “un-German” art would be fired, and, at a future date, the Nazis would confiscate and display Degenerate Art, then burn it, just as they had burned controversial books on 10 May 1933.

  It was a swift reverse for a country that had acquired a reputation after the Great War as a bastion of vibrant contemporary art. Goebbels began asking German artists to help perpetuate his propaganda, effectively meld
ing the once-free German art world with the government’s goals. The Nazis widely distributed a poster promoting a badly needed “yes” vote on 12 November to confirm the nation’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, showing Hitler with Papal Nuncio Alberto Vasallo di Torregrossa, present at the ceremony to lay the foundation stone for the House of German Art. Quoting Torregrossa the poster read, “‘I did not understand you for a long time. But I have tried for a long time. Today, I understand you.’ Every German Catholic, too, today understands Adolf Hitler and votes ‘Yes!’ on 12 November.”41 Torregrossa worked with Hitler to assuage the fears of cultured Catholics. They succeeded: 95 percent of Germans voted yes. There was no evidence of vote tampering. Even if there had been, the press was now in no condition to report it.

  Despite the success in co-opting the Catholic clergy, Goebbels knew he needed to win over the minds of the German people through culture as well. He aimed to curate a show around the theme of Great German Art for the opening of the House of German Art, not only to honor the museum’s opening but also to define the entire genre of Great German Art.

  The artist with the most at stake was Emil Nolde, who was monitoring the political situation as intensely as other German artists were monitoring him. Nolde, now in his mid-sixties, was one of Germany’s most academically respected artists. Younger artists viewed the government’s treatment of him as the bellwether of their own futures.

  Nolde’s personal background and artistic philosophy aligned closely enough with Hitler’s to give the elderly artist reasonable optimism that he would find a place within Hitler’s nascent stable of “Great German Artists.” Like Hitler, Nolde had been rejected from art school and supported his budding art career painting postcards for tourists. Though Nolde, unlike Hitler, had established a lucrative artistic career, his rejection from the Munich Art Academy in 1898 convinced him that Germany’s art establishment lacked a confidence in Aryan art’s superiority.42 Nolde turned thirty-nine in 1906 and joined Die Brücke, publishing his works in the portfolio that Grosz and his friends had admired in art school and during the Weimar Republic.

  Nolde’s artwork seemed to many, including Goebbels, to embody the strong, silent Nordic spirit underpinning the Aryan culture for which Goebbels and Hitler advocated. In his 1911 etching Children of the Forest, children dance naked in a circle in the woods; they could be nymphs, pure Nordic youth, or a mystical combination of both. The work reflected the Nordic spiritual belief that all Nordic souls and spirits were ethereally intertwined and were most present in nature. Nolde had invented watercolor techniques designed to evoke and celebrate the mystical qualities of German landscapes. On one cold spring day in 1908, he had marveled at how his wet watercolors crystalized on the special, highly absorbent paper he set directly on the ground outside. “Sometimes, I would paint in the freezing twilight and enjoyed seeing how the frozen colors had crystallized into stars and radiating lines,” he wrote.43 In Flood, Evening a watercolor on special Japanese paper that the Kunsthalle in Kiel purchased, Nolde used dramatic shades of black and gray pigments to portray the night sky on the low horizon of his home province of Frisia. The murky waters of flooded rivers seem to flow off the page, depicted with swirling greens and dark yellows.

  Despite admiring Hitler’s Weltanschauung, Nolde expanded two sections of his art portfolio that would prove problematic for Nazis: the humanization of non-Aryans and a deviation from classical depictions of Christianity. In 1913 Nolde had traveled to New Guinea; rather than viewing the natives as scientific specimens, common at the time, he portrayed villagers with genuine personalities, including clothing preferences, expressions, ages, and poses. On a subsequent trip to Manila, he questioned whether Europeans were inherently superior. “Are we so-called cultivated ones really much better than the people here?” he mused.44 In one work, The Dancer, a native woman spreads her legs and squats while dancing and flipping her dark brown hair, her brown skin glistening. Though she is topless, her face is earnest; Nolde does not fetishize her.

  His largest religious work, 1912’s gargantuan The Life of Christ, had injected life into what most of Nolde’s contemporaries considered a tired theme for paintings: Christianity. Nolde designed a triptych, the traditional format used for Catholic altarpieces in which one large work tells the main story, flanked by two narrower paintings telling ancillary stories. Nolde updated the format, however, by creating a center panel flanked by two sets of four small paintings telling the whole story of Christ’s life. The middle panel depicting the crucifixion follows the classical “triangle” format: Christ is at the center, his mourning mother at the bottom left, and Roman soldiers gambling for his possessions at the bottom right. Yet rather than appearing serene, Nolde’s Jesus reflects the corporeal agony of crucifixion. With blood leaking from his hands and feet, Jesus struggles and fails to support the weight of his hanging body, his chest heaving and muscles bulging torturously. On either side of him hang two criminals, one of whom has asked for and received Christ’s salvation. Rather than appearing elated and oblivious of his torture, as traditionally depicted, the newly Christian criminal appears to be in excruciating physical pain. Eight small panels on either side of the crucifixion scene emphasize the biblical characters as humans with complex emotions. In the Nativity scene, Jesus’s mother, Mary, holds him up, still bloodied. When the Magi visit, she is happy but clutching her hips in postpartum discomfort. In another scene, when the apostles meet Jesus for the first time after his resurrection, they are visibly confused and uncomfortable.

  In the mind of Nolde and his supporters, these more realistic portrayals of famous Bible stories kept Christianity relevant rather than ossified. Detractors considered them crude at best and sacrilegiously primitive at worst, but in 1912 they did not yet feel emboldened to call on the government for outright censorship.

  In the spring of 1934, however, as the government was decreasing the powers of the states and passing legislation to legally restrict the rights of German citizens, one art institution, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, was eagerly supporting Hitler’s censorship of art. Previously, curators would have considered it anathema to create an exhibition with the sole purpose of condemning the artists featured in it. Now, however, curators and museum directors who aligned with Hitler’s views felt emboldened to condemn Degenerate Art, the term the Nazis increasingly used for works they considered unpatriotic, lascivious, too reverential of non-Aryan cultures, or even simply aesthetically ugly. The Kunsthalle Mannheim opened its exhibition titled “Cultural Bolshevist Images,” featuring sixty-four paintings, two sculptures, and twenty graphic works crammed into two rooms. The artworks were taken out of their frames and hung in deliberately amateur ways by curators who knew full well how to hang them properly. They were labeled with the name of artist, the year of acquisition, the artist’s race, and the purchase price. Artists represented unsurprisingly included Grosz, but more unexpectedly the curators also targeted Nolde.

  Nolde was shocked that his work was included in the Mannheim show, particularly given that his Berlin dealer Ferdinand Möller simultaneously was holding a Nazi-lauded show titled Thirty German Artists, in which Nolde was included, organized in tandem with Joseph Goebbels and his assistant Hans Weidemann. Goebbels and Weidemann had also sent Nolde’s artworks to the Chicago World’s Fair and promoted him in a private show at the Propaganda Ministry.45 This humiliating discrepancy made clear that Nolde’s status as a revered older member of the German art world was in jeopardy and that the Nazi government needed to more clearly define what constituted Degenerate Art.

  One of Germany’s preeminent Aryan female collectors, Gertrud Stickforth, wrote to the Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter to advocate for Nolde as an anti-Semite and early opponent of the artistic preferences of Max Liebermann, the Jewish German Impressionist. At this point, Liebermann was a frail retiree in his late eighties, living in Berlin and attempting unsuccessfully to maintain a discreet profile so as not to attract the attention of anti-Semitic art world insid
ers such as Stickforth. Nolde, Stickforth wrote the Völkische Beobachter, had for years “risked his name and reputation” to advocate for the exclusion of Jews from the German art world. “He set the Jewish pack against himself by this manly deed. He’s actually the Germans’ German!” she exclaimed.46

  Though an early member of the Danish branch of the NSDAP, Nolde had maintained a public neutrality regarding Hitler’s rise. “I’m pretty helpless when it comes to politics. I don’t know myself whether I’m a German nationalist or a leftist,” he mused privately.47 Now, however, Nolde realized he would have to decide what stance he would take publicly, thereby staking his career, on the “Jewish question.” The need for him to do so was urgent. By the time of the October 1933 Foundation Stone Ceremony, Goebbels had become unsure of whether Nolde was a Great German Artist or not. “Is Nolde a Bolshevik or a painter? Theme for a dissertation,” he wrote.48

  It became clear to German artists that the Nazi cultural elites were about to name some of them Great German Artists; this title would bring not merely admiration from Goebbels and Hitler but permission to create and display artworks in an increasingly censored society. The careers of those who did not gain government approval would end and their means of supporting themselves and their families would be snuffed out. Nolde realized that he needed to more actively embrace anti-Semitism, retreat into silence, or speak out against discrimination.

  With this toxic atmosphere brewing in the art world, Nolde began targeting Max Pechstein, a fellow member of Die Brücke who was his age and had garnered popular acclaim for combining old and contemporary techniques to capture the strong spirit of a New Germany. Pechstein had always been a threat to Nolde. Not only did Pechstein have the added benefit of being a Great War veteran, but his depictions of the residents of Palau, made within three years of Nolde’s portfolio of portraits of the natives of Manilla, were decidedly easier to look at for the common connoisseur than Nolde’s similar works. Similarly, Pechstein’s woodcut series The Lord’s Prayer, though executed with primitive-looking lines inspired by the works of the native islanders, contained none of the pain and grimacing of Nolde’s The Life of Christ that put off so many regular Germans interested in buying works to display in their homes.