Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  Commercial success thus came far easier to Pechstein than to Nolde. In February 1913, at just thirty-one, Pechstein had begun working with an influential family of art dealers and curators: the Gurlitts.49 His large solo show of forty oil paintings and three stained glass windows at Fritz Gurlitt’s gallery led to a coveted contract with Wolfgang Gurlitt, who sold his art on commission and gave him steady monthly advances.50 The Gurlitt family provided Pechstein with generous space—both physical gallery space and mental room—to take artistic risks. Pechstein’s portrayal of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise displayed in Wolfgang Gurlitt’s gallery used the artistic medium of the mosaic developed in ancient Greece and Rome, the pinnacle of ancient Western culture. The aesthetically appealing image showing bodies with soft bellies and curves, yet primitive faces similar to those in Nolde’s works, was featured in the prestigious Das Kunstblatt a year later.51 This in turn lead to an exhibition of Pechstein’s work at the Kunstmuseum Zwickau curated by director Hildebrand Gurlitt, Wolfgang’s cousin. Pleased by the director’s progressive approach and refusal to bend to right-wing conservatives, Pechstein hoped that through Hildebrand Gurlitt “there may grow an oasis in this desert” of the German art world, which was growing increasingly stagnant now that the Nazis were intent on censorship.52

  Yet, despite this Nazi interference in the art world and the NSDAP’s antagonistic approaches to Pechstein’s Jewish and female colleagues, Pechstein yearned for power and influence and thus aimed to ingratiate himself with the Nazis. So he stayed silent. He was aware he was leaving weaker artists susceptible to persecution by not advocating for them, writing to Grosz in New York to describe how he and the other members of the new Reich Association of German Artists had acquiesced as Nazis purged the group of undesirables. “Well, what shall I tell you, among these few hundred members no-one objected,” he wrote. “You see, that’s how we are! Snappy, what?”53 When present at a meeting in which Käthe Kollwitz was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts during a Nazi purge of opponents, he declined to defend her. Pechstein justified this passivity by saying that he was a male Aryan, under no pressure to risk his stable career.54

  This behavior backfired for Pechstein, whose career began to decline while Nolde’s seemed to ascend. By autumn 1933, Pechstein knew why: Nolde had told a civil servant during a meeting at Goebbels’s office that Pechstein, with his surname ending in “stein,” was Jewish and lying about it. Nolde had decided to fully embrace explicit anti-Semitism in his efforts to preserve his status in the art world. Pechstein was furious, demanding that Nolde retract the accusation and providing Goebbels with documents asserting his Aryan heritage. Nolde refused to back down, and Goebbels refused to take the risk of investigating the matter. Due to the growing rumors that Pechstein might not be a full Aryan, the artist’s career began to suffer. German collectors grew wary of buying his pieces or promoting him.55 Outraged, Pechstein wrote to George Grosz in New York that the Nazis now considered him a cultural Bolshevik and Jew, which was ruining his livelihood. The irony seemed lost on Pechstein that Grosz had uprooted his entire family and fled to New York due to accusations that he was a Bolshevik himself. Instead of fleeing as Grosz had done, Pechstein remained silent, hoping that the Nazis would eventually welcome him back, even as they persecuted his former friends.56

  Nolde’s power play over Pechstein worked. Goebbels invited Nolde to the inauguration of the Reich Chamber of Culture in November, and he and his wife, Ada, also received invitations to the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch. Visiting Berlin, the Noldes stayed with Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Harvard man. Putzi hung several of Nolde’s works in his Berlin flat in solidarity. Having Nolde in attendance was crucial for Goebbels, who was drafting his list of artists for 1937’s Great German Art Exhibition. Supporting Nolde, the Propaganda Minister recently had hung several of the artist’s works in his own home. Hitler had seen them, however, and found them unpleasant.57 Knowing Nolde’s work could be difficult to process, Goebbels surmised that meeting the artist might be the best option for the Führer.

  Listening to Hitler and sitting in proximity to cultural figures of whom Hitler already approved fully converted Nolde into a Hitler supporter. “We saw and listened to the Führer for the first time without the intermediation of radio,” he wrote a friend, adding that he had been enchanted by Hitler’s soaring rhetoric. Though many of the military officers seemed boorish, Hitler’s speech was cultured. “The Führer is great and noble in his aspirations and a genius man of action,” said Nolde, who heeded Hitler’s warning that the Jews must be controlled. “He is still being surrounded by a swarm of dark figures in an artificially created cultural fog. It seems as if the sun will break through here and dispel this fog in the near future,” he wrote.58

  Nolde was determined to help cut through that fog. Setting aside his brushes for a pen, he channeled his effort into pandering to Hitler, feverishly writing a memoir published in 1934 that Nolde titled Jahre der Kämpfe (Years of Struggle), an overt homage to Mein Kampf.

  As Hitler had in Mein Kampf, Nolde expressed reverence for his mother but a wariness of female sexuality. Mentioning his wife, Ada, he worried publicly that sexual desires in wives had the power to “kill the artists in men.”59 This despite the fact that, for years, Ada had submitted to her husband’s creative demands and insecurities. “He had, apparently, in his nature something ponderous and dull, timorous and awkward; she was delicate and fine, charming, natural, of an almost fragile physicality, but there flowed between them an uninterrupted quiet harmony,” one of Nolde’s longtime collectors once observed.60

  In his memoir, Nolde mimicked Hitler’s discussion of nature’s mystic powers, with descriptions using archaic German phrases that bordered on maudlin: “It pained me, when in autumn the woodcutters came, hewing, sawing, and brutally felling the most beautiful of trees. Roaring, they fell directly over my path and lay dead, the majestic towering trunks with lost crowns,” he wrote of the apparent trauma he suffered when witnessing how logs were made.61 The artist took a less charitable view, however, in describing Jews. Though less virulent than Hitler in Mein Kampf, he described at length the first Jewish German he had met, at the age of eighteen in Flensburg, as “akin to a phenomenon.”62 Nolde also claimed to have met a Jewish researcher in Berlin who allegedly maintained that he was compelled to bed every young girl with whom he was left alone; Nolde wrote that this was proof that Jewish men were sexual deviants by nature. Nolde also targeted Pechstein yet again in Jahre der Kämpfe, calling him the “darling” of the “Jewish-controlled” media. He also attacked the once-revered German impressionist Max Liebermann, warning that he and other Jews have “great intelligence” but “little soul and little gift for creativity.”63

  In Jahre der Kämpfe, Nolde also advocated for enforced governmental regulation, including eugenics programs, for the sake of cultural purity. “Some people, particularly the ones who are mixed, have the urgent wish that everything—humans, art, culture—could be integrated, in which case human society across the globe would consist of mutts, bastards and mulattos,” warned Nolde.64 As a final flourish, Nolde mimicked Hitler and Goebbels’s assertions in their publications that their views were divinely inspired, writing that he had “God in me, hot and holy as the love of Christ.”65

  The bold manifesto shocked more reserved anti-Semites, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, still living in Switzerland and struggling with depression and a lengthy unproductive streak. Kirchner privately believed that every Jew lacked creativity and thus a true German “cannot be friends with him,” but he found Nolde’s public bigotry untoward. “It is very sad that he is such an opportunist [Conjunkturjäger], but he was always that way,” Kirchner commented to a friend, adding that Nolde had been supported by Jewish Germans far more than most artists.66

  The publication of Jahre der Kämpfe was, in effect, the throwing down of a gauntlet. Goebbels clearly now needed to issue a ruling on Nolde, one, Goebbels realized, th
at would not only influence the outcome of Nolde’s career but also test the Propaganda Minister’s seemingly indestructible relationship with the Führer. Goebbels was leaning toward a relatively tolerant interpretation of what constituted a Great German Artist, a standard by which new and even radical artistic techniques would be accepted, provided that the artist was Aryan and the content conformed to Nazi ideology.

  Before becoming involved with the Nazis, Goebbels had once attended a lecture on Vincent van Gogh, praising the Dutchman as “one of the most modern men in new art.” Goebbels even romanticized the mental illness that had contributed to van Gogh’s suicide. “All modern artists—I’m not talking here about half-hearted snobs and epigones—are to a greater or lesser degree insane—like all of us who have active minds,” he had noted.67 As a young man, Goebbels also had become interested in Ernst Barlach, a leading sculptor and lithographer whose figures were similar to Nolde’s in evoking primal emotions. His bronze statue Christ and John shows Jesus embracing his cousin John the Baptist, an evocative piece that celebrates familial love and vulnerable emotions in the two young men. Barlach, a Great War veteran born near Hamburg, also had two sculptures in the Thirty German Artists exhibition that Nolde had been in and that Goebbels had supported.68

  The debate about the cultural limits of Nazism took place in an atmosphere of bloody party purges that culminated in a rampage between 30 June and 2 July 1934, known as the Night of the Long Knives or the Röhm Putsch. A small but boisterous faction of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) began causing trouble for Hitler shortly after he became Chancellor in January 1933. While most Nazis immediately settled down to the task of governing, Ernst Röhm, the SA’s forty-six-year-old cofounder, brazenly declared that the “German Revolution” was ongoing. Hitler, never a fan of revolutionary language, which he felt sounded communist, had insisted to Röhm, Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and other top officials that the revolution was complete: they were now actual lawmakers.69

  Röhm remained defiant, demanding in February 1934 that the SA should control national defense.70 Röhm had become so bellicose by summer 1934 that Hitler realized that the hothead was jeopardizing the NSDAP. Fearing a putsch, Hitler and his entourage made a surprise visit to the Hotel Hanselbauer in the Bavarian lake town of Bad Wiessee on Tegernsee, where Röhm was staying with supporters. Barging into their rooms at 6:30 a.m., where they were sleeping off a hard night of drinking, Hitler brandished a pistol and declared Röhm a traitor. Hitler’s loyalists then found Röhm’s deputy, Edmund Heines, in bed with a younger Nazi man. This, combined with the fact that Röhm was an open but discreet homosexual, proved politically expedient. Neither Hitler nor Goebbels was particularly homophobic, but Röhm’s indiscretion provided them with a convenient slander palatable to the general public: the SA was bursting with repugnant homosexuals and therefore had to be purged.71 Hitler’s faithful took Röhm and five other SA men to Stadelheim prison in Munich.

  Back in central Berlin, Goebbels called Göring with the secret password to begin a wider purge: “Operation Kolibri” or “Operation Hummingbird.” Vice Chancellor von Papen, whose concern about potential judicial overreach was an increasing annoyance, was too prominent to be assassinated. Instead, Nazi hit men killed his press secretary, Herbert von Bose, to send a sinister message72 and murdered Edward Jung, von Papen’s speechwriter, and dumped him in a ditch. They subsequently put von Papen under house arrest. Youthful Nazis wearing coordinating trench coats and fedoras entered former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher’s home while he was on the phone; they shot him and gunned down his wife, Elizabeth.73 Hours later at a garden party, while mingling with his ministers’ wives, Hitler announced that Röhm’s death was necessary and that Röhm needed to do the deed himself. Nazis in Stadelheim gave Röhm a revolver with a single bullet in the cylinder and left his cell. Ten minutes later, when no shot was heard, they reentered the room and shot Röhm themselves.

  By the time the killings ceased on 2 July, the Nazis had assassinated at least two hundred people. Generally, Germans were grateful that their Führer had taken decisive steps to protect them from forces that could have unseated their first stable government in decades. With journalists consenting to Hitler’s control and the Protestant and Catholic churches remaining silent, laymen remained unaware that some of those killed were merely vocal objectors to some of Hitler’s more bigoted policies.74 Ordinary Germans gave little thought to the violation of the rule of law—with deadly results—that occurred during the Night of the Long Knives.

  The increasing trust Germans placed in their Führer came at a time when President Hindenburg’s health was fading, causing increased anxiety among ordinary Germans, who revered him. Hitler asked Germans on 1 August to vote on whether, when Hindenburg was no longer fit to serve, Hitler should take up Hindenburg’s responsibilities. Within hours, Hindenburg died at age eighty-six due to complications from cancer. After a pomp-filled funeral, Germans voted 89.9 percent to make Hitler the sole executive head of the country, as the military took oaths pledging loyalty to him rather than the nation.75

  Invitations for a rally at Nuremberg sent two weeks later featured what would become a favorite artistic theme for Hitler: muscular, naked young men bearing the party standard. Five hundred trains carried 225,000 people to cheer on the Führer with cries so genuine that even cynics, including American journalist William Shirer, were impressed. “They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana, on the faces of some Holy Rollers,” he recorded.76

  The Nazis legalized territorial expansion and anti-Semitism in 1935. In January, when French control of the Saarland expired under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the region’s half million voters cast ballots on whether to join France or return to Germany; 91 percent volunteered to join Hitler’s dictatorship.77 Two months later, when Hitler announced to foreign embassies that he was creating a new Wehrmacht with thirty-six divisions, Great Britain and France were too divided to react forcefully.78 The Führer’s confidence reenergized once-hesitant anti-Semitic hooligans, who now had a growing Jewish population to terrorize: many Jewish Germans who had fled discrimination came back to Berlin for the summer, encouraged by Germany’s financial stabilization and underestimating the NSDAP’s anti-Semitic prejudice. As bullying increased, Hitler decided that the most efficient action to take was no action at all. “There’s no point in artificially creating additional difficulties,” he reasoned.79 Moderate Germans began raising concerns with the government about the violence, not because it was immoral but because it was illegal. Recognizing this, the government simply legalized discrimination.

  Hitler and Goebbels went on a brief summer vacation in mid-July to relax before further legislative overhaul. “Eating together. Then walks and a boat trip by moonlight. Wonderful atmosphere. I steer. Back and forth across the Baltic. Führer very happy. I enjoy giving him joy,” journaled Goebbels, enraptured.80 Back in Berlin, the NSDAP declared that future marriages between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans were forbidden, Jewish Germans couldn’t employ women under forty-five to work in their houses, and the government would soon determine the status of “partial” Jews.

  After visiting an independently organized Dresden exhibition of Degenerate Art in August, Hitler was encouraged by the fact that Aryan elites in the art world were beginning to spontaneously denounce art that conflicted with the traditional styles and patriotic themes that their Führer preferred. He made “the future of German art” the major theme of the 1935 Nuremberg rally. So confident was Hitler of the universal truths in his speech that he ordered his Propaganda Ministry to translate it and publish it in English. Speaking to the crowd, he argued that by relinquishing so many rights to the government, Germans had shown the world how much they trusted their Führer to protect their cherished culture. “At some future date, when it will be possible to view those events in clearer perspective, people will be astonished to find that just at the time the National Socialists and their leaders we
re fighting a life-or-death battle for the preservation of the nation, the first impulse was given for the re-awakening and restoration of artistic vitality,” he declared.81 The cultural and political programs of the NSDAP were increasingly aligned, he said, in order to rid Germany of “facile smearers of paint.” Nazi Germany was showing its character—determining who was and was not worthy of inclusion.

  Hitler fervently explained that a nation’s art reflected the genetic purity of its citizens. Privately, Hitler told his inner circle that inferior artists should be “‘reeducated’ in concentration camps.” Publicly, however, he argued simply said that he was challenging artists who aimed to “wallow in filth and rubbish for the sake of filth and rubbish” and glorify the “moral and physical decomposition” of inferior humans in order to sully German culture. He was merely protecting German safety as any good leader should.82 “Just as nobody would claim that, in order to uphold the sacred right of personal liberty, the assassin should be left free to inflict physical death on his neighbor, for the same reason nobody has the right to be allowed to inflict spiritual death on a people, simply because he claims full liberty for the exercise of his obscene and distorted fancy,” Hitler argued.83