Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  The fourth room was an assortment of paintings not arranged by any theme; they included Oskar Kokoschka’s 1914 work Bride of the Wind, the portrait of the artist and his lover at the time, Alma Mahler, now maligned by the Nazis because her late husband, composer Gustav Mahler, had been Jewish. Guenther saw Kirchner’s exploration of his postwar depression, Sick Man at Night, before he entered the fifth room, where the Nazis had arranged art under the themes “Nature as Seen by Sick Minds” and “Madness Becomes Method.” There, Nolde’s painting Young Oxen hung catty-corner to Kirchner’s Winter Landscape in Moonlight, which was near his glamorization of prostitutes from 1913, Five Women on the Street.

  It was clear, looking through this room, that even artists who had tried after the Great War to paint subjects they considered harmless were being skewered if their artworks deviated even slightly from what Hitler considered ideal depictions of Aryan culture and the perfect Aryan body. Beckmann, the artist who had created the massive painting of the Titanic’s sinking, had worked after the Great War to create portraits of acrobatic performers and still life depictions of musical instruments, two themes he was convinced would be noncontroversial. The Nazis had not been able to find one of his greatest works, The Lion Tamer, a vibrant gouache work on paper of a circus trainer teaching a lion tricks, but in this fifth room hung other portraits of acrobats and even a still life of a saxophone; Hitler hated the instrument, believing that it represented the “niggerization” of German music.

  Winding his way through the crowds, down the narrow staircase, Guenther came to a catacomb-like corridor packed with paintings and works on paper crammed together on the walls. Works from Max Pechstein’s series The Lord’s Prayer hung alongside Dix’s portrait of a prostitute, Leonie. Also here was Keep Your Mouth Shut and Do Your Duty, George Grosz’s etching from 1927 and the most famous of the twenty works of his in the exhibition. On the wall around Grosz’s works were quotes from his publisher, Wieland Herzfelde, about the potential merits of communism.

  Guenther did not notice the discrepancy, but one artist appeared in both exhibitions. Rudolf Belling, a fifty-year-old Berliner who had moved to Istanbul in early 1937 after much of his work was confiscated by the Nazis, had submitted a 1929 sculpture of the celebrated boxer Max Schmeling. The German boxer had been heavyweight champion of the world between 1930 and 1932 and had beaten Joe Louis in 1936. Hoffmann had accepted and prominently displayed the work in the Great German Art Exhibition—clearly a statement of the superiority of Aryans—even as Ziegler put Belling’s cubist-inspired Triad and a sleek brass work of a gorgeous woman’s head in the Degenerate Art Exhibition.110

  When a “journalist” quietly pointed out the discrepancy to party officials, Nazis removed the “degenerate” Belling work; the exemplary one remained on show.111 In their reporting, the press toed the party line. On 20 July, the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost classified the works in the Degenerate Art Exhibition as “shoddy products of a melancholy age” when Bolshevism and dilettantism celebrated their triumphs.”112

  Having their works in the Degenerate Art Exhibition represented the professional death knell for Nolde, Kokoschka, Dix, Pechstein, Kirchner, and dozens of other artists who had hoped to continue their livelihoods in Europe after the Nazis took power. In total, thousands of their artworks were confiscated by the Nazis for potential use in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. When that exhibition closed in Munich in 1937 before touring the country, over two million people had visited, a number that even New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art would not surpass until the Mona Lisa visited Manhattan in 1963.

  The Great German Art Exhibition, by contrast, saw 554,759 visitors between July and its closing on 31 October.113 The artworks it showcased were put up for sale; this, combined with the growing Nazi censorship of artists featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition, was an explicit attempt by the government to rig the art market: it declared Aryan work valuable even as it condemned and confiscated supposedly Degenerate Art. “The prices of these works were tenfold excessive, and the big German companies and industrialists were ordered to buy the exhibited works, which they did not want to possess, for large sums,” Emil Nolde fumed to a friend about the “trivial, average pictures and sculptures” on display at the House of German Art. “A similar art fraud under the cloak of the state had probably never happened before,” he added.114

  He was right.

  By 22 July, three days after the show at the House of German Art opened, 250,000 reichsmarks’ worth of art had sold. Ultimately, Germans bought around five hundred works for a total of 750,000 reichsmarks that year from the House of German Art.115 The Führer himself popped up at the sales: he was the largest supporter, paying 268,449 reichsmarks for an unknown number of works.116 Goebbels piled in, too: he bought 50,000 reichsmarks’ worth of art for the Propaganda Ministry and 200,000 reichsmarks’ worth for his private collection. “The Führer has taken many beautiful things away, but there is still a lot,” Goebbels recorded, adding that there were “wonderful things among them.” Primarily German firms hoping to ingratiate themselves with the regime purchased the remaining third of the artworks.117 Ultimately, there was no genuine popular enthusiasm for the work displayed in the Great German Art Exhibition. The sales were mostly manipulated.

  Nevertheless, Nolde did not give up the fight to ingratiate himself with the Nazis. He continued protesting to Goebbels that he was a true German artist whom the regime should cherish. “I take this particularly hard, and especially because I was—before the beginning of the National Socialist movement—almost the only German artist in open struggle against the foreign infiltration of German art and fought against the unclean art dealers,” he wrote to Goebbels.118 Nolde retreated to the remote hinterlands of Frisia in northern Germany, working on a six-hundred-page memoir he would publish two decades later, conveniently leaving out any mention of the period between 1933 and 1945.

  Oskar Kokoschka, living in Prague, soon fled to England. Otto Dix retreated with his family to a house on Lake Constance at the Swiss border, hoping that the Nazis would forget about him. Max Pechstein escaped detection for a few years, until the Nazis drafted him into the Volkssturm, their national militia.

  Inclusion in the Degenerate Art Exhibition hit Ernst Ludwig Kirchner the hardest of all. After years of battling clinical depression and insomnia, he told his partner, Erna, on the night of 14–15 June 1938 that he was about to shoot himself. After Hitler invaded Austria, he could not cope with a growing fear that the Nazis would invade Switzerland and capture him, a fear he developed after being so maligned in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Erna immediately went to the telephone to call his doctors for help but, as she was doing so, he walked outside and pulled the trigger. “He chose a radiantly beautiful day,” Erna recalled a few days later. “He had been suffering grievously until he was able to make this decision.”119

  In summer 1938, Max Beckmann, his career in tatters, traveled to London to warn the English art world about the censorship that had increased in the year since the opening of the House of German Art and the Degenerate Art Exhibition. In vain, Beckmann cautioned that the collectivism that had taken over the art world in Germany would extend into other parts of German society if other nations did not actively oppose it. “The greatest danger that threatens humanity is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites. I am against these attempts with all the strength of my being,” he unsuccessfully entreated.120

  The majority of the art world did not listen. Meanwhile, Hitler and Goebbels moved forward with their plans to process the thousands of artworks they had stolen or confiscated from museums and institutions around Germany even as they eyed the private collections of Jewish Germans and other minorities. Their ambitions were not limited to Germany. Both men aimed to use military expansion into other western European countries to gain access to the greatest art collections on the continent so that they could rewrite—
on a continental scale—the cultural history of European art in favor of their Germanic prejudices. In order to do this, they realized, they would need to assemble a team of savvy museum directors and art dealers to help them accomplish what would become the largest art heist in history.

  CHAPTER V

  BAD COMPANY CORRUPTS GOOD MORALS

  “Occasionally, the soul can be turned into money.”

  —Publisher Heinrich Ellermann to Hildebrand Gurlitt

  IN THE MIDST OF WORLD War I, Hildebrand Gurlitt, then a soldier in his early twenties, wrote on an undated page of paper that “in the moments of great danger,” humans “freeze” their emotions, and a man is able to make himself “a clearly thinking, unfeeling machine.”1 It was a skill that Hildebrand set aside for twenty years until autumn 1938, when, faced with a regime that sought to destroy the modern art he had once nourished, it became politically and financially expedient for him to use his connections to help the Nazis dismantle that very system in which he had been so influential.

  Born on 15 September 1895 to the respected art historian Cornelius Gurlitt and his wife, Marie, Hildebrand was the youngest of three children. The family was immersed in the German art world. Cornelius was professor at the respected Königlich Sächsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden, where the family lived in a stately villa on the urbane Kaisitzer Straße; his paternal grandfather, Louis, then an octogenarian, had been a landscape painter beloved by the upper middle class.

  As a child, Hildebrand went with his mother to see an exhibition of the Brücke artists, the group of which Emil Nolde had been a part and that George Grosz had admired as a student. Even at such a young age, Hildebrand appreciated how the Brücke artists challenged convention. Discussing the exhibition with his father after the show, he was thrilled to hear Cornelius predict that the Brücke artists would represent a freshness for the boy’s generation that the Jewish German artist Max Liebermann and the Christian German artist Lovis Corinth had represented for Cornelius’s generation.

  Shortly before the Great War, the art school where Hildebrand’s father was a professor accepted him as a student, offering him a chance to avoid serving in the military provided that Germany won the war quickly. Yet Hildebrand and his younger brother Wilibald eagerly volunteered for the front with the same enthusiasm that had swept up Adolf Hitler and George Grosz. Like Grosz and his artist friends, however, Gurlitt was quickly disillusioned by combat—a point that the military noted in its reports when moving the twenty-two-year-old Gurlitt in October 1917 to a desk job in Lithuania, where he propagandized to the natives regarding the superiority of German art and culture. The job, Hildebrand wrote at the time to Wilibald, made him yearn to work after the war as a museum director in “some town or other with modern, heavy industrial life,” where he could influence the mind-sets of blue-collar workers indifferent to art or high culture and ignite in these philistines an enthusiasm for contemporary art.2

  After the Great War’s end on 11 November 1918, Gurlitt studied art history in Berlin and Frankfurt before returning to Dresden to work at the Architectural History Collection that his father had helped establish. His professional life was thriving, thanks to his father’s connections, but the family experienced tragedy at home: Hildebrand’s younger sister Cornelia killed herself, seemingly motivated by a breakup with her married lover, an esteemed art critic ten years her senior.3

  On 1 April 1925, Hildebrand Gurlitt became director of the König Albert Museum in Zwickau, a small industrial town near the Czech border. At just twenty-nine years old, Gurlitt achieved the goal he had set for himself at his army desk job in 1919. The position offered him an opportunity to showcase a unique curatorial style that he hoped would draw the attention of more prestigious museums. Early on as director at Zwickau, Gurlitt took a stand against the more powerful, more traditional, and better-funded museums in Berlin and Hamburg by bluntly positing that a museum director should not solely operate as “the faithful guardian and propagator of ancient treasures” but also instruct visitors, particularly local ones, about the merits of art made in their own time. He issued a direct challenge to the establishment by declaring that he wanted to be the first director in an industrial area to exhibit abstract art.4

  Gurlitt shrewdly devised an innovative and lucrative system through which to promote contemporary art on a shoestring budget, enriching Zwickau’s collection as he also expanded his own bank account. He would stage exhibitions as a curator but also encourage sales that he would personally broker. On a large, dark wooden desk covered with papers and small figurines, he successfully organized exhibitions promoting artists then embroiled in controversial political struggles, notably Max Pechstein and Käthe Kollwitz. The artists welcomed his support; Kollwitz, then in her early fifties, was reeling from the death of her son Peter on the battlefield, and Pechstein, in his late thirties, had recently created his works based on his 1914 trip to the Palau Islands. The Pechstein exhibition was particularly profitable, not only because a large number of Germans bought tickets to see it but also because Gurlitt successfully brokered sales of Pechstein’s works while they were hanging in the museum; the scheme gave a 10 percent kickback to the museum and generated a commission for Gurlitt.5 He became both curator and dealer, artfully blurring the line between the two professions, a move that, while legal, respected directors in Europe considered ethically dubious.

  Following the success of the shows, Gurlitt began recruiting wealthy sponsors who endowed the Zwickau museum in exchange for his advice on what they should buy and sell for their private collections. The quid pro quo worked well. Salman Schocken, a Jewish German businessman, displayed his private collection in the Zwickau museum. Gurlitt had a similar arrangement with Leo Levin, another Jewish German collector.6 The ability to showcase art owned by wealthy collectors increased the museum’s social status and revenue while also upping the value of Schocken’s and Levin’s collections. It also brought personal profits for Gurlitt. He soon expanded his art advisory business to Dresden, where Jewish German industrialist Kurt Kirchbach also used him as a consultant.7

  Despite creating a stronger financial footing for the museum, Gurlitt angered the retirees in Zwickau, who protested that he was replacing the calming landscapes and portraits in their beloved museum with what they considered bizarre art by radical young artists—the men and women from whom Gurlitt was profiting personally. Controversially, Gurlitt balanced the museum’s budget by selling old-fashioned works in its permanent collection that he considered subpar, including one by Wilhelm Kuhnert. Though hardly a heavyweight in the great canon of German art, Kuhnert crafted animal scenes that were both biologically accurate and emotionally charming, and the Zwickau traditionalists were greatly attached to his paintings.8 After selling off Kuhnert’s work, Gurlitt curated shows with lascivious themes, including one exhibition in 1928 on the history of sexually transmitted diseases. For a small city like Zwickau, it was a smashing success; predictably, however, the topic offended the more reserved townspeople.9

  Confrontation was inevitable. Zwickau officials, Gurlitt’s supporters, and Gurlitt himself exchanged hundreds of pages of tightly typed letters debating whether he should leave his post. Ultimately, on 1 April 1930, he left his directorship, pushed out by those in Zwickau who considered him a vulgar populist.

  Gurlitt quickly bounced back. He secured a position as head of the Hamburg Art Association, a placement that thrilled him. He and his wife, Helene, hoped to start a family, and on 28 December 1932, she gave birth to their son. The couple named him Cornelius after Gurlitt’s father, who was then in his early eighties. Working in Hamburg, Gurlitt continued to support female artists, holding a show for Gretchen Wohlwill, a Jewish German artist in her early fifties. He still blurred the line between curator and dealer as he had in Zwickau, selling art he displayed in the exhibition space and pocketing profits. Just months after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, the association’s authorities fired Gurlitt both for his love of avant-garde art
and for his refusal to fly the Nazi flag outside the building. Undaunted, he began focusing exclusively on dealing.

  Now that Hitler was in power, the apolitical and agnostic Gurlitt began worrying about his future. Although he was nominally a Protestant, Gurlitt’s grandmother had been Jewish, making him a mischling, or “mongrel,” in the eyes of the Nazi elite. Yet, despite qualifying as a “mongrel second-degree,” he continued dealing in modern art that Hitler would soon declare degenerate. In 1935, Gurlitt’s family grew with the birth of his second child, a daughter, whom he and Helene named Renate Nicoline Benita. That same year, he put on a show of twenty-five works by the Jewish Swiss artist Karl Ballmer, helping the artist, then in his mid-forties, maintain a modicum of financial security and academic respect at a precarious time in his career.10 The support for Ballmer was appreciated by one of his more famous fans, Irish writer and later Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett, who attended the exhibition.

  By early 1937, after Hitler instructed Joseph Goebbels to round up modern art inside German museums for the Degenerate Art Exhibition in autumn of that year, Gurlitt became aware that staying above the fray would be impossible: he would need to either leave the country, join the resistance, retreat into obscurity, or collaborate with the Nazis. He would later maintain that, as a quarter Jew, he had chosen to lay low. In reality, he actively sought to undermine the very market he had once nurtured, not to survive but instead to make millions of reichsmarks.

  When faced with grave danger, Gurlitt became what he had described twenty years before: a “clearly thinking, unfeeling machine.”