Hitler's Last Hostages Page 16
By early 1938, the Führer was ready to expedite his plans for European expansion. On 12 February, he met with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg at the Berghof. Alone in the Berghof office, Hitler talked at—not with—Schuschnigg for two hours.11 Hitler’s entourage at the Berghof could distinctly hear when Hitler shouted at Schuschnigg, “I am Austrian by birth, and I have been sent by providence to create the Greater German State! And you stand in my way! I will crush you!”12 After three days, Schuschnigg acquiesced to Hitler’s instruction to legalize the Nazi Party in Austria and create a joint foreign policy that Hitler would control. By 11 March, Schuschnigg had resigned. Within hours, on 12 March, German troops crossed the border between Bavaria and Austria, where civilians welcomed them with open arms. Greater Germany had arrived. Soldiers referred to the military operation as the Flower War because Austrian women pelted them with so many garlands.13 After the annexation, Germany effectively shared borders with Italy and Hungary, while Czechoslovakia was almost totally encircled.
Hitler soon visited Vienna. He toured the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which he had roamed as a failed art student twenty years before. He remembered the time he went into the foyer outside the office of Professor Alfred Roller, the art expert whom his neighbor in Linz had contacted on young Hitler’s behalf after he failed the art entrance exam. Recalling his youth, Hitler, now in his late forties, joked about his decision not to enter Roller’s office. “He would have accepted me immediately. But I don’t know if it would have been better for me: everything would have been much easier!” scoffed Hitler.14
After the Anschluss, the Nazis rounded up members of the same Jewish communities in Vienna that had funded the warming stools and homeless shelters that Hitler had used as a young man twenty-five years before. Yet, privately, the Führer was willing to throw aside the racist dogma he publicly espoused to help one man: Eduard Bloch, the doctor who had tried in vain to save his mother, Klara, during her fight with cancer. Bloch suffered financially after the Nazis closed his medical practice when they annexed Austria. Convinced that his persecution was a horrible misunderstanding, he reached out to Hitler, who placed him and his wife under official Gestapo protection until they could emigrate to America in 1940.15
Samuel Morgenstern, the most consistent buyer of Hitler’s paintings when the future Führer was a struggling artist in Vienna, was not as fortunate.16 In 1938, his framing workshop was taken over by non-Jewish Viennese without compensation. The elderly man was forbidden from working at all, leaving him with no income to pay the “Reich flight tax” required for an exit visa. Remarkably, Morgenstern still had the receipts to prove he had financially supported Hitler in his youth—and that most buyers of Hitler’s artwork had been Jewish Austrians. The retiree wrote to Hitler in Berlin, saying that he knew Hitler was “a correct and honest man.” He asked to be allowed to leave the country with his family. He offered to leave his assets behind. “Please have my application checked and please approve it. Faithfully yours,” wrote Morgenstern. The postman delivered the letter to Hitler’s secretary, who sent it to the chancellery’s mail department. It was then forwarded to the Finance Ministry, where it was filed away and forgotten.17 Samuel Morgenstern and his wife were moved to a ghetto, where he died. His widow was then deported to a concentration camp, where she soon perished.18
By this point, German and Austrian art dealers, though excited by the opportunities that resulted from Hitler’s expansion of power, had become worried about the legal risks that might arise from acquiring artworks that the Nazis had confiscated. Recognizing their concerns, the Nazis passed the Law for the Confiscation of the Products of Degenerate Art on 31 May 1938, legalizing both retroactively and for the future the confiscation of Degenerate Art from both private and public collections. The law also waived the need for the Nazis to provide compensation to those from whom they confiscated artworks. The passing of the legislation was the trigger for the Nazis to seize 5,000 paintings and 12,000 other artworks from over one hundred galleries and museums across Germany. Though the Nazis burned many of the artworks, they planned to sell the others across the continent to increase their reserves of foreign currency. Eventually, they reasoned, they could destroy the works after conquering the countries to which they had been exported. The foreign reserves handed over to Germany in exchange for these degenerate works would help to fund the invasion of Europe.19
In the summer of 1938, one in four Jewish Germans, about 150,000 people, had fled the country. Three-quarters of them sought refuge in western Europe, though many hoped to emigrate to North America. They became the topic of a conference at the chic French resort of Évian on 6 July 1938, where thirty-two nations, including France, Great Britain, and the United States, spent nine-days socializing with dignitaries from smaller nations that were far removed from Hitler’s regime, including New Zealand and Mexico. Enjoying the luxurious conditions of the Hotel Royal at the expense of their taxpayers, they discussed how to handle the deluge of Jewish German refugees. At the end of their lengthy stay, they decided to do nothing. The Jewish refugees were displaced, with no obvious haven.20
Within his own borders, Hitler began encouraging Jewish Germans to engage in “self-extermination” shortly after the Évian conference; the NSDAP rescinded the medical licenses of around 80 percent of Jewish German doctors and prohibited the remainder from treating non-Jewish Germans.21 Laws were also passed restricting the professional activities of Jewish lawyers, bankers, and entrepreneurs. For roughly half a century before Hitler’s rise to power, it had been possible for professional middle-class Jews to curate impressive artworks, creating diverse collections comprising both traditional older works and daring new styles. Though most were still hesitant to move out of Germany, these professionals began seriously exploring how to liquidate their art assets in the event that such a time might come, as well as to provide for their families given their newly straitened circumstances.
Hildebrand Gurlitt was poised to take advantage of their plight.
By late summer, Joseph Goebbels made public the plan that he and Hitler had created for confiscating Degenerate Art, declaring that the regime had decided in private meetings that the works would be offered to Americans and non-Germans in Europe in exchange for foreign currency. “In doing so we hope at least to make some money from this crap,” Goebbels wrote.22 Gurlitt was aware of this when, in August, Goebbels arranged for Schloss Niederschönhausen to house 780 of the best paintings and sculptures and 3,500 works on paper confiscated thus far, along with putting 16,000 works in an empty depot in Berlin’s Köpenicker Straße.23 The Nazis also burned approximately 5,000 artworks in a bonfire outside Berlin’s opera house. Hildebrand Gurlitt voluntarily approached Goebbels’s Propaganda Department, hoping to work with it in liquidating the artworks after a friend informed him of the repositories and Hitler’s plan to sell artworks abroad.24
Soon thereafter, Hitler’s government authorized four art dealers to help with raising money from art sales: Ferdinand Möller, Bernhard Böhmer, Karl Buchholz, and Hildebrand Gurlitt.
World leaders were too ill prepared to help those persecuted by the Nazis to even consider the fates of the victims’ assets or of art confiscated from Germany’s public and private collections. They were also ill equipped to accurately assess the treatment of those whom Hitler despised; in August 1938, an international committee for the Red Cross lead by Colonel Guillaume Favre visited the Dachau concentration camp and wrote a positive report.25
Appeasement progressed further when, on 29 and 30 September, representatives of Britain, Italy, France, and Germany signed the Munich Agreement allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland, parts of Czechoslovakia that had large German populations, without input or participation from anyone representing Czechoslovakia itself. Hitler was pleased with Neville Chamberlain’s acquiescence. The British Prime Minister, twenty years the Führer’s senior, nodded deferentially when SS men gave him the Hitlergrüß. When Chamberlain entered the negotiation room, Hitl
er did not bother to stand up. He and Goebbels also purposefully had arranged for Chamberlain’s seat to be cloaked in shadow. Upon leaving the negotiations, Chamberlain even raised his hat when SS officers again gave him the Hitlergrüß.26 The image was the perfect visualization of appeasement politics.
This amused Hitler, who on 30 September invited Chamberlain to his Munich flat to pose for a photograph. It made for a striking propaganda image.27 In the photograph, the Führer stands over the baffled-looking Briton, who is sitting on a sofa with a backdrop of German artworks, including a piece by Edward von Grützner, a quirky German painter who specialized in portraits of intoxicated monks. Hitler had never met Grützner, who died in 1925, but he had been sufficiently enamored of the eccentric artist to have praised him in Mein Kampf. The photograph was stunningly symbolic: the antiquated Chamberlain in repose at Hitler’s house, while the young Führer stands confidently, showing off his surroundings. Hitler appears as the physical embodiment of a new nation.
David Lloyd George, who had been Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Great War, met with Hitler that autumn and praised him effusively in the British press. “Whatever one may think of his methods—and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country—there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the people,” wrote George in one essay, declaring Hitler’s regime “a miracle.” As to Germany’s rearmament, George predicted it would take Germany “at least 10 years” to build up an army equal to that of France. As for Russia, wrote George sarcastically, “Germany is no more ready to invade Russia than she is for a military expedition to the moon.” Though the British statesman admitted in passing that “public condemnation of the Government” was censored “ruthlessly,” he lauded Hitler’s “magnetic, dynamic personality” and “dauntless heart” and noted, without irony, that he heard no criticism of him from German citizens.28
Like most European politicians, George had been duped.
Just one week after the photograph was taken, a seventeen-year-old Jewish Pole, Herschel Grynszpan, took a revolver to the German embassy in Paris after learning that his parents had been deported from Germany to Poland under Hitler’s new policies. Grynszpan fatally shot the first German diplomat he could find, a young junior official named Ernst vom Rath. The killing provided an opportunity that Hitler seized. The timing of the assassination was opportune for the Nazis, occurring only one day before Hitler’s annual speech commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Goebbels discreetly encouraged a series of violent reprisals against Jewish Germans. As anti-Semitic arson attacks raged throughout Germany, firemen in numerous towns rushed to the scenes of burning Jewish-owned buildings—in order to protect the adjacent Aryan-owned ones. German police arrested roughly 30,000 Jewish German men, deporting them to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other camps. The government demanded that Jewish families hand over their firearms; the majority complied. Three hundred Jews committed suicide, while anti-Semites murdered between 1,000 and 2,000 more. Neither the Catholic nor Protestant churches issued statements of condemnation.29
With their typical sardonic humor, Berliners referred to the evening as Reichskristallnacht, or “Reich crystal night,” because the smashed glass of Jewish windows sparkled on the sidewalk like shattered crystal chandeliers. Jews the world over named it “The Night of Broken Glass.”
It was now obvious to Jewish German academics, entrepreneurs, and other affluent professionals that to remain in Germany would be fatal. However, they realized to their horror that for the majority of their persecuted group, it was now too late to escape abroad. Jewish Germans with substantial art collections or real estate holdings understood that they were in immediate danger, as Nazi elites began targeting them. They were now in no logistical or legal position to defend their valuable possessions. The terror affected not only these adults but also their children, as the Nazis began breaking apart families, and their non-Jewish neighbors and friends began complying with the anti-Semitic persecution.
One child caught up in the terror was thirteen-year-old Klaus Günther Tarnowski, who lived in Breslau, a prosperous city in eastern Germany. Tarnowski had recently celebrated his bar mitzvah at the local synagogue. While worshipping there and on Jewish holidays, he answered to his religious name, David Toren. His parents, Georg Martin and Marie Hildegard (née Friedmann), not only used Tarnowski as their surname—it was the eastern German version of the traditionally Jewish surname “Toren”—but had given traditionally German birth names to both Klaus and his seventeen-year-old brother, Hans Hermann.
Georg and Marie had made that decision not out of shame or fear but out of patriotism and pride in their fatherland. Georg was a Great War veteran who had earned the Iron Cross First Class for his valor; returning home after the war, he published numerous poems and plays that were performed in Breslau. In addition to being a homemaker, Marie, in her mid-forties, was an accomplished pianist and tennis player, and the couple had an active social life in Breslau. They enrolled Klaus at a prestigious local school attended mostly by Christians and, as proud Germans, never conceived that their affable neighbors could become complicit with an anti-Semitic regime like that of the NSDAP. Even once the Nazis took power and anti-Semitism surged, the Tarnowskis viewed it as a temporary reversal: like many other Jewish Germans, sixty-year-old Georg began wearing his Iron Cross First Class around Breslau, convinced it would prove his patriotism to anti-Semites.
The nationalistic sincerity of Jewish German veterans was a particularly sensitive topic in Breslau. Georg had suffered nerve damage from sarin gas attacks during the war. Fritz Haber, also a Jewish German from Breslau, had helped develop the toxic chemical and was known nationwide as the “father” of the poison. The fact that Haber was Jewish fueled rumors spread by Breslau-based anti-Semites that the Jews who had served in the Great War had actually been planted in their units by a secret international Jewish organization to help poison “real” Germans. Regardless, when the teenage Klaus asked his parents about the growing anti-Semitism, both Georg and Marie seemed genuinely unconcerned. “No one thought that Hitler would last very long,” Klaus Tarnowski would recall with sadness over half a century later, after he had legally changed his name to David Toren.30
In autumn 1938, Klaus was focused primarily on his academics, on karate, at which he excelled, and on a schoolgirl named Anita, a fellow Jewish resident of Breslau. Klaus and Anita had admired each other since kindergarten; now, at the beginning of adolescence, the two frequently held hands at the end of the school day. On 9 November, a Wednesday, Klaus headed from school to his weekly 7 p.m. karate lesson with his instructor, a Korean immigrant. To the boy’s surprise, his instructor said that there would be no lesson: the Nazis, believing that Koreans were also a superior race, had recruited him as an SA member. “You go home now and avoid the street corners, because bad things are going to happen to the Jews this night,” he told Klaus, revealing that the SA was planning to smash the store windows of Jewish shops before setting them on fire. Rushing home, Klaus spotted a Jewish friend who had just been at the synagogue and warned him of the coming destruction. Heading to Klaus’s house, the two saw a few SA members marking up the windows to be smashed. Spotting the boys, the men rushed at them. Klaus put his martial arts training to good use—kicking one of the men in the genitals before grabbing his friend’s hand and running home. The family hid in an interior room, listening to the sirens of fire trucks wailing through the night.
The next morning, the Gestapo knocked on their door and announced that they would be arresting Klaus’s father for a crime they had yet to determine. It was a surreal moment for Klaus; the men smiled at him and his mother and were, he later recalled, “impeccably polite.”31 After she recovered from the shock, Marie called her uncle, David Friedmann, a wealthy widower and retiree in his early eighties, who had made his money in the sugar and brick industries and lived nearby with his daughter, Charlotte. Friedmann was not only shocked to hear about
Georg’s arrest but also alarmed because Georg was supposed to represent him that morning as he sold a portion of his 10,000 acres to a Nazi officer in an attempt to appease Hitler’s elites. Now, Friedmann worried that the officer would turn against the entire family, including Marie and her sons.
After a few frenzied phone calls, the officer located Georg and brought him to the estate, where Marie and Klaus were waiting to see him. As the adults brokered the sale, Klaus wandered around the house eating chocolates that the Nazis had given him; though he had showed up to the estate scared, his father greeted him calmly and encouraged him to eat the sweets and enjoy this “surprise school holiday.” Going through each room, Klaus said good-bye to the estate where his family had enjoyed most of their leisure time. Delicate marble statues and exotic African ivory carvings sat on the pristine tables; on the walls hung artwork by both German and French Impressionists—his uncle’s favorite genres. Friedmann had a Lovis Corinth ink drawing of a politician, an oil painting of a river landscape by Camille Pissarro, and a portrait by Max Liebermann of a girl sewing.
The hardest work for Klaus to say good-bye to hung in a dark annex that protected it from light: Liebermann’s 1901 painting Two Riders on the Beach. Klaus did not know much about the artist, but it was his favorite work because his uncle had taught him to ride horses. The boy liked to imagine that, one day, the two of them could take a trip to the seashore and ride there just like the men in the painting. As evening set in, he ventured out of the annex to say farewell to his father. After the sale had been completed, the Gestapo rushed Georg to their Mercedes; they had been warned that the next train to the Buchenwald concentration camp would leave promptly at 7 p.m. Georg told his son that it was simply a routine business trip and the boy was not to worry.
On 12 November 1938, the Nazi government ordered Jewish Germans to pay one billion reichsmarks in compensation for the “services” the government provided by cleaning up the destruction of Reichskristallnacht, which it had quietly encouraged. On 3 December the government legalized the takeover of Jewish business by non-Jews. As with the law that legalized the confiscation of Degenerate Art, which the NSDAP had enacted in May, the Nazis made this change in order to mollify complaints by non-Jewish Germans who were appalled at the attacks on Jewish businesses—not for their cruelty but because they had not been legally sanctioned. Now, the destruction of property and assets owned by Jewish Germans could be conducted in plain sight.