Hitler's Last Hostages Page 17
The Nazi government concurrently enacted legislation clarifying that marriages in which the husband was Jewish but the children were raised Christian were legally privileged, which included Hildebrand Gurlitt’s own marriage. Moreover, Gurlitt was in a protected position given his job as an art dealer for Hitler, which by now was lucrative not only due to the deals he struck for the Führer but because of the purchases he made for himself.
In December 1938, Gurlitt bought twenty-three drawings by Adolph Menzel, a revered nineteenth-century German realist artist noted for his delicate, precise sketches and etchings, from the Wolffson family, Christian Germans who were being persecuted by the Nazis for their Jewish ethnicity and who desperately needed funds to plan and finance their emigration to the United States. Gurlitt was well qualified to assess the quality of the works, particularly Interior of a Gothic Church, with elegantly curving arches, and Roofs, a charmingly quirky view of the rooftops of the quaint Saxon town of Schandau. Gurlitt took advantage of the desperate straits of the Wolffson family, offering only 150 reichsmarks for Gothic Church and 300 reichsmarks for Roofs, roughly $60 and $120 at the time. Immediately after buying them, however, Gurlitt flipped Roofs for 1,400 reichsmarks—a 367 percent profit. He decided to keep Gothic Church for himself.32
As Germans rang in the New Year in 1939, signs of impending war were clear. Germany had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest aluminum producer, an ominous indication of a surging need for military equipment. Clampdowns on Jews continued, a point about which Hitler was clear: “The Jews among us will be annihilated,” the Führer bluntly told the Czech Foreign Minister on 21 January, a point he reiterated in a 30 January speech to the Reichstag.33
Hitler met on 15 March with Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha to demand that he sign an agreement making his country a German protectorate. When Hácha refused, Hitler resorted to shouting at him, “If you don’t sign, German bombers will reduce Prague to ruins!” The threat caused Hácha to faint, and he had to be revived by Hitler’s doctor, Theodor Morell; one of Hitler’s assistants then pushed a fountain pen into Hácha’s hand. Hácha complied. Around midnight, Hitler’s huge Mercedes limousine sped into Prague. Unlike the Anschluss of Austria, which the majority of Austrians had supported, this encroachment into Czechoslovakia was deeply unwanted by the inhabitants. It was a landgrab well beyond any historic German boundaries. At Prague’s Hradčany, Hitler climbed out of the car and, in its headlights, stood before the door of the castle that seemed to float above Prague’s roofs. Inside, he ordered those present to bring all available food and drink to a table for his men. Hearing from his advisors that Neville Chamberlain was astonished by Hitler’s move, the Führer was genuinely baffled. “I don’t understand why London is so amazed; they must have known it was going to happen,” he remarked to his men.34
A few weeks later, Hitler woke up at 8 a.m. to celebrate his fiftieth birthday on 20 April 1939. His staff had packed the chancellery with flowers and exotic plants, and as the Führer entered the Great Hall, a band struck up the Bavarian military tune “Badenweiler Marsch,” one of his favorites. Following that, they played the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.” They then presented Hitler with birthday presents, including toy models of tanks, field guns, and aircraft; delighted, he played with his new trinkets before attending a military parade in his honor.
Hitler spent a relaxing summer of 1939 at the Berghof. The Bavarian retreat was the Führer’s pride and joy. Carefully chosen decorations evoked a sophisticated yet simple German home and gave no hint of grand imperial pretensions. The Great Hall featured a seventeenth-century Gobelins tapestry; there were Persian carpets on the floor and a group of red upholstered easy chairs around a large wooden table. Downstairs, Hitler had had a bowling alley installed.35 He regularly entertained requests from journalists to visit and photograph the Berghof, not only from German reporters who were under the control of the Propaganda Ministry but also from American journalists whom Putzi Hanfstaengl, the Führer’s German American public relations officer, wooed using his Harvard connections.
Hitler’s style and love of art had been a topic of significant interest in the United States since a profile in Vogue in August 1936. In an article for the fashion world’s magazine of record, style experts had referred to the Berghof as Hitler’s “hiding spot at little Berchtesgaden,” featuring photographs of his chunky swastika throw pillows and declaring Hitler not merely a politician but rather an “art dictator” who firmly believed in the integrity of Nordic art.36 Hitler had put intense effort into making the Berghof appear like a modest but chic chalet; its terrace was covered with red marble sourced from Mount Untersberg, and his study featured oil portraits of his parents.37
Even after the atrocities of The Night of Broken Glass, American editors were eager to report on Hitler’s fashion and art interests. In the summer of 1939, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a lengthy profile of Hitler, glibly titled “Europe’s Man of Mystery!” It emphasized his “keen interest” in the well-being of children, citing how he gave his staff between $80 and $100 in addition to a new baby buggy when they had their first child. “They speak with glowing eyes of Hitler’s understanding for their problems and his generosity,” wrote the Tribune’s reporter. The article also casually noted Hitler’s passion for art and his plans to expand the influence of German art throughout Europe. “In his joy in these projects his tension eases and he turns back to face his daily problems with renewed strength,” gushed the Tribune. The journalist stressed that Hitler was curating a collection “of paintings, prints, and sculptures of young German artists” to evaluate, noting the Führer’s passion for sketching water fountains and foliage and holding soirees to discuss art. “Gay parties have taken and take place,” wrote the reporter, “with scores of Germany’s most famous artists helping beautify them.” According to the newspaper, the artists would “proudly tell you: ‘The Führer is happiest when he can forget his care of state in the midst of his artists. We are closer to him than many of the politicians who take themselves so very seriously.’”38
That summer, unbeknownst to the Tribune, Hitler was solidifying his plans to collect artwork for a future Führermuseum in Linz. He had been dreaming of creating the museum since he was a small boy, drawing plans for it at the dinner table as his mother doled out dishes. Now Hitler invited Hans Posse, the respected sixty-year-old museum director of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, to visit him at the Berghof.
Hitler had full confidence in Posse. Initially, Posse had tentatively supported modern artists and supported Hildebrand Gurlitt, sixteen years his junior, during his struggles with the Zwickau traditionalists in the 1920s. Posse had been the head of Germany’s pavilion at the 1922 Venice Biennale, where he promoted Oskar Kokoschka as the face of German art. Yet Posse rescinded this position once Hitler came to power, at which point the director shuttered the Dresden Gemäldegalerie’s modern and contemporary art department.
Though low-level officials had rejected Posse’s 1934 application to join the NSDAP on the ground that he was a supporter of Degenerate Artists, Hitler passed this off as a bureaucratic mix-up. Impressed by his flattery regarding Hitler’s taste in art and by Posse’s sincere pledges of loyalty, Hitler offered him the directorship of the top-secret Führermuseum Project in late June 1939. The Führermuseum, Hitler explained to Posse, would house an elite selection of Aryan art, focusing on the nineteenth century and beyond. It was the natural next step after the opening of the House of German Art in July 1937.
The Führer openly admitted to Posse that the museum’s permanent collection would consist of not only works owned by the German state but also those confiscated from the private collections of non-Aryans and from the public collections of nations that the Nazis would invade. Posse did not question whether this was ethical but clearly worried that carrying this mission out might necessitate violating the law. Assuaging his doubts, Hitler reassured him, saying, “I shall give you all nec
essary legal documentation and authority.”39 The project, Hitler’s inner circle acknowledged, would cost a tremendous amount of time and money.
With Posse’s becoming director of the Führermuseum Project, yet another formerly liberal art historian was now opportunistically working with the Nazis to dismantle the modern art world he had helped create. This move provided a new connection with Hitler’s inner circle for Gurlitt, who had casually known Posse for years and who was still focused on selling Nazi-confiscated artworks; Posse was close enough to Gurlitt to have had attended the funeral of his father, Cornelius, in 1938.40
On 30 June 1939, four days after Posse accepted his position, the Nazis held a three-hour auction at the stately Grand Hôtel National on the banks of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Their goal at the auction—held in German, English, and French—was to transform confiscated art into cash. Though dozens of dealers and curators worldwide boycotted the auction, art world elites from Belgium, Switzerland, France, and America were all in attendance; this included Henri Matisse’s son Pierre, an art dealer based in Paris and New York, who accompanied Joseph Pulitzer Jr., son of the famous newspaper magnate.
The Nazis chose Swiss auctioneer Theodor Fischer to lead the auction, the only experienced Swiss dealer who had international ties but was not Jewish. Fischer, like Gurlitt and Posse, had once been a champion of avant-garde artists, including Edvard Munch and Oskar Kokoschka. Now the auctioneer was eager to exploit his connections for personal gain, receiving commissions of 15, 12.5, or 7 percent depending on the value of individual lots.41 The Nazis told Fischer not to mention the Third Reich in connection with the auction in order to increase the chances of luring buyers, but the international art world was well aware of the artworks’ origins.
Fischer produced an auction catalogue featuring the 125 offered paintings and sculptures; he had many of the 108 paintings reframed for the ten-day preview between 17 and 27 May. Fischer charged three Swiss francs for attendance and sold three hundred tickets. Gurlitt did not attend the auction but helped Georg Schmidt, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, identify artists whose works Schmidt was interested in purchasing.42
The most important and expensive piece offered was a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, completed in 1888 and confiscated from Munich’s Neue Staatsgalerie. The work sold to Jewish American industrialist Maurice Wertheim for $40,000, and Wertheim subsequently donated it to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. It was a strong price but fell $8,000 below the presale estimate in an auction that saw only 70 percent of works sold, significantly below the 88 percent sell rate that denotes, albeit somewhat arbitrarily, a resounding success in the art world.43 The quality of the artworks was staggeringly high; yet most international art dealers, museum directors, and collectors who attended out of curiosity ultimately felt it untoward and damaging to their international reputations to purchase works that the Nazis had acquired under morally dubious—even if technically legal—circumstances.
Two paintings by George Grosz, still living in exile on Long Island, sold for only 980 Swiss francs, or $220, in total, one to New York dealer Curt Valentin and the other to Antwerp’s Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.44 Eight works by Kokoschka sold to dealers, museums, and collectors in France, Switzerland, Sweden, New York, and Ohio. Seven works by Emil Nolde were now for sale; two went unsold, while the others went for between 1,800 and 3,500 Swiss francs each. Two Max Pechstein paintings went unsold, while a Swiss doctor bought a third for only 820 francs, less than half its estimate.45
Still, the auction made the Nazis 500,000 Swiss francs, or about $113,000 at the time. Hours afterward, Fischer brokered a deal of one work that had failed to sell on the auction block, Pablo Picasso’s 1902 Absinthe Drinker, bringing in an additional 42,000 Swiss francs ($9,500).
Shortly after the auction, as the summer was winding to a close, Hitler invited Carl Burckhardt, the commissioner for the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations established by Woodrow Wilson, to visit the Berghof. He still presented himself as an artist who had been forced into politics in order to restore Germany to its proper position of cultural supremacy. “Oh, how I wish I could stay here and work as an artist,” Hitler said. “I am, after all, an artist.”46
Hitler now was ready to expand his power throughout Europe in order to cement Germany’s cultural dominance. The time was ripe, the Führer decided, to implement his eugenics program and prepare to invade Poland.
Shortly before the invasion, German doctors had used a small set of test subjects to whom the press and diplomats were paying scant attention: disabled, non-Jewish German children. The Nazis asked parents, doctors, and midwives to register minors with problems ranging from severe disabilities to the vague, nonmedical diagnosis of “idiocy.” The government paid these medical professionals bonuses for each child they reported. Doctors dispatched the minors to three dozen government-run clinics, overriding the protests of their parents. Over the course of a few months, medical professionals killed 5,000 children through a combination of starvation and drugging; in doing so and filing detailed reports, they helped the Nazis to perfect the most efficient methods of assembling, killing, and disposing of victims.47
Hitler’s euthanasia program, code-named “Action T-4” because its office was located at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, now began authorizing the murders of non-Jewish adults whom Nazi doctors classified as possessing “life unworthy of life.” The government authorized SS officers to drive thousands of mental patients to a remote field, where they shot the adults, many confined in straightjackets. Following this, thirty-nine-year-old SS head Heinrich Himmler personally reviewed a session in which government employees placed several patients in a specially sealed room and poisoned them with carbon monoxide. It marked the first time a gas chamber was used for mass murder in recorded history.48 As a reward, Herbert Lange, a thirty-year-old SS officer, arranged for his men to receive ten reichsmarks for every person they killed—an amount, he estimated, sufficient for them to buy their children one Christmas or birthday toy per human life.49 Half the murdered patients came from hospitals run by Protestant or Catholic churches.50 Soon, residents near sanatorium crematoria throughout Germany began noticing smoke wafting through the air on a daily basis. William Shirer, the American journalist living in Germany, even wrote of the killings in his diary.
Yet editors in the United States shelved stories by journalists who attempted to cover Hitler’s atrocities within Germany and his plans for territorial expansion. Forty-eight hours before Hitler assembled his top military advisors at the Berghof on 22 August 1939 to finalize plans to invade Poland, the New York Times Magazine featured a piece on him at the Berghof, describing the chalet’s atmosphere as one of “quiet cheerfulness” and reporting on the dictator’s love of chocolate and fondness for brook trout.51
On 1 September 1939, Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, a move that initially shocked ordinary Germans. William Shirer observed “astonishment, depression” on the faces of Germans he interviewed.52 Yet a mere seven days later, even as German forces were sweeping across a near-defenseless Poland with an anti-Semitic fervor, Shirer recorded that “the average German is beginning to wonder if it is a world war after all.” While Great Britain and France nominally declared war, they took no military action to either aid the Poles or target Germany. “Is that war?” noted Shirer one weekend. “The long faces I saw a week ago today are not so long this Sunday.”53
The opinion that the invasion was regrettable yet manageable was also present in the 11 September 1939 edition of America’s Life. The magazine’s editors admitted in a lengthy feature that “Europe had arrived at that point of dull deadlock that spells war,” but their analysis blamed the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, particularly those advocated by France and Great Britain. Those terms had forced Germans to elect a radical leader, representing an angry minority, a man “who told the Germans it is better to demand than beg,” the editors argued, concluding that the United States should refrain
from interfering in European affairs. “In the last war we tried to preserve democracy and peace and justice for the world by taking arms. But when the war was over we, like the rest, were tired and embittered,” they wrote. “This time if we stay out, when the war ends we may have the strength and spirit to help the exhausted peoples of Europe build for their children a new and better world out of the ruin of the old.”54
Hitler’s presentation of himself as a cultural figure to America’s mainstream press was so successful that he even succeeded in having Life publish an article on 30 October, two months after the invasion of Poland. Life analyzed the Führer’s artistic preferences and praised him as preferable to Napoléon, a notorious art looter. Hitler, they suggested admiringly, was “molding all German art into the pattern he prefers.” In an oddly wistful tone, Life speculated that perhaps the artists in Munich who ignored Hitler when he moved there before the start of the Great War were to blame for his bellicosity now. Life’s subsequent issue included a letter to the editor from a Mrs. V. Seefried, noting “Adolf certainly scores one up on the Roosevelt family when it comes to decorating a home.”55
Pleased, Hitler continued with his plans to redesign Europe.