Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  Throughout most of 1939, Gurlitt conducted few professional deals, focusing on his wife and two young children, seven-year-old Cornelius and four-year-old Benita. Yet Gurlitt was aware that the Nazis were rounding up thousands of citizens they opposed, and by the end of the year he was poised to profit from the material possessions the Nazis forced these victims to leave behind. He brokered a deal for Fate of the Animals, painted by Franz Marc, a German Expressionist, in 1913. The canvas was a kaleidoscope of dramatic red, blue, and green bursts of light, all surrounding a horse with an elongated neck, her head stretched high into the sky. Confiscated by the Nazis under unclear circumstances, the painting languished in a government depot before Gurlitt sold it to the Basel-based curator Georg Schmidt, who had contacted the dealer, hoping to acquire confiscated art for Switzerland. Gurlitt charged Schmidt 6,000 Swiss francs but told the German government he had charged only 5,000. He pocketed the extra 1,000 and also charged Schmidt a 900 Swiss franc “commission fee” that he did not disclose to the German government. Gurlitt’s sale of Fate of the Animals represented a rare instance in which the dealer kept a full paper trail of his transactions. Generally, he diligently destroyed documents that personally incriminated him—showing how he had taken advantage of those from whom the Nazis confiscated artworks or how he had fleeced the Nazis themselves.56

  On 9 April 1940, the German army began its invasions of Norway and Denmark. The Danish surrender came in a matter of hours. Although the occupation of Norway was protracted, the Reich soon turned its focus toward invading the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Germany’s invasion of these three countries on 10 May 1940 and the surrender of the Dutch on 15 May 1940 signaled to both Gurlitt and Hans Posse, head of the Führermuseum Project, that Dutch artwork would soon be available for purchase or plunder and that opportunities in France probably also would unfold. Yet the campaigns also brought increased military involvement from the British.

  Although they lived in Hamburg at the time, Gurlitt and his family were unharmed. The dealer’s attention was focused on a major deal with the Propaganda Ministry, sealed on 22 May 1940, through which he acquired Degenerate Art confiscated by the Nazis from respected German museums. Using cash he had amassed by brokering deals in Switzerland and had not disclosed to the Nazis, Gurlitt paid just 4,000 Swiss francs for 259 pieces, a bargain basement sum.

  This newly acquired stash included several paintings and works on paper that Gurlitt decided to keep for himself, works created by nearly all of the artists whom he had once admired and whose misfortunes he now exploited. In terms of volume, it was the largest purchase for his private collection that Hildebrand Gurlitt ever executed. The set included Max Beckmann’s 1920 drypoint on paper Old Woman with Cloche Hat, a whimsical piece showing a posh, uppity woman sporting a fancy hat. After the Nazis took it from the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, they valued it at a mere 0.8 Swiss francs, about one cent in US currency—the value of the paper and nothing more.57 Gurlitt also acquired Beckmann’s 1934 watercolor Zandvoort Beach Café, a colorful portrait of a black man and white woman cavorting on a beach. Also in the cache was a lithograph by Emil Nolde depicting a starkly dressed Danish redhead, along with a Nolde watercolor that the Nazis confiscated from the Kunsthalle in Kiel, a haunting flood scene. In addition to two watercolors by George Grosz, the selection included one of Käthe Kollwitz’s classic works lamenting the dead soldiers of the Great War. There was a nude scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that the Nazis had confiscated from the König Albert Museum, the same museum in Zwickau that had fired Gurlitt for refusing to work with the Nazis before Hitler came to power.

  In late May 1940, Belgium surrendered to Hitler, and on 14 June, German troops occupied Paris unopposed. “Berlin has taken the news of the capture of Paris as phlegmatically as it has taken everything else in this war,” observed Shirer in his diary, noting that he had gone to swim at a lake in the capital city and only three of about five hundred Germans there had bothered to read the news when a paperboy came to report the fall of Paris.58 The Vichy government came to power on 10 July 1940, dividing France into an occupied northern zone with a coastal strip on the Atlantic Ocean and a French-administered center and south. The Vichy regime tacitly agreed to Hitler’s looting of French art, and Hitler charged Hans Posse with organizing and implementing the seizure of works in France for the Führermuseum.

  Gurlitt, meanwhile, continued liquidating Degenerate Art and taking special orders from his growing client base. Though he did not know the specifics of the Führermuseum Project, which was still confidential, he had heard rumors that Posse was either buying or confiscating works in France that fit the style of the Great German Art Exhibition of 1937. In mid-November, he traveled to Holland and Belgium, cryptically writing a friend he was going “to visit some old customers that still are always interested in certain pictures,” a common euphemism for Degenerate Art available to sell abroad.59

  In December 1940, Gurlitt worked directly with Posse in the first instance that he formally documented. Posse came to Gurlitt on behalf of a client who wanted to acquire a last-minute Christmas gift for Hermann Göring on a large budget of 25,000 reichsmarks. “The main thing is to find something that the Reichsmarshall will still find pleasure in, given the vastness of his collection,” Gurlitt wrote Posse.60 Gurlitt took time to help Posse pick out a medieval painted-glass work from Cologne, which Posse knew Göring would adore. The speed with which the two men collaborated—exchanging letters within hours of each other—clearly indicated that they were well acquainted. It was also the first recorded instance of Gurlitt’s dealing in art of which the Nazis approved.

  Brokering this Christmas deal emboldened Gurlitt to explore other ways in which he could profit from sales of works not labeled as Degenerate Art. Three months later, he sold Posse a work by his grandfather, Louis Gurlitt, an obscure artist who had died in 1897. Posse trusted Gurlitt’s judgment so completely that he sold the Louis Gurlitt artwork to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architectural advisor and the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production.61

  By March 1941, Gurlitt was ready to close the most significant of at least eight other deals with the Nazis for which documentation survived after the war, transactions in which he received Degenerate Art in exchange for artworks that suited Hitler’s tastes. Rumors of the Führermuseum Project now were widespread among dealers, collectors, and curators—though the general public and the press remained ignorant of the operation. Gurlitt exchanged three nineteenth-century paintings and three sixteenth-century prints for an astounding forty-two artworks by Kokoschka, Nolde, Beckmann, Corinth, and Otto Dix. The deal was a testament not only to Gurlitt’s business acumen but to the Nazis’ desperation to acquire Old Masters and traditional artworks for the Führer, regardless of the quality of the pieces or the fame of the artists.62

  After Operation Barbarossa commenced on Germany’s eastern front on 22 June 1941, Posse increased his efforts to cull artworks for the Führermuseum, eager to please Hitler. Though still not an official dealer for the Führermuseum Project, by autumn 1941 Gurlitt was traveling regularly to Paris, attempting to find artworks that matched Hitler’s aesthetic for him to sell to German museums.63

  The successful persecution of Jewish Europeans throughout the continent in 1941 provided a flood of artwork onto the market, pieces by both Old Masters and artists labeled degenerate that ranged from masterpieces to sketches and minor works. Over the year, Hitler had tightened laws in territories he occupied. It was now forbidden for Jewish Europeans in the Reich to socialize with Aryans; Jewish men were prohibited from shaving or even buying shaving soap; and all Jews in territories that Nazis occupied were forbidden from attending museums, buying flowers, wearing fur coats, or eating in restaurants—infractions that could all be punished with the death penalty. The NSDAP designed the regulations to dampen Jewish Europeans’ morale, to isolate them from the rest of society, and to make them look physically “subhuman” to their neighbors.

  Arresting Jews no
w was so common that it was impossible for ordinary Germans to be unaware of the sudden disappearance of thousands of their fellow citizens. As the 1941 Christmas season approached, several Catholic bishops in Germany jointly wrote a carefully worded letter to Hitler that protested Nazi killings of the physically weak and mentally ill throughout the Reich. While the bishops did not refer to Jewish Germans explicitly, the clergy clearly understood Hitler’s persecution was also directed at them. Yet Cardinal Adolf Bertram suppressed the letter’s distribution because he was hesitant to anger the man who, he felt, was waging a just war against the heretical ethnic group whose ancestors had murdered Jesus Christ.

  The urgency with which Posse and Goebbels worked on the Führermuseum only increased after Japan bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and as the wider military involvement of nations outside Europe only reinforced Hitler’s belief that his artistic struggles were of global importance. The same month, the Allies bombed Hamburg again, this time severely damaging Gurlitt’s home. He had ample time to protect his art and records from damage, however, as the Royal Air Force threw down leaflets beforehand warning civilians of the impending bombings.

  The Gurlitts subsequently made plans to move into Hildebrand’s childhood home in Dresden at Kaisitzer Straße 26, where his mother had been living alone since his father’s death in 1938. During this frenetic time, Hildebrand was able to close a lucrative deal with Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum, selling it thirty-two pieces created by major French artists including Eugène Delacroix, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Auguste Rodin; exactly how Gurlitt had acquired the works in France and to whom they had belonged was of little interest to the museum, and the dealer saved no documents that would betray how he took possession of them.64

  In early 1942, plans for active and formal extermination of Jews worldwide intensified, culminating with the 20 January conference that the NSDAP hosted in a beautiful lakeside villa in the upscale western Berlin district of Wannsee. In Goebbels’s words, it was necessary to “clear the decks,” eventually even in neutral Switzerland. Goebbels and Hitler did not attend the conference. After the meeting, the group celebrated with a bottle of brandy.65 The same day, Goebbels wrote admiringly in his diary about how Hitler’s focus on creating a world of Aryan culture had only increased in the wake of increased extermination and US involvement in the war. “The intensity of the Führer’s longing for music, theater and cultural relaxation is enormous,” he wrote, noting that Hitler believed fighting the war on degenerate culture was equally as important as fighting to expand the Reich’s territory.66

  A few weeks after the Wannsee Conference, the first transports arrived at Auschwitz from Slovakia and France.67 The Nazis began murdering them using Zyklon B gas. The victims took at least two minutes to die. After the systematic and publicly implemented T-4 program aimed first at disabled Aryan children and then at “subhuman” Aryan adults, the Nazis had experimented with Zyklon B on six hundred frail Soviet prisoners of war, before then successfully murdering nine hundred healthy Soviet POWs with the poison.68 “A pretty barbaric procedure is being applied here, and it’s not to be described in any more detail, and there aren’t too many Jews remaining,” Goebbels wrote in his journal a week later, concluding that 60 percent of European Jews needed to be actively “liquidated,” while the remaining 40 percent would be conscripted as slave workers until they died of exhaustion.69

  The family of Klaus Tarnowski, the teenager whose great uncle David Friedmann owned Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach, was destroyed by the “Final Solution” implemented at Auschwitz. Georg and Marie had been able to arrange a place for Klaus on one of the last Kindertransport journeys to Sweden in August 1939. The Kindertransport program functioned roughly like the Underground Railroad during the US Civil War: non-Jewish Germans risked their lives to smuggle Jewish youths to countries not controlled by the Nazis. Klaus’s brother Hans was eighteen in 1939 and did not qualify for the program, but he managed to escape to safety in England.

  After David Friedmann died in early 1942 of old age in Breslau, the Nazi regime homed in on his property, including the Liebermann painting; they marveled at Friedmann’s collection, which, an official appraiser noted, “must have been brought together over a period of approximately sixty years under expert direction,” adding, “There are a whole series of pieces which, in peacetime, would certainly bring in foreign currency quickly.”70 Nazi officials swiftly confiscated his possessions and deported his daughter, Charlotte, to Ravensbrück, an all-female concentration camp in northern Germany. After the gassings at Auschwitz commenced, they transferred Charlotte there and immediately killed her. Living in Sweden, Klaus knew something was amiss when he stopped receiving postcards from his parents around this time. Later, he learned that they also had been deported to Auschwitz and immediately murdered.71

  Within weeks, Gurlitt was contacted by Cornelius Müller-Hofstede, head of the regional museum in Breslau; the director had for months received letters from Gurlitt imploring him to pass on any information on confiscated art for sale. In euphemistic language, Müller-Hofstede informed Gurlitt that some works were coming onto the market. He brokered a deal to sell Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach for an unknown sum.

  On 11 November 1942, mocking the anniversary of World War I’s armistice, German troops took over the Vichy region of France. Gurlitt’s power was about to grow as well: on the one-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, 7 December, Hans Posse lost a battle with oral cancer that he had been fighting for weeks. His death was a shock to many who knew him well, Gurlitt included. Posse had continued working tirelessly for Hitler, and though he appeared exhausted, few suspected he was seriously ill. Over three years, Posse had already amassed roughly 2,500 works of art for the Führermuseum, but Hitler wanted even more.

  Now Posse’s death left a hole in Hitler’s Führermuseum Project, one that Gurlitt hoped to fill.

  CHAPTER VI

  CULTURAL COMPLICITY

  “I know Dr. Gurlitt’s character and can assume on the basis of experience so far that his drive and savoir-faire are the best guarantee he will carry out his task quickly and safely.”

  —Hermann Voss, second director of the Führermuseum Project

  AFTER HANS POSSE DIED OF cancer, Adolf Hitler could easily have allowed his enthusiasm for the Führermuseum to wane. The military leadership desperately hoped that the Führer would abandon the project and focus solely on winning the war. Occasionally during strategy meetings with his generals, Hitler would stop focusing and turn to Joseph Goebbels to discuss art. Goebbels noted in his journal on 23 January 1943 that “despite the gravity of the situation” in Russia and the fact that Hitler was “colossally over-exhausted,” “the Führer still has as open a heart as ever for the arts and is eyeing the time when he can focus on the arts to an even stronger” extent.1

  A week later, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrendered in Stalingrad.

  Around two million people, from both the Russian and German sides, died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. The Russia campaign had been the high-water mark of Nazi expansion into the east; its end marked the last major offensive Germany would undertake. In the face of the humiliating and devastating defeat, Hitler became ever more obsessed with his plans to build the Führermuseum in Linz. He scheduled a trip to his hometown, visiting the opera house for the first time since he was young. Standing in the cheap seats at the top gallery where he used to sit, the Führer daydreamed for a full five minutes about how his Führermuseum would attract millions to the city of his youth. His staff gathered around him and waited quietly. “For some time, he gazed dreamily into space, his eyes absent, his features slack,” noted Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.2 In the final days of the Russia campaign, Hitler had completed plans for dozens of buildings other than the Führermuseum that he would construct in Linz: a planetarium, hotel, community center, exhibition hall, concert hall, library, weapons
museum, and sports stadium. They would, he explained to his entourage, transform his sleepy hometown into the finest cultural center in the world.

  Finding a replacement for Hans Posse to direct the Führermuseum Project became Hitler’s major priority. After Posse’s death in December 1942, his widow contacted Hitler’s staff. Upon learning that his cancer was fatal, she said, Posse had repeatedly told her that Hermann Voss, a fifty-eight-year-old art historian and dealer, would be a solid candidate to succeed him. Upon learning this, Hitler immediately arranged to meet Voss.

  Although he had expressed anti-Nazi sentiments before Hitler’s rise to power, Voss had started to ingratiate himself with Nazi art elites after Germans elected the NSDAP, even giving a lecture in 1939 to the SS that lauded the new Nazi cultural vision.3 Voss had an extensive background researching early German painting and was a specialist in the Italian Old Masters, whom Hitler admired. By 1941, Voss’s complicity with the regime was not merely ideological but also practical; he unashamedly appraised artwork for the Nazis that belonged to Jewish Germans who had fled the country or whom the government had deported to camps. He was thus a natural choice to fill Posse’s position as director of the Führermuseum Project, now often referred to as the Sonderauftrag Linz, or Special Commission for Linz.

  In Hitler’s meeting with Voss, the Führer spoke for over an hour, taking scant pauses for breath as he explained his childhood dream to create a museum in Linz housing the best of Great German Art. Despite Posse’s death and state funeral, the details of the Führermuseum Project were still a state secret. Voss quickly realized that Hitler had already accepted him for the position and, while listening to his Führer, began thinking of potential candidates who could help assemble the museum’s collection. Hildebrand Gurlitt immediately came to mind.