Hitler's Last Hostages Read online

  Voss and Gurlitt, eleven years the new director’s junior, had not only known each other for decades but shared complementary research styles. While Voss loathed traveling, relished routine, and enjoyed pouring over documents in his office, Gurlitt enjoyed going from city to city and the constantly changing schedules that came with this peripatetic lifestyle. Voss knew that Gurlitt’s fondness for Paris, the appeal of which Voss had never understood, would save him from needing to visit the City of Light himself.

  Within hours of his meeting with Hitler, Voss contacted Gurlitt and presented him with the opportunity for which the forty-seven-year-old had been pining: the chance to work directly under the Führer’s command and protection, with state-funded trips to Paris to boot.4 Gurlitt had already been cultivating international contacts whom he considered useful for just such an opportunity. He had been preparing for a possible move into the inner circle of the Führermuseum Project for months, aware of the opportunities to acquire works not only for it, for which he could receive a finder’s fee, but for himself on the side.

  Since the beginning of 1943, Gurlitt had been working with Erhard Göpel, an art historian who, like himself, had been a proponent of avant-garde art before the war. Göpel now worked as a Nazi-protected art dealer in occupied areas, especially the Netherlands, and had known Gurlitt for decades. Now that the Nazis controlled most of Europe’s art market, Göpel, like Voss and Gurlitt, was actively exploiting his own knowledge of traditional and contemporary art to aid Hitler; he valued Gurlitt’s expertise, even arranging for him to have documentation certifying him as a protected supporter of the Nazi’s cultural program in order to ease his travel abroad.5 Göpel was deliberately cryptic when he wrote to Gurlitt about works he had obtained in areas where Jewish Germans were persecuted. In one letter from Paris, Göpel referred to a portrait by the late German realist Wilhelm Trübner as a painting he had acquired from “Berlin emigrants who brought it to France,” a known euphemism for Jewish Europeans who had fled Germany.6 In the months before Voss was appointed the second Führermuseum director, Gurlitt had also forged ties with the Dutch art dealer Theo Hermsen, who had extensive experience acquiring confiscated art to sell at the prestigious Viennese auction house Dorotheum, which by now was the largest institution in Austria approved to sell art confiscated from Jewish Austrians.

  Gurlitt was strategic about developing contacts within the German administration based in Paris. On one trip to France, even before he was part of the Führermuseum Project, Gurlitt had worked closely with Karl Epting, head of the Nazi-sponsored cultural outreach organization Deutsche Institut, to create an exhibition in Paris titled “Watercolors and Works on Paper of German Artists.” The show aimed to educate the French about Aryan art, and Gurlitt loaned it works from his personal collection and arranged for it to tour France. Yet his more practical purpose for helping Epting mount the exhibition was twofold: it ingratiated Gurlitt further with the Nazis, and it increased not only the prestige of the artworks but their monetary value as well. The more his paintings were exhibited, the more valuable Gurlitt’s collection became and the more he profited from the persecution of the owners who had been forced to sell the art or from whom it had been stolen.

  Voss and Gurlitt immediately began working together to carry on Posse’s work. While Voss worked from Dresden, juggling his new directorship with his old job as the head of the Dresden Picture Gallery, Gurlitt prepared to take to the roads of war-torn Europe.

  Hitler, now secure in his choice of Posse’s successor, spent the spring of 1943 at the Berghof. To his generals the war was now a defensive struggle, but Hitler remained optimistic. At his mountain retreat, the Führer and his entourage mixed military and cultural meetings with ample leisure time.

  Hitler commonly went to bed late and slept in. His valet, Heinz Linge, would begin the leisurely wake-up process by placing his boss’s newspapers and dispatches on a chair outside his bedroom at around eleven o’clock. Hitler would retrieve the papers, read them for approximately an hour, and descend the stairs for “breakfast” around 1 p.m. Lunch took place at 2:30 p.m., with the Führer’s preferred meal being a gruel of puréed linseed, granola, and vegetable juice. Occasionally, he treated himself to a baked potato with curds and unrefined linseed oil. Sitting with him at a table decorated with fresh flowers that Eva Braun would pick outside, his guests enjoyed traditional German fare: a standard meal was braised beef marinated in vinegar and herbs, mashed potatoes, and a simple salad.7 In the past, Hitler had enjoyed a lunchtime beer or glass of wine, but having gained weight, he now abstained from alcohol.8

  Eva Braun considered herself the Berghof’s homemaker. “It was almost a family environment, with grown-ups sunning themselves, children running around madly and, between them, yapping dogs,” noted Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge.9 That Braun and Hitler were romantically connected was an open secret among his close confidantes, a fact kept quiet from the public. Even around Hitler’s entourage, the pair refrained from even the slightest display of physical affection. Braun was, however, the only person allowed even gently to tease Hitler. When she joked about his spartan choice of food, he countered that she should actually eat more to maintain the traditionally feminine, curvaceous figure befitting an Aryan woman. “When I first met you, you were so nice and plump, and now you’re positively skinny. All the ladies say they want to be beautiful for their menfolk, and then they do everything they can to be opposite what a man likes,” the Führer said at one meal.10

  In the afternoons, Hitler would draw sketches of landscapes and plans for the Führermuseum.11 Ensconced in his office, he would hear Negus and Stasi, Eva Braun’s Scottish Terriers, racing through tall grass on the hillsides barking at deer and other wildlife so tame that they only moved aside when the Scotties came extremely close.12 In the early evenings, the group often played in Hitler’s bowling alley. He kept the facility’s existence a closely guarded secret. “If the bowling associations get wind of it,” he told his valet, Linge, “they will make me honorary president of every club.”13

  After dinners, the group gathered in the living room, a large, open area with a massive bookcase holding encyclopedias, rarely perused Western classics, and copies of Mein Kampf, which they picked up even more infrequently than the classics. The walls were covered in medieval tapestries; a portrait by Anselm Feuerbach of his Italian lover, Anna Risi, nicknamed “Nanna,” hung over the hearth. Hitler admired Feuerbach’s realistic style. “Her hand is as radiant as if she were alive,” he marveled, noting that he wanted the works that he displayed at the Berghof to be specially featured in the Linz museum after the war. On one sidewall hung a portrait of Hitler’s beloved niece Geli, who had committed suicide by gunshot in her uncle’s home in 1931.

  The Führermuseum was often a topic of conversation during these nighttime discussions, which lasted until 4 or 5 a.m. “I shall make Linz a fine city and give it a gallery that people will flock to see,” he told Traudl Junge and friends one evening. Hitler was reticent to hang too many artworks in the Berghof; he believed that because it was his private retreat and not a house of the people, covering it with too many artworks intended for the Führermuseum would be inappropriate. “I regard the pictures hanging here in my house as only on loan, something that brightens my life,” he explained.14

  As the entourage spent the evening hours discussing art and music, Blondi, Hitler’s German Shepherd, would impress the group with a plethora of tricks. One of Hitler’s favorites was to tell Blondi to “play schoolgirl” when she was sitting next to his chair. Blondi would turn toward him and put her paws on the arm of his chair, mimicking a female pupil sitting at a school desk.15

  It was during one such evening of discussion about art and music that the only recorded instance of anyone directly confronting Hitler about his treatment of Jewish Europeans took place. Henriette Hoffmann, the daughter of Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, was visiting with her husband, Baldur von Schirach, who was the head of th
e Hitler Youth. In a momentary pause in the conversation, Henriette turned to Hitler and blurted out, “My Führer, I saw a train full of deported Jews in Amsterdam the other day. Those poor people—they look terrible. I’m sure they’re being very badly treated. Do you know about it? Do you allow it?” After an awkward silence, Hitler stood up, said goodnight, and left the room. The room remained silent, and Henriette was banned from the Berghof.

  The expansionist and genocidal plans about which Henriette Hoffmann was so concerned showed no signs of abating. As the spring of 1943 turned into summer, German manufacturing was in full force as the Nazis attempted to recover from the devastating loss at Stalingrad. After the death in a plane crash of fifty-year-old Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt, Albert Speer transitioned from being Hitler’s architect of buildings to an architect of war, reorganizing armament production and reducing the time to make a U-boat from forty-two weeks to sixteen. The Reich was producing around 1,000 aircraft monthly, twice the amount that it had eighteen months before, portending a prolonged war even as the Soviets were beating German tank production by a ratio of four to one.16

  Plundering for the Führermuseum was also increasing in pace. Although more and more German men were conscripted into the armed forces, even those of middle age, Voss discreetly arranged for Gurlitt and roughly a dozen other workers to be given permanent exemptions from military service so that they could focus on acquiring art for Hitler.17 As he plundered from Jewish Europeans whom he did not know, Voss looked out for those who had been his friends before the war, traveling in late spring to the Netherlands to meet with art historian Vitale Bloch and Max J. Friedländer, the seventy-five-year-old former director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The two men had managed to escape being rounded up by the Nazis, and Voss told Bloch and Friedländer to contact him if they ran into trouble with the authorities. The Nazis and their supporters were willing to make exceptions for Jews with whom they personally sympathized. Those without these slivers of good fortune were doomed.18

  The Führermuseum team was busy preparing in mid-1943 for its biggest and trickiest deal yet: securing the confiscation of 333 artworks that the late Jewish French art collector Adolphe Schloss had bequeathed to his wife, Lucie. Sensing the looming Nazi threat, her family had hidden the treasures, mostly paintings, in 1939 at the Château de Chambon, the elegant country estate of a family friend located sixty miles south of Paris. It was French officers, not German ones, who had discovered and confiscated the so-called Schloss Collection, hoping to keep the paintings in the country for the enjoyment of French Aryans. Yet many of the works were created by Dutch masters whose styles Hitler admired, piquing the interest of the Führer’s entourage. These included a pietà by Petrus Christus, a fifteenth-century eastern Dutch artist known for his realistic paintings; a Venus by Jan Gossaert, famed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries for his skill at painting lush fabrics that seemed to pop off the canvas; and numerous other masterpieces by Dutch icons, including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.19

  The successful plundering of the collection of another wealthy Jewish Frenchman, art collector and dealer Paul Rosenberg, led the Nazis to believe that looting the Schloss collection would go relatively smoothly.

  Paul Rosenberg, born in 1881, had been one of the most influential French art dealers before Hitler’s rise to power. In 1910, Rosenberg had opened his gallery on rue la Boétie in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, home to the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. The building’s spacious interior featured high ceilings and windows through which ample sunlight could stream, though soft brown curtains easily could be drawn to protect more fragile works. Rosenberg had been proud that one of the first artists he signed to a contract was a woman, Marie Laurencin, a thirty-year-old who worked in the cubist circle to which Pablo Picasso also belonged. Rosenberg also secured exclusive contracts with Picasso and Henri Matisse, championing them despite the skepticism of many other established dealers. On the ground floor of his gallery, Rosenberg proudly hung art by these avant-garde artists, whom he represented exclusively. Recognizing that many of his clients would reject these more daring works, however, Rosenberg featured nineteenth-century masterpieces in the upstairs space—Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet.20

  The Degenerate Art Exhibition held in Munich in 1937 alarmed Rosenberg, who warned his colleagues not to purchase art from the subsequent auction of Nazi-confiscated Degenerate Art in the Swiss city of Lucerne. Still, not until 1939 did Rosenberg feel threatened enough to secure his own collection in earnest. Though disturbed by the growing anti-Semitic wave in Europe that Hitler had already codified in Germany, he was optimistic that France would not be invaded by the Nazis. Rosenberg worked with Alfred Barr, the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, to organize the first major retrospective of Picasso, sending works by the cubist master to New York. In autumn 1939, he also transported several of his works to Tours, a mid-sized city in central France, where a friend held them in safe keeping.

  Recognizing the growing Nazi threat, Rosenberg decided to leave Paris in February 1940, renting a home for his wife and sons in Floirac, a tiny suburb of Bordeaux. Three months later, in May 1940, Matisse visited to discuss business, and the two chatted under a centuries-old cedar tree outside the Rosenberg family’s rented house. Matisse was annoyed at Hitler’s rise, which he described as “thunderstorms brewing all around, to which I pay no attention whatsoever.”21 Yet now Matisse complained that these thunderstorms had become impossible to ignore, a burdensome inconvenience to his late career. Rosenberg had recently cancelled an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse in Paris, fearing for the safety of his family and that of the paintings; this irked Matisse even as Picasso saw it as a warning sign that artists should create politically provocative artwork to oppose fascism. After the visit with Matisse, Rosenberg’s sense of unease only increased. Not only were his countrymen largely apathetic, but his friend and business partner, Matisse, was as well. “On the whole, people don’t say much because they don’t know what the future holds, although they fear it,” was how Matisse summarized the mood of most Frenchmen.22

  Taking action, Rosenberg rented a bank vault in Libourne, twenty-two miles east of Bordeaux, where he stored 162 of his most precious paintings in what he assumed would be a secure location. These artworks included masterpieces by Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, Monet, and Matisse. One of the most striking paintings in the trove was Woman with a Fan, an oil on canvas that Matisse had painted in 1921 of a creamy-skinned brunette with a flowered blouse waving a fan to ward off the summer heat.

  After storing his works in the vault, Rosenberg finally realized he needed to escape France as soon as he could secure passports for his family. Within days after the fall of Paris on 14 June 1940, art experts who supported Hitler arrived at Rosenberg’s gallery, disappointed to discover that the dealer was not there. The Nazis swiftly made plans to turn the gallery into their Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, which would help organize the ghettoization of Jewish Frenchmen. On the most prominent of the walls that had displayed Rosenberg’s treasures they hung a large panel of a nude woman, representing France, sprawled on the ground with a French flag. A vulture, representing Jews worldwide, prepares to peck her to death. “Frenchmen, Help Me!” read the caption below it.23

  The Nazis immediately began searching for the dealer himself, hoping to round up not only Rosenberg and his family but also their vast art collection. Yet the Rosenbergs escaped via Lisbon to New York City, arriving in Manhattan in autumn 1940. A year later, in September 1941, the Nazis found the vault in Libourne. After consulting the bank’s French civilian employees, the Nazis catalogued and transported the paintings to the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

  Organizing the dispersal of the Schloss collection in 1943, two years after raiding the Rosenberg collection, the Nazis expected the same level of deference from France’s Aryan art world elites that they had
received during the raid of Rosenberg’s vault. Yet French curators, particularly those at the Louvre, were jockeying to take possession of the entire Schloss collection. The situation required delicate negotiations that would last until late 1943. Though the Nazis could in theory loot French museums at will, they were aware that the passions stoked by this behavior could well provoke the violent anger of the French at a time when, after the Battle of Stalingrad, it was important to keep the peace in conquered nations. While any protesters could assuredly be defeated, doing so would divert military resources that were badly needed elsewhere.

  Knowing that curators from the Louvre were eager to take possession of the entire collection, Erhard Göpel, one of Gurlitt’s business partners, wrote to Hitler’s personal assistant, Martin Bormann, on 26 April urging the Nazis to broker a deal to acquire at least some of the works for the Führermuseum.24

  As Hitler’s art team worked on the details to resolve the Schloss Affair, Gurlitt also worked on acquiring art in Paris from Theo Hermsen, the dealer who acquired looted work for the Dorotheum. Gurlitt aimed to obtain art both for himself and for the Führermuseum. Though he destroyed his files specifying what purchases he made for himself, the amount was clearly prodigious. Hermsen confirmed this on 16 June, writing Gurlitt a gushing confidential letter after a recent meeting: “Given our discussion, allow me to write you about how thankful I am that you have bought so many paintings and artworks from or through me.”25

  Though the Führermuseum Project remained a state secret—even Posse’s official state funeral had included no mention of it—Hitler hoped that the Führermuseum would bring relief to an increasingly dejected Volk after the war. The people needed encouragement. Hitler’s popularity was in decline after the crushing defeat at Stalingrad and the increased bombings on the home front; mothers and fathers had been willing to send their older sons away to war, but now the war was coming to them at home, terrifying their daughters and younger boys. The SS internally noted a stark decline in the use of “Heil Hitler” as a greeting.