Hitler's Last Hostages Page 21

  Though Gurlitt had long admired Beckmann, this move was not purely altruistic. He was well aware that he needed to show that he had helped persecuted artists during the war, given that the conflict would now certainly end in the Allies’ favor.

  Unbeknownst to Beckmann, Gurlitt was in possession of at least six of his artworks that the Nazis had confiscated from museums, including Zandvoort Beach Café and Old Woman with Cloche Hat, the pieces that were in the roughly 238-strong cache that he had bought from the Nazis in May 1938. Gurlitt took ample advantage of his access to the depots that held confiscated Degenerate Artworks. He acquired at least thirty-one pieces by Otto Dix, including Leonie, his portrait of a prostitute painted in 1923, and Horse Cadaver and Corpse in Barbed Wire from his 1924 war series. The dealer obtained at least fifty works by Emil Nolde, still living in seclusion in northern Germany, including Children of the Forest, the fairytale scene painted in 1911, along with Flood, Evening and The Dancer. Though he did not particularly admire George Grosz’s artworks, Gurlitt recognized their value and procured at least forty-seven, all of them works on paper. He had taken some of them out of one of the Berlin-based depots of Degenerate Art, including a lithograph from 1919, Heads of Teutons, which the Nazis had taken from the Nassauisches Museum in Wiesbaden, a city in the central-west German province of Hesse.

  Much more to Gurlitt’s liking were the works of Max Liebermann; he acquired at least seventy-nine, all or nearly all of which were most likely in his possession by late 1944. In addition to David Friedmann’s painting of Two Riders on the Beach, major works that Gurlitt acquired included two self-portraits of Liebermann as well as a pastel rendition of Two Riders.

  The hundreds of other artworks that Gurlitt amassed by the end of the war were created by dozens of artists spanning a vast array of genres and periods, from the 1590s to the early 1940s. Though the largest number of works came from German artists, followed by artists from France and the Low Countries, Gurlitt had also obtained works from farther-flung locales, including ceremonial masks from unidentified African countries and even a small selection of Japanese works. These striking pieces included an early nineteenth-century color woodcut by Shungyosai Ryukoku of a woman in a kimono sitting at a table and an 1814 color woodcut of a ghost consumed by burning flames.

  By October 1944, Hitler had grown increasingly anxious about the Allied invasion. The invincibility he had felt after Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt had dissipated. Finally recognizing the Allies as a threat that could well bring his Thousand-Year Reich to an ingloriously early end, he began exhibiting tremors in his hands and was increasingly reliant on sedatives to help him sleep and stimulants to sustain his energy during the day. By November, his erratic health made lengthy public appearances impossible. He sent the forty-four-year-old head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to make the annual speech to the “Old Fighters” at the ceremony in Munich commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Remaining in Berlin, the Führer ordered Goebbels to cut 75 percent of the Reich Chamber of Culture’s budget—severely impacting theaters, orchestras, and newspapers.

  Yet the Führermuseum Project was not to be touched. On 2 December, Hitler had a five-hour conversation with Goebbels about the future of art in the Reich. “The Führer is pursuing quite grand plans in regards to the re-establishment of cultural life,” noted Goebbels. “Consequently, after the war, the Führer is determined to start afresh in the cultural sector on quite a grand scale.”56

  Even as the Russians were closing in on Berlin and swiftly dismantling the Nazi infrastructure, Hitler steadfastly believed that the Führermuseum would be built. On 27 January 1945, the Red Army took over Auschwitz, where 7,000 prisoners were still alive. The Soviets found the survivors wandering around six hundred corpses decomposing on the ground. While there, the Red Army catalogued 7.7 tons of human hair that the Germans had kept in storage, presumably to sell to wigmakers after the war.57

  At long last, the Führermuseum Project finally wound down. In total, Hans Posse and Hermann Voss had spent at least seventy million reichsmarks, most probably up to ninety million reichsmarks, to purchase thousands of works for the museum. Voss, however, was not about to risk his life for Hitler’s passion project.58 In early 1945, he moved to Schloss Weesenstein, an eight-hundred-year-old castle located twelve miles from Dresden. There, he hoped to avoid detection by the Allies in the remote fortress. Voss soon sent word of his whereabouts to Gurlitt, still living in Dresden with Helene and their children, Cornelius and Benita.

  By the end of the war, Gurlitt had completed approximately 3,800 deals for the Führermuseum. His nearest competitors had managed a fraction of his output: Ferdinand Möller completed approximately 850 deals, Karl Buchholz completed approximately 880 deals, and Bernhard Böhmer completed approximately 1,200 deals for the Führermuseum.59 The exact amount of money Gurlitt earned from his commissions was unclear, but his profits working for the Führer were certainly high enough that he and his wife could retire and his children would never need to work in order to live out their entire lives in affluence.

  In addition to the proceeds from these deals, Gurlitt amassed around 1,000 works for his private collection during the war. Having anticipated that the Allies would target Dresden, Gurlitt had already been working since early 1944 with a professional moving company to transport around 550 kilograms in approximately forty boxes out of the city to a secret location, in addition to having some works stored in an east German mill house.60 Despite painstakingly planning how to hide his artworks, he showed no interest in saving the records that proved their provenance. Had the previous owners sold them willingly, these provenance records would have dramatically increased their value. The only conceivable reason for Gurlitt not to have protected this documentation was to obscure the dubious circumstances under which he had amassed his trove.

  Protecting the artworks and his other assets now became Gurlitt’s top priority. Reluctantly, he decided to stop adding to his collection. Dresden had become very dangerous.

  CHAPTER VII

  REVISIONIST HISTORY

  “Enjoy the war, for the peace will be terrible.”

  —Common German joke in late wartime

  IN MID-FEBRUARY 1945, HILDEBRAND GURLITT loaded up a truck with his wife, mother, son, and daughter, along with some of the most precious works of early twentieth-century art. Taking the driver’s seat, Hitler’s forty-nine-year-old dealer slowly but urgently made his way to Schloss Weesenstein, the manor outside Dresden where Hermann Voss, his boss for the Führermuseum Project, was hiding.

  During the late hours of 13 February and into the morning of Valentine’s Day, 773 Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers had dropped 650,000 firebombs over the roofs of Dresden, rendering the once picturesque city a blazing hellhole: 80,000 houses and buildings were destroyed, and 25,000 people died. The RAF maneuver kept the pressure on Germany to surrender.

  Leaving the city with such a conspicuous amount of art was a risk for Gurlitt, particularly as he was traveling with his wife and two children. Enraged by what their comrades, families, and Hitler’s victims had suffered, Russian soldiers were determined to exact revenge and did not spare women and even girls as young as Gurlitt’s nine-year-old daughter, Benita, from brutal gang rapes. By the end of the war, the Red Army had suffered eleven million losses, and the brutalization of a few thousand German women and children seemed proportionate payback.

  Despite these perils, Gurlitt risked the journey to Schloss Weesenstein. There, he and Voss swiftly decided to take their chances and travel to Schloss Aschbach, a manor owned by the Baron von Pölnitz, an acquaintance who lived 250 miles away in southwest Germany. Gurlitt left behind his octogenarian mother Marie, who was too weak to travel; she returned to Dresden to live alone in her bombed-out basement.

  Packing up their wagon again, Gurlitt and his family gathered wood chips to use as fuel because there was a gasoline shortage. His sputtering truck traveled over bomb-cratered roads to the new manor, as Cornelius and
Benita sat in the back with the artwork. Upon arriving, the group was welcomed into the estate by Baron von Pölnitz, and Helene spent most days homeschooling the children while her husband, unable to work or travel, unsuccessfully tried to stave off boredom. Helene had no idea what to teach the children about their Führer. As far as she knew, Hitler was still fighting for the Fatherland, but it was obvious that the Allies would soon declare victory.

  Adolf Hitler saw the sky for the last time on 20 April 1945.

  The Führer celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday by briefly leaving the bunker in which he had been living since mid-January to pin decorations on child soldiers who had begun fighting Russian tanks.1 As these recruits from the Hitler Youth paraded for him, the Führer beamed. His twenty-five-year-old secretary, Traudl Junge, tried to conceal her horror. “Was he planning to rely on that kind of defense?” she thought to herself.2 Going into the bunker and celebrating his birthday with a rare glass of champagne, Hitler announced that he would never leave Berlin.3

  Hearing his decision, Eva Braun was briefly sullen. Soon, though, a fire entered the thirty-three-year-old’s eyes, a spark that Junge immediately identified. “She wanted to celebrate once again, even when there was nothing left to celebrate; she wanted to dance, to drink, to forget,” Junge observed. Braun dashed through the halls of the bunker, the walls of which displayed valuable artwork from Hitler’s planned collection for Linz that he had ordered his entourage to hang in his underground office to remind its residents of the future Führermuseum.4 Braun assembled a small group of younger staff, including Junge, and herded them up into the first floor of the chancellery. There, they danced as champagne flowed, pausing only to reset the gramophone after an explosion outside. “This was a party given by ghosts,” noted Junge.5

  Hitler’s entourage knew that an Allied victory was a foregone conclusion. Russian soldiers were quickly closing in from the north, the city was in smithereens from bombing, and the army consisted largely of old men and children.

  Hitler’s conversations with other bunker residents increasingly revolved around his German Shepherd, Blondi, Braun’s Scotties, and art, including the model of the Führermuseum that his entourage had taken great pains to transport into the bunker. “No matter at what time, whether during the day or at night, whenever he had the opportunity during those weeks, he was sitting in front of this model [as if he were standing] at a promised land into which we would gain entrance,” observed an aide.6

  The day after Hitler’s birthday, his thirty-two-year-old valet, Heinz Linge, woke him at an uncharacteristically early 9:30 a.m. to tell him the Russians were shelling Berlin. “The Russians are already so near?” exclaimed Hitler.7 The next day, Hitler uttered damning words during the situation conference: “The war is lost.”8 Braun quickly adopted the tone a caregiver would use with a small child, telling him, “But you know I shall stay with you.” Hitler’s eyes shone, and he kissed her right on the mouth, the first and only time his close circle saw him do so.9

  Going outside with two of the other women to smoke cigarettes and walk Blondi, Eva Braun noticed a beautiful bronze statue of a lithe naiad in a hidden spot behind shrubs that surrounded the Foreign Office. Birds were tweeting, flying around daffodils that encircled the statue. The women sat sullenly on a rock as Blondi played in the grass, then dashed back underground when the sirens howled once more.

  Back inside the bunker, Eva told Adolf about the statue of the naiad. “It would look really good by the pool in my garden,” she told him. “Do please buy it for me if everything turns out all right and we get out of Berlin!” she pleaded.10 Calmly but adamantly, Hitler admonished Braun for wanting a publicly owned statue for her private collection, explaining that the statue was owned by the people and part of the revolutionary museum system that he had created over the past twelve years.

  Within hours, the bunker was filled with not only the high-pitched sounds of sirens from outside but also the delighted shrieks of children as Joseph and Magda Goebbels moved their six children into it: twelve-year-old Helga, eleven-year-old Hildegard, nine-year-old Helmut, eight-year-old Holdine, six-year-old Hedwig, and four-year-old Heidrun.11 Their cheerful obliviousness made the situation more disconcerting for Hitler’s staff. Traudl Junge, trying to distract the children, took them to the area where the staff stored birthday presents for Hitler, which included children’s toys from young Reich residents.12 When Hitler began plodding through the bunker halls aimlessly, Blondi never leaving his side, the Goebbels children clamored for attention from “Uncle Adolf,” thrilled about this unexpected school holiday.13

  On 25 April, a telegram from Hermann Göring arrived in which he declared himself Führer, effective 26 April. Göring cited the fact that Hitler was in the bunker and thus unable to assess the war’s status above ground. Alarmed by this insubordination, Hitler’s assistants began destroying his personal documents in Berlin, including art records documenting purchases for the Führermuseum.14

  The bunker residents began casually discussing the best methods for their suicides. “The best way is to shoot yourself in the mouth. Your skull is shattered and you don’t notice anything,” said Hitler. This horrified Eva Braun. “I want to be a beautiful corpse,” she insisted.15

  Minutes later, Hitler asked Junge to take dictation of his last will and testament. She expected it to be a confession, a reflection, a justification. Instead, Hitler criticized the German people for not being sufficiently passionate about establishing the Third Reich before issuing a tirade on the importance of his role as an artist and curator. “I collected the paintings in the collections I have bought over the years, never for private purposes, but always exclusively for enlarging a gallery in my hometown of Linz on the Danube. It would be my most fervent wish for this legacy to be realized,” he insisted.16

  Hitler had told Eva Braun that he would marry her after he won the war so that they could retire to the Berghof, where he would resume painting and write his memoir as the Führermuseum was being constructed in Linz.17 Now, Hitler made good on his promise. The Goebbels family and the staff attended the marriage ceremony, during which the officiant amended the vows so that they would not include lines such as those about staying married “until death do us part,” given that their deaths were so imminent.18 Afterward, the group celebrated over champagne, sandwiches, and tea; Braun’s eyes glowed as the others began addressing her as “Frau Hitler.”19

  Preparations then began for Hitler and Braun’s suicides, starting with the killing of Blondi to test the cyanide capsules. The Führer’s medical doctor ushered Blondi into the washroom, after which the smell of burnt almonds quickly wafted into the hallway. It was the odor of working cyanide.20

  Shortly thereafter, around 11 p.m., staff informed Hitler that members of the Italian resistance movement had assassinated sixty-one-year-old Benito Mussolini and his thirty-three-year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, and that their bodies had been hung upside down in a public square to be mocked and photographed. “Had Hitler needed a final shove in order to make his own suicide a reality, that was probably it,” observed Rochus Misch, Hitler’s bodyguard.21

  On the morning of 30 April, preparations for the Führer’s death escalated as the bunker was rocked by the sounds of explosions above ground. Hitler formally said good-bye to his staff and had a final luncheon with Traudl Junge, before taking his valet, Linge, and chauffeur, Erich Kempka, aside, instructing them to burn his and Braun’s bodies so they wouldn’t meet Mussolini and Petacci’s fate.

  “I am going to shoot myself now. You know what you have to do,” Hitler said, giving his final salute.22 Braun was wearing the Führer’s favorite dress of hers, a black frock with roses at the neckline. Her hair was perfectly coiffed.23 Eating buttered bread, Helmut, the Goebbels’s nine-year-old son, heard a shot ring out. “That was a bullseye!” he exclaimed.24

  The valet Linge approached Hitler and Braun’s bedroom when he smelled the pistol discharge. Going inside, he saw Hitler with a head wound the
size of a penny in the right temple. By his right foot was a 7.65-mm Walther pistol; by his left foot was a 6.35-mm pistol, presumably a backup.25 Braun’s revolver lay on a table, near a picture of Hitler’s mother, Klara, as a young woman.26 Braun was sitting on the sofa, her legs drawn up under her and her face contorted from the cyanide.27 The brass case of her used cyanide capsule was lodged on the floor near the sofa. “It looks like empty lipstick,” thought Junge, peering into the room.28

  Outside, the bunker’s residents lay Hitler and Braun side by side. Shells exploded in the vicinity as Kempka opened petrol bottles, pausing to straighten Hitler’s arm against his side before pouring petrol on the newlyweds. Braun’s dress fluttering in the air caught his eye. He lit a petrol-soaked rag and flung it from a few feet away onto the bodies. “Slowly the fire began to nibble at the corpses,” he observed.

  The group gave the Hitlergrüß one last time, their right arms extending high into the air.29 “The most powerful man in the Reich a few days ago, and now a little heap of ashes blowing in the wind,” Junge ruminated to herself, watching the bodies burn. Several hours later, the Soviets delivered news of Hitler’s death to Joseph Stalin in Russia. Stalin was annoyed that he could not take his foe captive.30

  At around 5 p.m. Magda Goebbels quietly but efficiently began changing her children into white nightdresses. She praised their “Uncle Adolf” using the present tense, as if he were still alive.