Hitler's Last Hostages Page 22

  The bodyguard Misch, a new father himself, observed the scene in the cramped quarters but absolved himself of any responsibility for the deaths he knew the children would soon face. “I knew this was the final parting of a mother from her children, but I did not want to see it. Frau Goebbels was preparing her children for death,” he noted, trying not to let four-year-old Heidrun’s confused looks make him think of his own young daughter.31 He developed a deliberately indifferent mentality: “I asked no questions when it was best to ask none, but I also raised no questions when I could have,” he noted later.32 At 7 p.m., Misch observed Magda Goebbels playing a card game at a table. Her eyes were red but dry. Joseph Goebbels approached her, solemn and silent.33 Misch then began pacing the bunker hallway and chain-smoking before leaving the bunker, only to be captured quickly by the Soviets, who kept him in a labor camp before eventually releasing him.34

  Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, also felt a visceral urge to leave the bunker. Taking one final look inside Hitler’s bedroom, she saw Blondi’s leash dangling from the coat rack. “It looks like a gallows,” she thought to herself. Going back into the hall, she saw that Hitler’s valuable portrait of Friedrich the Great was gone; someone inside had taken it as he or she fled.35 As Goebbels prepared to shoot his wife and then himself, Junge fled home to Munich, anticipating condemnation from her family and friends about her involvement with Hitler. The condemnation never came.

  A week later, on 7 May 1945, at 2:41 a.m., Alfred Jodl signed Germany’s surrender, officially ending the war on 8 May 1945. While the Allies and those whom they liberated referred to this day as Victory in Europe Day—VE Day for short—the Germans referred to it as Stunde Null, or “Zero Hour.” The term had a dual meaning: not only had they lost everything, they now had the opportunity to create a new Germany, seemingly from scratch.

  In reality, however, war profiteers were not starting from zero. Whether they had dealt in ammunition, automobiles, art, or other industries, a few lucky men exited the war with substantial assets that would sustain them and their families for decades to come. Their primary concern during the Zero Hour period was portraying themselves as victims of Hitler in order to hide their profits from whichever Allied organization was tasked with investigating their wartime activities.

  For Hildebrand Gurlitt, that organization was the Monuments Men.

  The Monuments Men, a group of roughly four hundred men and women who formed the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program, were art experts from Allied nations. Primarily funded by the US government, these historians had long been concerned about Hitler’s attempts to eradicate any art that he considered degenerate. American civilians had lobbied the federal government in 1943 to research how to protect art and other culturally significant artifacts in the event of an Allied victory. The initiative garnered the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, although it granted only $16,500 to pay the salaries of staff in New York and Washington.36

  The parsimonious attitude of the Rockefeller Foundation was somewhat understandable. No government in the history of warfare had ever spent funds, let alone solicited donations from civilians, in order to preserve the culture of the territory it was about to defeat. The notion that art experts would be accompanying them on missions annoyed Allied militarily officials, who worried about preserving lives over inanimate objects, however culturally significant. One member of the Monuments Men summarized the situation. “I doubt there is need for any large specialist staff for this work, since it is at best a luxury and the military will not look kindly on a lot of art experts running around trying to tell them what not to hit.”37

  Hiding out at Schloss Aschbach, the manor owned by Baron von Pölnitz, Gurlitt heard rumors about the Monuments Men and worried that they would find him. He and Helene also griped about their living conditions, even though they were fully aware of their good fortune in comparison to other Germans during the Zero Hour period.

  The fact that the Gurlitts had a roof over their heads was a postwar luxury: 40 percent of the nation’s homes were now destroyed.38 Upper Franconia, the Bavarian region surrounding Baron von Pölnitz’s estate, was in chaos, but the pandemonium in other regions made for a far grimmer picture.

  Rape was now rampant throughout Germany. Allied courts convicted 284 American and British soldiers of the crime.39 French troops from North Africa raped around 260 young girls and adult women around Stuttgart on Hitler’s birthday, one hundred miles from Schloss Aschbach.40 Yet the overwhelming majority of sexual violators hailed from the Red Army. They routinely forced men to watch the rape of their wives, daughters, or sisters, killing both the men and the women if the men attempted to intervene.

  For survivors of concentration camps, the horror that they had experienced continued as they struggled to regain their sense of humanity and identity among fellow Europeans who had contributed to their persecution and were not inclined in the postwar period to help them reintegrate into society.

  American and British personnel, though earnest in wanting to assist Hitler’s victims, were ill equipped to deal with the emotional, mental, and physical trauma that these survivors had endured. At Dachau, Time magazine reporter Sidney Olson observed how lice-bitten, typhus-infected male prisoners confused soldiers with their glee at announcing they had banded together to kill two German soldiers themselves. At Bergen-Belsen, a Jewish chaplain with the British army described how the soldiers were unprepared for the sight of the prisoners, who seemed like real-life zombies. “Their skeleton arms and legs made jerky, grotesque movements as they forced themselves forward,” the chaplain wrote.41 The idea of helping the Germans rebuild their country—with the use of US taxpayer funds—was unfathomable.

  Against the backdrop of these postwar horrors, Baron von Pölnitz, a longtime friend of Gurlitt, was thrilled to host the dealer’s family but was none too happy about what he dubbed the “Jewish manor invasion”: the use of a section of his estate by the Allies to house a small community of Jewish Europeans hoping to emigrate to Palestine. The army confiscated some of the buildings to hold classes for Holocaust survivors to help them learn English, Hebrew, agricultural basics, and logistical information relevant for their move.42

  Gurlitt wrote a series of letters complaining about how the conditions were subpar compared to those he had enjoyed before. “Believe me, we aren’t living in Paradise here; we have sufficient potatoes, bread and flour, but everything else is limited and no special allotments like fish, etc!” he penned to one friend.43 Writing to his cousin, Gurlitt complained, “There’s nourishment and quiet here, but that is it; bucolically speaking, it is disgracefully primitive and one is alone in a way that one cannot possibly describe.”44

  Cornelius Gurlitt was now twelve and his sister, Benita, nine. Cornelius, due to his father’s status, had avoided the conscription as a child soldier that had befallen many boys his age. Both children, though emotionally shaken by the war, were physically unscathed and well fed throughout even the worst days. This was not good enough for their parents. Despite access at the estate to a tutor—most schools were in shambles—Gurlitt wrote to his cousin complaining, “The children are getting tans [playing outside] but aren’t getting any brighter” from studying.45 Hildebrand and Helene Gurlitt’s largest parental worry was that other adults joked that Benita’s name was Benito, referring to the recently assassinated Mussolini.46 Helene Gurlitt even had the gall to write to Lisa Arnhold, the Jewish widow of the banker and art collector Heinrich Arnhold, who, after Heinrich’s death, had hopscotched around Europe with her children to avoid the Nazis before escaping to the United States. Helene claimed that the Gurlitts had endured great hardships and asked Arnhold to send clothes and shoes for Cornelius and Benita, along with sewing thread.47

  Hildebrand Gurlitt, meanwhile, worried constantly that the Monuments Men would not only find and confiscate the small fraction of his collection that he had brought to Schloss Aschbach but also discover his bigger trove. All he could do for the moment was wa
it and hope.

  It did not take long for Europeans who had been deeply complicit in or actively helpful to Hitler’s cause to begin spinning false narratives about their actions during the war—deceptions with devastating consequences for victims of the Third Reich.

  Support for Hitler during the war had been so widespread among ordinary Germans that even those in Hitler’s elite circle were shocked to receive no condemnation from fellow citizens, even as stories of those with the courage to resist Hitler began circulating.

  Returning to her home in Munich, Traudl Junge learned of Sophie Scholl, a fellow Munich resident her age who had risked her life to warn Germans of the murderous policies of Hitler, the same policies for which Junge had taken dictation on her typewriter. The Nazi regime beheaded the twenty-one-year-old Scholl for her activism. Junge felt both guilty and defensive that she had not displayed the courage that Scholl had shown. In light of this, Junge expected to be pilloried by Munich’s residents, who knew that she had been Hitler’s secretary. Yet, to her shock, her fellow Bavarians pretended that she had never had any connection to the Nazis, let alone direct access to Hitler during his last days.48

  Junge correctly attributed this to the fact that most Germans realized that holding their fellow citizens responsible for the rise of Hitler and his successful genocide would require them to examine their own actions—or inactions—during the war. “We were all looking to the future and trying—with remarkable success, incidentally—to repress and play down our past experiences,” noted Junge.49

  Gurlitt never articulated his views on complicity with the Nazis as clearly as Junge did, but he was acutely aware of the seriousness with which the Allies intended to investigate all aspects of Hitler’s program. However, he also knew that the Monuments Men were a small group of pioneers in a gargantuan Allied machine attempting to assess millions of people in a short period. Though he remained anxious, Gurlitt knew that too many Germans had aided the Nazis or been complicit in their actions for the Allies to identify all of them; even if the Allies were able to do so, punishing them all would effectively mean punishing most of the country.

  In July 1945, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States met at the Cecilienhof in Potsdam and agreed on the “five Ds” of “demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decentralization and decartelization.” As a result of this meeting and what he observed around him during the Zero Hour period, Gurlitt decided to bet his future and his art trove on the probability that he could tell calculated lies to the Monuments Men, which they would have insufficient resources to fact-check or rebut.

  The Monuments Men first investigated Gurlitt’s direct superior, Hermann Voss. He and Gurlitt had remained close during the first months of the postwar period, both aware that the Allied treatment of Voss would serve as precedent for their eventual investigation into Gurlitt. Voss gave the Monuments Men a line that Gurlitt would repeat: because of his prewar support of modern art and his association with Jewish art dealers before Hitler’s rise, he was a victim, not a perpetrator, of the regime.

  It was nonsense, and the Monuments Men detected Voss’s attempt at deception. “Voss represents himself as a person of strong anti-Nazi sympathies who accepted the Linz position only with the idea of saving the pictures and handing them over, intact and inventoried, to the Allies, who he felt certain would win the war,” they noted in Voss’s interrogation file.50 Voss claimed to have an astounding level of ignorance regarding the nature of the very Führermuseum Project for which he was the director, telling the Allies that he had barely known his predecessor, Hans Posse, and had no idea that the Führermuseum’s art collection could possibly include art confiscated from Jews, occupied territories, or other museums. Voss stated that he had been “shocked” to learn, upon becoming head of the Führermuseum Project, that even a few works in the collection had been purchased from Hitler’s victims under duress or confiscated outright. He rationalized, however, that this was not his problem because it had occurred before his time. The interrogators immediately noted Voss’s unctuous and deceptive tactics, quipping, “His constant reliance on failure of memory to explain discrepancies in his testimony did not improve the atmosphere of the interrogations.”51 The Monuments Men summarized Voss’s mentality: “He states that the confiscated pictures were sure to go somewhere, and what difference did it make?”52 Furthermore, they saw Voss as emblematic of the overall mentality of Germans about the material possessions of Jewish Germans and other victims of Hitler. “Voss takes the profoundly German attitude that art history is pure science, and that one can pursue it without exterior moral responsibility,” they noted.53

  Voss justified his actions thus: “Things had gone too far for me to stop them.”54

  Allied suspicion escalated when they discovered a 16 December 1943 letter written by Voss in which he joked—implying the possibility of Germany losing the war—that art dealers would be able to “escape” responsibility for their actions. The Allies were flabbergasted when Voss solemnly submitted to them, without sarcasm, a poem he composed for them about his love of art and peace as proof of his anti-Nazi sentiments.55 Incredulous, the Monuments Men noted that Voss seemed baffled that the Allies didn’t consider him a “savior” and a war hero.56

  The Monuments Men wrote a damning report to conclude Voss’s file. “He constantly avoided the question of moral responsibility involved in accepting [a Führermuseum] position” and “claims immunity from the consequences”57 of his involvement in “the most elaborate purchasing expedition in the history of art”58 by justifying that the Führermuseum Project had been conceived by those more powerful than himself. The Allies rejected the idea that Voss was merely a “fellow traveler,” concluding that “he had the chance to stop proceedings and that he did not, even though he was sufficiently informed to know what he was getting into.”59 Voss had “kept his hands clean by leaving the dirty work to others and not asking too many questions,” they wrote, strongly suggesting that this mentality likely applied to his entire Führermuseum Project team.60 “In short,” the Monuments Men concluded, Voss “pictures himself as both the important man who was responsible for saving the pictures of Dresden and Linz, and as a pure scientist who was not concerned with what went on behind the scenes.”61

  The Monuments Men recommended to their Allied superiors that Voss be detained as a “potential war criminal.”62 This report came a few weeks before General Lucius Clay created the Denazification Policy Board that functioned in the provinces of Hesse, Baden-Württemburg, and Bavaria, putting Voss’s case under Clay’s jurisdiction. Yet Clay’s subordinates dropped the case, and Voss went on to enjoy a long and prosperous postwar career in the art world before dying in 1969. Clay concluded that disciplining supporters of Hitler who had committed violent crimes should take priority over investigating and disciplining nonviolent criminals such as Voss. It was this decision that served as precedent for the handling of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

  When authorities investigate a group of potential criminals, one of two things usually happens. Typically, the suspects turn on each other during interrogation, having not discussed a strategy beforehand. In rare cases, however, the group schemes beforehand to decide what version of the truth they want to tell. In this sense, the art world elite of Nazi Germany was an impeccably organized cartel. Once the Nazis surrendered and the Monuments Men found Voss, the director “outed” Gurlitt as one of Hitler’s top-three most important art dealers, seemingly in a gesture of goodwill toward the Allies. The two men had arranged this beforehand.

  After the investigation of Voss began, Gurlitt quickly compiled his own character references from around the globe, knowing he would also soon be investigated. Many were written by men and women who felt compelled to vouch for Gurlitt due to their own complicity with the regime and fears that, were they not to support him, he might recommend that the Allies investigate them, too. Brazenly, Gurlitt also requested character references from Jewish Europeans and other victims of the Nazi regim
e who had fled Europe early enough to avoid persecution, yet now, in a cruel twist, were unaware of Hildebrand’s complicity with the very regime that had expelled them.

  Gurlitt’s references thus fell into two categories: those given by others who had also been complicit in Hitler’s art crimes and those given by people who had fled the Third Reich and were unaware of what Gurlitt had done during the war.

  In the first group, Robert Oertel, a researcher at the Art History Institute in Freiburg, testified that he had known Gurlitt since long before the war and that Voss had bought artwork from Gurlitt “just like [Voss did] from countless other German art dealers.” Oertel added that Gurlitt had nothing to do with any artwork confiscated from Jewish Europeans and that “Dr. Gurlitt has never had a special status or carried out anything but pure business duties” for Hitler’s Führermuseum Project. Oertel failed to mention that he himself had jockeyed for a position to work with Gurlitt and Voss to become a lower-ranking art dealer for Hitler.63 Kurt Martin, director of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, wrote that Gurlitt was anti-Nazi and that he was “convinced that [Gurlitt’s] activities as a trader abroad have always been respectable.” Martin did not disclose that he had arranged for the Kunsthalle to take art that had been confiscated from Jewish Europeans.64

  Gurlitt also submitted a January 1946 testament from Walter Clemens, a lawyer in Hamburg, who testified “without reservation that [Gurlitt] always has been an unlimited adversary of Nazism” and that “the house of Gurlitt was a center of culture” and “an island of refuge for free art and expression” where diverse opinions were “honored with care.”65 The Allies had recently reinstated Clemens’s legal license, so he had a vested interest in mollifying Gurlitt, who could have denounced him as a Nazi sympathizer, prompting renewed investigation into Clemens’s own work during the Third Reich.