Hitler's Last Hostages Page 23

  The Jewish Europeans and other victims of Hitler’s regime to whom Gurlitt reached out were most likely ignorant of his wartime dealings and undoubtedly desperate to preserve what few connections they still had in the German art world in the event that they repatriated. Guido Schönberger, a German academic in New York, wrote from his Upper East Side home a carefully worded letter declaring, “When Hitler came into power, [Gurlitt] did not, as so many others did, make [sic] his position easier through compromises.”66 Albin von Prybram Gladona, a Jewish Austrian who had lived in Munich before the war, had spent time in a concentration camp and fled in 1938 to France to work for the resistance. He vouched that Hildebrand was an “ardent and sincere anti-Nazi.”67

  Gurlitt also instructed his secretary from 1942 to 1944, Maja Gotthelf, to vouch for him. Describing herself as a “half-caste Jewess,” Gotthelf voluntarily acknowledged that she owed Gurlitt a debt for hiring her, given her vulnerable status in Nazi Germany; she falsely testified that she had never signed his letters with “Heil Hitler.”68

  Even Max Beckmann, the exiled artist whom Gurlitt had visited in Amsterdam during the war, was unaware that Gurlitt had numerous Beckmann works in his stash. The artist wrote him a letter of support, assuring him, “I’m glad that you have escaped Hell and are still alive.”69

  Most of these letters of recommendation were ready by mid-November 1945, when the Monuments Men confiscated the artworks that Gurlitt had brought with him to Schloss Aschbach. Gurlitt carefully and deliberately had assembled the collection, ensuring that it comprised economically valuable works along with obscure and relatively inexpensive idols and sculptures from New Guinea, Nepal, and unidentified African countries. Among the approximately 7 percent of Gurlitt’s collection that the Monuments Men confiscated and catalogued were one of the statues by Auguste Rodin, the pietà by Käthe Kollwitz, two works by George Grosz, The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann, and Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach.

  Through this clever strategy, Gurlitt concealed from the Allies around 93 percent of his collection. Rumors, however, were percolating in the small village surrounding Schloss Aschbach. A few weeks later, the Monuments Men received a tip from an unexpected source informing them that Gurlitt was deceiving them. On 29 April 1946, forester Karl Gruell wrote to Bavaria’s Governor and Finance Minister, as well as the Monuments Men, noting that he had heeded the declaration by the Allies nine days prior that ordinary Germans with knowledge of those who, during the war, had “robbed or removed property” from victims of the Nazis should report that information. “It’s known to me—as it has to be to the responsible [government] office in our local community—that in March 1945, Dr. Gurlitt from Dresden came with two trucks laden with around 100 [crates],” he said. Gruell implied that it had become common knowledge that Gurlitt’s boxes contained valuable French artworks, copper engravings, and rare books so that even he, as a lowly forester, knew about it.70 The widespread rumor, Gruell warned, was that Gurlitt’s collection of hidden artworks was worth about twelve million reichsmarks.71 Gruell had no way of knowing, but the roughly one hundred works that Gurlitt turned over to the Monuments Men were probably worth slightly less than twelve million reichsmarks. The total worth of Gurlitt’s roughly 1,000 works far exceeded his valuation.

  The Monuments Men asked Gurlitt to respond to what Gruell had said, while keeping the forester’s identity hidden from him. Gurlitt wrote on 18 June that he had been a low-level dealer for German museums and “institutions” and that all his business records and correspondences had been destroyed in the Dresden bombings. Consequently, he claimed, it would be “immensely difficult” for him to prove rightful ownership of his artworks. Even overlooking the reality that Gurlitt had purposefully neglected to preserve his records, most art dealers have a rough idea of where and when they acquired their artworks, particularly those with the highest market value. Essentially, Gurlitt was implying that he suffered from severe amnesia, at least as far as his art trove was concerned.72

  On 26 September, the Monuments Men recorded in their file that they asked Gurlitt to swear that he did not have any artworks acquired in or from foreign countries, which, of course, even Gurlitt could not.73 Without noting the source, Gurlitt’s interrogators wrote that they had “received information” that Gurlitt had eleven paintings and drawings by Max Liebermann that he had purchased in Paris during the war but that he had not included these alleged Liebermann works in the list that he submitted to the Monuments Men. In reality, unbeknownst to the Monuments Men, Gurlitt had around seventy works by Liebermann. Gurlitt was never asked to clarify how many Liebermann artworks were in his possession, a sign of the overwhelming task that the understaffed team of Allies was trying to accomplish—frantically sifting through hundreds of thousands of pages regarding potential looting by dozens of Europeans.

  Observing how overworked the Monuments Men were, Gurlitt reached out to French art historian Rose Valland, one of the few women who had worked in Nazi-occupied Paris to protect art from rapacious Germans like Gurlitt. Now that Valland was a captain for the Monuments Men and a high-powered member of the squad investigating him, Gurlitt wrote her a fawning letter on 1 October, pontificating about who could have enabled Hitler’s looting of artworks without once mentioning his own participation in the Führermuseum Project.74 A lack of coordination between the French government and the Monuments Men, including French nationals like Valland, was instrumental in Gurlitt’s successful deception. Writing to the Monuments Men, the French government expressed concern that Gurlitt had returned sixty-nine wrongfully acquired paintings to Paris but that he had bought over two hundred paintings there that dealers in Paris might have acquired under dubious circumstances—a point in direct contradiction to what he had told the Americans. The French officials believed that Gurlitt had not only acquired paintings for the Führermuseum in Paris but also amassed a collection there for his personal use. “Were they lost?” they wondered about the paintings, adding, “We do not think so,” implying that Gurlitt was being honest with the Allies about only a fraction of his collection.75 French officials further submitted a document to the Monuments Men, stating, “It is probable that there were still other paintings bought from [France] by Gurlitt and which are not on the list.”

  Yet, because resources for the Monuments Men were scarce, the tip languished in the file of the Monuments Men, forgotten until the twenty-first century.

  Nineteen months after the end of the war, the Allies began winding down their punitive responses toward Germany, aiming to rebuild the nation and strengthen western Europe in preparation for possible aggression from the Soviet Union. The total who had died in the war—due to the famines, genocides, diseases, and fighting it engendered—numbered between fifty million and eighty million people. Yet relatively few Germans were punished. On 1 October 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg handed down death sentences to just twelve Nazi defendants.

  Gurlitt was aware that the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials gave many citizens from Allied countries the feeling that justice had been served and that it was time to move past this troubled period in Western history. This mentality began working to his advantage in 1947. Despite witnesses still insisting to the Monuments Men that he had transported about one hundred crates to Schloss Aschbach, Gurlitt kept repeating that he had only brought twenty-five and had handed over his complete collection. “I have never hidden artworks or anything else,” he testified falsely.

  Through his insistence that he had “very few paintings,” Gurlitt in fact hid his secret in plain sight. He had realized during the war that acquiring hundreds of works on paper was the best means to avoid punishment for dubious deals. They were easy to transport and hide, they were often dismissed as less important than paintings, and it was harder for investigators to trace their original ownership.76 On 9 March 1947, Monuments Man Edgar Breitenbach recommended formal dismissal of the tip from the forester Gruell. The Allies followed Breitenbach’s recommendatio
n.77

  By mid-1948, the Monuments Men were experiencing fatigue and dwindling resources, further emboldening Gurlitt to push them to exonerate him. He sent them a statement in June falsely reiterating that all of his artwork had been acquired between 1942 and 1944, that any trace of the origins of the works had been destroyed in the Dresden bombings, and that he could not remember anything about their provenance.78 He added a short autobiography, writing that he had fought the “hardest of fights with members of the NSDAP” and emphasizing his position as director of the left-leaning Zwickau museum before Hitler’s rise.79

  The strategy succeeded. Over the summer of 1948, the Monuments Men formally dismissed the complaints filed against Gurlitt by observers around the Pölnitz estate. “Mr. Gurlitt has been thoroughly and repeatedly questioned by representatives of this office on his art purchases in formerly occupied countries, as well as on the allegations made by Karl Gruell,” they concluded in July. In August, they added that “this office believes that it has extracted from Gurlitt all desired information.”80

  The Monuments Men were in no position to request further resources to investigate Gurlitt and the dozens of other men who, they suspected, might have amassed collections of looted or confiscated art during the war. By this time, the United States, the main funder of the Monuments Men, was too preoccupied with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in spring 1949 and with supervising Germany’s first postwar elections.

  Growing more impatient, Gurlitt contacted the authorities on 6 November 1950, writing, “If I may, can I ask what steps I need to take in order to regain possession of the artworks, and if it would somehow be possible for you to send me a list of the confiscated artwork?”81 The Monuments Men sent him an inventory of what they had itemized and approved for release. Before Christmas 1950, the Monuments Men returned to Gurlitt the 115 paintings, 19 drawings, and 72 other objects that he claimed represented his entire collection.

  This included Beckmann’s The Lion Tamer and Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach. At some point before or around this time, Gurlitt had also acquired Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Fan, the 1921 portrait of a brunette that the Nazis had looted from the Libourne vault of Paul Rosenberg during the war. It was these three works that would trigger the unraveling of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s secret half a century later.

  Gurlitt’s deception of the Monuments Men was hardly a sign of their incompetence as art experts. Rather, it was indicative of the overwhelming pressure this small team of dedicated historians faced in attempting to catalogue a gargantuan number of artworks. Though the group comprised around 400 men and women and was funded mostly by the United States, its members came from fourteen nations, often did not speak the same languages, and oversaw millions of items.

  The dirty truth of postwar Germany—one that the Allies begrudgingly recognized and that the Germans and Austrians used to their advantage—was that so many Germans had either actively helped or been complicit with the Nazis that to bring them all to justice would require economically annihilating the very parts of western Europe that were crucial to advancing NATO in the face of the growing Soviet threat. Even punishing official Nazi Party members and ardent Hitler supporters would necessitate prosecuting 10 percent of the population.82 In this sense, Hitler gained a posthumous victory: his campaign of hate had been so successful that his movement was immune to full denazification, with consequences that would impact Germany and Hitler’s victims for decades to come.

  In a prescient line, Monuments Man Richard F. Howard predicted that, despite his team’s efforts, Hitler’s obsession with art would have a lasting impact on the international art world and on Germany’s standing in the global community. “The legal status of ‘Degenerate Art’ is today as confused as the times and circumstances which saw its development,” he warned.83

  CHAPTER VIII

  OUR SINCERE CONDOLENCES

  “One gets a strange feeling, breaking up a home in which one has lived for a long time. It is as if one were destroying something as intimate as the shell of a snail or a mussel.”

  —George Grosz, describing exile

  AFTER NEWS REACHED THE UNITED STATES that Adolf Hitler had “fallen,” most Americans rejoiced in the defeat of the Third Reich, planning parades and parties to celebrate the eventual return of their boys fighting abroad. The mood was euphoric in New York City, but the atmosphere set off an extreme bout of depression for George Grosz, who was now fifty-one years old and living with his wife, Eva, in Huntington, Long Island. VE Day catalyzed the next phase in a vicious cycle that the exiled artist had been battling since moving with his family to America twelve years before. Grosz’s depression followed a clear pattern: happiness at being free from Nazi threats, followed by guilt about the persecution of his friends, fellow opponents of Hitler, who had not been able to escape the Third Reich. This subsequently devolved into anxiety about being in exile, along with anger at how the Nazis had irreparably harmed his career. Finally, Grosz would feel intense guilt about experiencing all these emotions in the safety of America, a country that had welcomed him and for which he felt a genuine admiration. He would subsequently try to cope with the stress by drinking heavily and retreating into his office; he never mistreated his wife or children, but he grew withdrawn and sullen. Upon regaining sobriety, Grosz would begin the loop again. By 1945, this destructive pattern was repeating itself more frequently and with an escalating intensity that would eventually kill him.

  Only three days after Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945, Grosz sent a letter to Wieland Herzfelde, his friend and former publisher, who was trapped in Germany. In it, Grosz stressed that he understood why Americans wanted to celebrate victory but said the triumphant mood felt like a national requirement, leaving little room for his own mourning and anxiety. Even as troops were uncovering the horrors of the war, many fellow New Yorkers did not want to focus on them or on the trauma that Hitler’s victims had endured. “They’ve found the first of the Concentration Camps. And we’d rather not talk about the now tormented millions in Poland” and other camp zones, he wrote, admitting he was in a nihilistic phase. “It’s maybe just a sign of the blindness of fate, given that [I have] lived through all this,” wrote Grosz.1

  The war that had only started for America after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 had lasted thirty-one years for George Grosz. Since Germany had entered the Great War in 1914, now referred to as World War I, Grosz’s life had been embroiled in a never-ending swirl of psychological peril and emotional pain. Throughout the war, he felt not only guilty that his artworks and political activism had been insufficient to stop Hitler’s rise but angry with the majority of Germans for ignoring, underestimating, or abetting the Nazi regime.

  Grosz and Eva experienced the same trauma of exile as most other displaced Europeans, a phenomenon that would not be discussed widely in American and European societies for decades. Such a mass exodus of intellectuals and the middle classes had never before occurred in the history of a Western nation like Germany. Members of the press, psychologists, and the general public in the United States and England—the key host countries of those exiled—were ill equipped to identify or understand this particular branch of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Its impact on not only Grosz but also the entire art world would be permanent and profound. The war had pushed the center of the art and fashion worlds to New York City; they would never again be anchored in Paris or Berlin. American art and fashion, created by native-born Americans who had never seen war on their own soil save for the attack on Hawaii, would dominate these spheres. The Europe that Grosz had tried his whole life to protect was now dead. In its place was ruins, and it would be many years before it became the continent that Grosz had always wanted it to be: a peaceful network of economically prosperous nations with vested interests in avoiding future wars.

  Once George Grosz’s sons, Peter and Martin (called “Marty” by his family), arrived in autumn 1933, the family
moved into a house in Bayside, Long Island, and Grosz impressed upon his young boys the importance of integration. Though his poor English embarrassed him greatly, he began speaking it as much as possible until he was finally fluent. “He was nuts about America,” Marty Grosz would later recall. “He put a lot of emphasis on being in America and being American.” Eva worked on learning English, as well. At home, however, she still spoke German with their sons. She also learned American styles of cooking, while ensuring that Peter and Martin retained a healthy appetite for German fare. “We were very ‘kraut-oriented’ at home,” remembered Marty. “My mom had radar; wherever we were she could snoop out a German butcher.”2

  Searching for themes in the United States to depict in a new body of artworks, Grosz felt that it would be inappropriate to turn the acerbic style he used to pillory German society on the country that had rescued him from a future of “only horror, terror and humiliation,” he wrote in his notebook.3 The majority of Grosz’s greatest paintings warning against fascism were trapped in Berlin. These were the very artworks that had made him famous in America, where magazine and newspaper readers had seen reproduced images of them in numerous publications.

  Resuming his crusade in 1934, without the benefit of exhibiting his older works in the United States, Grosz held nothing back in trying to warn America about Hitler. Through correspondence with his friends in Germany, Grosz had heard that the Jewish German writer Erich Mühsam had been dragged out of bed in the small hours of the morning by Nazis, then bludgeoned to death in July 1934 in a latrine at the Oranienburg concentration camp. Grosz created a three-part series on Mühsam titled A Writer Is He! In one work a Nazi hooligan kicks the fifty-six-year-old, still in his nightshirt, while another looks on laughing; in another, grinning guards beat him with a rifle, and a German Shepherd snaps at his trembling legs. In the background are two middle-class civilians, standing outside the camp near a house. It was a clear repudiation of the idea that ordinary Germans were unaware of the camps: located at the end of a residential street in an outer Berlin borough, Oranienburg was hardly remote. In the third work, After the Questioning, Grosz depicts the aftermath of Mühsam’s murder, after camp guards had crudely staged the scene to look like a suicide. The work shows blood spattered on the walls as two Nazi guards, their boots covered in the writer’s blood, exit the torture chamber.4