Hitler's Last Hostages Page 27

  What happened immediately thereafter is unclear. Grosz, clearly intoxicated, seems to have tripped on the stairs. Yet there was no obvious sign of an injury on impact that would have killed him. A newspaper delivery boy discovered him near the mailboxes early in the morning of 6 July, having asphyxiated on his own vomit. It appeared to be less of a case of a man too injured to stand and ask his wife for help than that of an artist too exhausted to do so.

  Someone, perhaps the delivery boy, alerted Eva, and a few men carried Grosz upstairs. George Ehrenfeld Grosz, aged sixty-six, was already dead. The city coroner registered his death as heart failure.

  In shock, Eva called Marty and Peter in the United States. Living in Chicago and working as a successful jazz musician, twenty-nine-year-old Marty immediately arranged to come back and comfort his mother. He felt shock but not surprise. He was aware of the extent of his father’s drinking and the demons with which he was grappling, but his father had never possessed a death wish or been suicidal.

  Five days later at noon, George Grosz was interred in a Berlin cemetery. His death was an irrevocable shock for Eva. Physically speaking, she had been far weaker than her husband for the past several years, so she had always expected to die first. Just one year after George’s death, almost to the day, Eva passed away. Her family buried her next to her husband. Half a century later, Marty would still attribute her death to heartbreak at losing the love of her life.

  Decades before Grosz’s death, Charles Baudelaire, the French art critic and translator of works by Edgar Allen Poe, had written of Poe, “A part of what today is the source of our enjoyment is what killed him.”62 To a certain extent, the same could be said for Grosz, who, like Poe, was highly passionate, depressed, and dependent on alcohol. Yet Grosz had spent his life fighting for a more tolerant, less racist world, perpetually pushing Germany to confront the faults not only of her past but of her present. He had done so despite the knowledge that it cost him his career and took a crushing toll on his psyche.

  In his final interview, with the New Yorker in 1943, Grosz had admitted that he coped with the stress of his work via methods that were detrimental to his own physical and mental health. However, he told the publication, he would not have changed anything he did to resist Hitler, fascism, racism, and violence in the years before he had fled to America as a consequence of speaking out about those very topics. “On Judgment Day,” he told the magazine, “I will take back nothing!”

  Without intending to, the magazine anticipated his demise by ending that article—ostensibly about his future—with an epitaph that the New Yorker thought would be suitable for Grosz when he died. It was a passage that the poet William Butler Yeats had written about author Jonathan Swift’s death:

  Savage indignation there

  Cannot lacerate his breast

  Imitate him if you dare

  World besotted traveller, he

  served human liberty

  CHAPTER IX

  HITLER’S LAST HOSTAGES

  “No person lives longer than the documents of his culture.”

  —Adolf Hitler

  CORNELIUS GURLITT AROSE IN HIS Munich apartment at sunrise on 28 February 2012 and puttered to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a day like nearly any other in the past thirty years since he had moved to Munich. Against the wall leaned a rickety dining table, a single chair tucked in, with a placemat set, as always, for one. The kitchen had a few bulging trash bags ready for disposal—a chore that the seventy-nine-year-old dreaded. He was wary of his neighbors. His favorite sound was silence. Even his own inhaling and exhaling seemed intrusively loud. Cornelius did not own a television, rarely listened to the radio, and had never used the internet or a mobile phone. He did not visit restaurants. Instead, he bought canned goods—he rarely bought fresh fruits and vegetables—and painstakingly rationed them. Only occasionally he would treat himself to coffee and cake at a café ten minutes away from his house, a cozy establishment with a Queen Elizabeth II bobblehead doll in the window.1

  Cornelius, Hildebrand Gurlitt’s son, largely spent his years sitting quietly in a threadbare brown chair. It was not a spiritual exercise; although he had considered becoming a monk as a young child, his belief in any form of social cohesion, religious or secular, had crumbled long ago. He was not sure why or how. He only felt that life was safest when he sat still and alone.

  Above all, Cornelius worried about spies. They could be any of the people on the street, in the hallway, or in the grocery store. He did not use the word “love,” but he felt a deep connection to his sister, Benita, the only surviving member of his direct family. They had cared for each other since they had fled in February 1945, during the bombings, with their parents.

  Half a century later, sitting in the silence, Gurlitt was acutely aware of even small noises, so it was with great alarm that he heard footsteps, then rapping on his door, then the buzzer. He did not answer.2

  Suddenly, within seconds of the buzzer sounding, the door was being broken down. Cornelius stood, pale and trembling, in a vintage nightgown, his deep blue eyes contrasting with his papery skin. Men he did not know handed him a search warrant as they barged into the room, ordering him to stay seated and quiet. Here they were at last, he thought: the spies.3 In actuality, they were government tax and customs officials. They had, however, been spying on Gurlitt for over a year, using multiple CCTV cameras to film not only him but his neighbors in the apartment complex.

  As Gurlitt sat uneasily in his dingy brown chair, the officers looked to the right of him and saw a marble statue by Auguste Rodin on a table next to a bookcase. Exploring the apartment further, they were shocked to find over 1,000 works of art. Some were stacked on wooden shelves, while others were in a bespoke cabinet created to house works on paper. Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Fan, the painting that the Nazis had looted from Paul Rosenberg seventy years before, was rolled up in the pantry and stuffed among canned tomatoes. On the living room wall was Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach, which had been looted from David Friedmann, the great uncle of David Toren.

  Mid-level customs officials had initiated the investigation into Cornelius a full year before, suspecting him of dealing in Nazi-looted art. Yet they were now under orders from their boss, Bavarian tax prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz, to assess the works solely for taxation purposes. Nemetz considered the identities of their rightful owners to be irrelevant.

  On this 28 February 2012 morning, only one thing was certain. The officials had arrived in a small wagon. Seeing the amount of art in the small apartment, they realized they would need a fleet of trucks to take away the loot.

  After the police and customs officers left three days later, taking with them the Gurlitt family’s art trove, Cornelius grabbed his diary and jotted down a succinct line: “Door broken open. Customs Investigators.”4 Then his silence returned as he contemplated his past.

  The last traumatizing event for Cornelius Gurlitt, before the raid on his apartment, had been his father’s death on 9 November 1956. On hearing the news, Cornelius had written in his agenda calendar just five simple words: “6:30 a.m., my father died.”5 Almost immediately thereafter, Cornelius quit university in Cologne. At twenty-three, he had inherited 80,000 deutschmarks in assets, roughly $157,000 in 2019. He jotted down that he was determined “never” to earn his own money or “assiduously pursue a sensible profession.” He was forthright about his reasoning: “I’m completely selfish and don’t want to improve myself.”6 Cornelius considered his father’s artworks a formidable asset, a view reflected in the nearly one hundred condolence letters that the family received in the wake of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s death, most of which made no mention of the period from 1933 to 1945.7

  After Hildebrand’s death, his European business partners were eager to help liquidate his collection and courted Cornelius and his mother. Rudolf Schleier, a Nazi operative in Paris during the war, wrote that he had worked with Gurlitt “during a challenging time during the war in Paris and cam
e to appreciate him” for his ability to discuss and solve their “mutual problems.”8 Another letter arrived from Aenne Abels, a dealer in Cologne. After a cursory mention of Gurlitt’s death, Abels expressed his wish that the Gurlitts would employ him to discretely sell off parts of the trove, particularly works by Max Liebermann and specifically Two Riders on the Beach.9

  These letters made Cornelius acutely aware that it was now incumbent on him to manage his father’s estate in a way that preserved the family’s public reputation while also allowing them to sell works discreetly on the grey market. Initially, Cornelius focused on misleading the financial authorities about the estate. Helene Gurlitt had inherited 700,000 deutschmarks in liquid assets from her husband, which she declared and on which she paid taxes. She also declared his collection, but valued it at only 12,000 deutschmarks, a sliver of its real value.10 This mollified the authorities.

  For two years after his father’s death, Cornelius lived with his mother and loafed around Düsseldorf. His ambitions for a social life or career withered, especially once he was romantically rebuffed by a woman at a local museum after he told her of his affection for her; she did not reciprocate, and Cornelius would never reach out romantically to anyone again.

  In spring 1959, Cornelius and his sister, Benita, both in their twenties, traveled to Paris for a mission that seemed surreally cinematic. They visited the dealer Raphaël Gérard, who had worked with their father, to retrieve 2,500 gold coins worth roughly 190,000 deutschmarks. To do this, they stuffed the coins into knapsacks and lugged them to banks, where they exchanged them for cash.11 The pickup from Gérard occurred around the time that the family received two letters from Germany’s Federal Office for External Restitution, the institution tasked with continuing the work of the Monuments Men. The bureau inquired about artworks they suspected Hildebrand Gurlitt had acquired in France for the Führermuseum. Cornelius trashed the letters, telling his mother, “No important mail came. Just yet another letter from the Federal Office for External Restitution,” adding, “It’s all too idiotic.”12

  Cornelius was convinced that his father had technically acted legally in acquiring the artworks. The war was over, he rationalized, and Hildebrand Gurlitt was a hero for saving the art from destruction. Moreover, the Gurlitt family had possessed these works long enough that previous owners should simply move on.

  Helene Gurlitt shared her son’s conviction. She decided in 1960 to move 380 miles away from Düsseldorf to Munich, where she could start anew. She purchased two apartments there and agreed to finance a third home elsewhere for Cornelius. He found a 6,400-square-foot plot in Salzburg, nestled below the Austrian Alps, ninety miles away. He designed a two-floor, one-thousand-square-foot house with a white picket fence.13

  For a few hours on a chilly January evening after Cornelius first arrived at his new cottage, it might have seemed to Cornelius that he had escaped his past. The kitchen featured a state-of-the-art refrigerator and new electric oven. Upstairs was an office and a small bedroom with a tiny bed that left no room for a partner. The walls throughout were bare, white and pure.

  Yet, the very next day, a moving truck arrived with 250 of the most precious, historically significant masterpieces from his father’s trove—and from European history.

  Into the house came five works by Pablo Picasso and five by Edvard Munch. Movers carried in works on paper by Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckmann. Cornelius Gurlitt carted in numerous paintings to decorate the walls—three works by Gustave Courbet, including a striking portrait of a shepherd with a scarlet scarf, framed in ornate gold; an Édouard Manet seascape with a dramatic gray sky and foamy green waves; a Camille Pissarro view across the Seine; two works by Eugène Delacroix, including a dramatic knight on a mighty grey steed; and an iconic Edgar Degas pastel of Parisian ballerinas arranging their hair. Six works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, including a charming portrait of a peasant with a pipe, were placed throughout the house.

  In some respects, Cornelius’s new living room looked quite normal; a Danish-style lounge chair sat in front of a coffee table, placed on a Persian rug; light-colored bookcases on dove grey walls held books on history and culture. Yet, among these banal furnishings, Cornelius hung and placed permanent reminders of Hitler’s Führermuseum Project and his father’s involvement in it.

  Two Riders on the Beach was still hanging in one of his mother’s Munich apartments. However, Cornelius brought nine other of Max Liebermann’s works to Salzburg, including two unique self-portraits. He squirreled away around twenty-five works by Emil Nolde in drawers throughout the house, along with twenty works by George Grosz and thirty Rodin drawings. Behind Cornelius’s lounge chair rested a fragile Rodin sculpture of a woman holding a sphere perched on an undersized pedestal.

  Once he was comfortably ensconced in Austria, Cornelius’s descent into isolation continued unchecked. “The thing is, people are easiest to deal with when they are dead. One can only endure very few of the living ones; most are latent murderers, torturers, robbers, scoundrels and those who beat others to death,” he wrote to his mother.14 Sometimes this worldview made Cornelius quietly despondent; other times it manifested in extreme anger, though there are no indications that he ever turned violent. When his mother suggested visiting him with a friend—in the house she owned—Cornelius flew into a rage. “I have no interest in that!!” he wrote her. “Now I’ll have to figure out how to get food, make supper, chat about stupid rubbish,” he wrote, signing the letter before adding a postscript underlined twice: “I want my peace and quiet.”15

  Cornelius did spend Christmas 1961 with Benita and her boyfriend, Nikolaus “Klaus” Fräßle, whom she had met studying art history at the University of Freiburg. Marriage was on Benita’s mind, and she hoped that the two men would get along. She was acutely sensitive to Cornelius’s social anxiety, and to her relief, Cornelius and Klaus hit it off quite well. The morning that the couple departed, however, Cornelius firmly told his sister that only she and their mother were welcome in Salzburg from then on. Klaus was not. Cornelius saw no reason to expand his social network.

  Shocked, Benita refused to end her relationship but agreed never to bring Klaus around her brother again. She and her mother agreed to visit quarterly; Helene also paid for a maid to clean his home.16 She hoped that taking care of Cornelius’s basic needs would encourage him to venture out more into Salzburg society. She was confused that Benita had adjusted to postwar life but Cornelius had not. “You have gotten yourself worked up into a truly alarming paranoia,” Helene wrote her son. “What in the world has happened to make you so jittery?”

  He did not reply.17

  From his windows Cornelius observed his neighbors, but only in so far as they brushed up against his property. A common diary entry read, “//Neighbor-Children playing soccer / my fence as ‘goal’ / Ball more than once over the goal, came into the garden, hitting flowers etc / banged against the garden door //.”18 Ultimately, Cornelius’s life was one of limited but regular routines. He took walks only after dark so as not to attract attention. Otherwise, he only left the house every two weeks to buy food and take his suits to the laundromat.

  In 1967 Cornelius returned to Munich, visiting his mother and sister for Pentecost. The square on which Helene’s two apartments were located had recently been christened Artur Kutscher Platz, in honor of a Nazi playwright who had died in 1960. Soon after Cornelius returned, doctors diagnosed his mother with cancer. By New Year’s Eve, it was clearly terminal. Cornelius stayed by his mother’s side, dutifully recording his hours with “Mommy” in his diary. He and Benita were present in late January 1968 when she died.

  The brother and sister responded to their mother’s death in vastly different ways.

  Cornelius, now thirty-five, retreated into his solitary world. Benita, however, began feeling a spiritual unease that could not be placated. She now regarded their father’s collection and the wealth it had provided them with as sinister. “I’ve sensed a curse ar
ound [the artworks] like in Wagner’s ‘Ring,’” she told Cornelius, referring to the magic ring in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a piece of jewelry that gives its owner the power to rule the world at the cost of contentment and peace. “What have we [inherited] other than angst, anger, worry and strife from this?”19

  Yet, while Benita distanced herself from the collection, she felt unable to extricate herself from its allure. From Helene, Cornelius inherited the deed on his Salzburg home, Benita inherited the two Munich flats, and each sibling inherited about 340,000 reichsmarks in cash—the modern equivalent of nearly half a million dollars each. Benita felt queasy about staying in the flats: stacks of her father’s artworks were still propped against the walls after all these years. She refused to relinquish them, however, and instead handed over the keys to Cornelius for safekeeping. Moreover, Benita took twenty-two artworks to the home in Kornwestheim, outside Stuttgart, that she shared with Klaus, now her husband.20

  Cornelius knew that to sustain their leisurely lifestyles, he had to sell a mid-priced artwork every few years, enough to provide for his needs without raising suspicion. By 1971, he had concluded that working with German and Swiss dealers would be most discreet. Cornelius reached out to the two auction houses that would become the mainstays of his transactions for the next four decades: Ketterer Kunst in Stuttgart and Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland.

  After Cornelius had written Wolfgang Ketterer a letter, the auctioneer’s wife visited him in one of the Munich flats, where she placed 90,000 deutschmarks in cash on the table and took away Bar, Brown by Max Beckmann, a 1944 oil on canvas that the exiled artist had painted in Amsterdam and that Hildebrand Gurlitt had purchased from him. Ketterer promised “strict discretion” on this and any future deals; it was, Cornelius learned with relief, unnecessary for him to provide information about how his family had acquired their artworks.21 Bar, Brown would later make its way into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.