Hitler's Last Hostages Page 28
Cornelius’s arrangements with Eberhard Kornfeld were also discreet; the middle-aged dealer personally came from Switzerland to Munich for several watercolors and prints by Beckmann, Kirchner, and Nolde, which he successfully sold in July 1971. Cornelius chose to travel to Bern on 9 November—the anniversary of his father’s death—to retrieve his 71,000 deutschmarks in cash.22
The exact volume of traffic between Cornelius and Ketterer Kunst, the Düsseldorf-based auction house, is unclear. The number of works he sold through Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, however, was almost certainly far higher. Cornelius found the policies of the murky Swiss art world, as well as the option of storing his earnings in a secret Swiss bank account, comforting.23 Kornfeld was the closest Cornelius came to having a friend over his lifetime; the two exchanged banal pleasantries in their letters, though they always addressed each other with the formal Sie rather than the informal Du. Between 1971 and 1991, Cornelius sold at least thirty paintings, woodcuts, watercolors, and pastels at Galerie Kornfeld. Hildebrand Gurlitt’s preference for works on paper now proved shrewd: in wartime they had been easier to transport than paintings or sculptures and also attracted less attention in auctions because no single work fetched a conspicuously high price. Postwar, these same attributes benefited Cornelius as he sold off artworks of dubious provenance.
The thirty sales together raised 1.321 million Swiss francs, from which Kornfeld took a 10 percent commission. Gurlitt kept the remaining 1.18 million francs, then worth roughly $787,000. The works included three woodcuts by Emil Nolde, four pieces by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one work by Otto Dix, and one watercolor by Max Beckmann. The highest price, 600,000 Swiss francs, was paid for Woman at Her Toilette, a pastel by Edgar Degas.24
The deals went off smoothly, but Cornelius must have feared exposure because, over the years, his fear of spies grew. He warned Benita never to send him postcards, instructing her to seal letters in tinfoil before placing them in envelopes. He kept his shutters closed and covered in black fabric. “I just want to know what seedy pack is continuously spying on me,” he told her.25
Eventually, Cornelius pushed Benita to a breaking point with his anxiety, for which she saw no basis, and his demands for circumventing the nonexistent espionage. “You issue written statements [to me] and I am supposed to act like a robot and [carry them out], however absurd,” she eventually wrote to Gurlitt. “It’s like I’m paralyzed, because I don’t know how someone can help you anymore,” she added. Cornelius soon cut Benita out of his life completely, refusing even to open the door to her when, in the 1990s, she made one final attempt to pierce his seclusion by visiting him in Salzburg. Seeing her outside his house, Gurlitt walked away from the window. The next day, when she returned, Cornelius had left a note pinned to his front door: “I do not want any visitors.”26
Cornelius’s self-imposed seclusion ended on 22 September 2010 when he traveled from Munich to Zurich. In the morning, he took the high-speed Eurocity 196 to Switzerland and headed straight to his bank, formerly the Schweizerischer Bankverein but now a part of UBS. He withdrew €9,000, but in his deposit box Cornelius had €18,000 in cash and around 290 gold coins worth about €250,000. It is unclear if he had other bank accounts. A few hours later, he boarded the Eurocity 197 for the return journey to Munich.
Passengers and police alike nicknamed the Eurocity 196/197 train the “Black Market Express,” as assets were easily moved in and out of Switzerland. Yet the German Finance Ministry had started cracking down on its passengers to fund the country’s expanding welfare needs.
As the train zipped past the affluent resorts on Lake Constance on the German-Swiss border, at around 9 p.m. German customs officials came through the car where Cornelius was sitting. Cornelius was utterly exhausted. A few weeks earlier, a local doctor had diagnosed him with a “weak heart,” urging him to find a specialist. Confused, Cornelius had reconnected with Benita after decades of estrangement. She helped her brother meet with a cardiologist, who diagnosed him with “calcified coronary arteries and a heart valve defect” and recommended a treatment plan.27 Yet Cornelius did not trust doctors and refused care, though he felt increasingly frail.
It was at this point that German customs officials reviewed Cornelius’s passport, noticed that he had only stayed in Zurich for a few hours, and found his envelope with €9,000 inside. When customs agents asked Cornelius how he had earned the money, he said that it was proceeds from a sale that his father had made at the Galerie Kornfeld before the end of the war.
The officers had no choice but to let Cornelius go, assuming correctly that he was a quirky old man ill accustomed to speaking with the authorities. Yet a few days later, back at his desk, one junior officer writing up the routine report of the search paused. No one during the search, the junior officer realized, had asked Cornelius Gurlitt the question that Germans born after the war had been instructed from childhood never to ask their elders: “What did your family do during the war?”
The officer did something that Cornelius had never heard of, a rapid response that two years later would be replicated thousands of times in dozens of countries and numerous languages across the globe: he typed “Gurlitt,” “art,” and “Nazi period” into a search engine and pressed “enter.”
After reading the little that existed in 2010 about Hildebrand Gurlitt on the internet, the junior customs officer correctly surmised that Cornelius was selling off artworks that his father had acquired during World War II and that hundreds of artworks were likely in his possession. Strictly speaking, the junior officer’s remit did not extend to items obtained before the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1945. If Nazi-looted art were in Cornelius Gurlitt’s possession, however, this seemed to him to warrant an official inquiry on ethical grounds.
The junior customs officer wrote a report warning that a moral alarm needed to be sounded within the bureaucracy: Cornelius Gurlitt might be in possession of Degenerate Art, looted art, or both.28 He dutifully sent his report to a senior officer in Munich, who agreed that Cornelius’s fortune “may have been generated from crime in conjunction with the sale of art in Nazi Germany” and that Cornelius might have related assets stored in Switzerland.29 An experienced bureaucrat, this senior official was unfamiliar with the murky world of grey market art, as the majority of his cases concerned weapons, counterfeit fashion items, and drugs. He would soon learn that, astoundingly, Cornelius had a greater legal right to possess a work of art stolen from Jewish Europeans gassed at Auschwitz than he did to own a pistol, a counterfeit briefcase, or a packet of marijuana.
This senior officer was curious about what Cornelius looked like, and in the first week of November 2010, he sat on Artur Kutscher Platz waiting for the mysterious old man to leave his apartment. His opportunity came one afternoon as Cornelius, now seventy-seven, tottered back from buying groceries, dragging a trolley full of food behind him, a grim expression on his face.
Unbeknownst to the senior German officer, Cornelius was incensed because he had returned to Munich from Salzburg, where the police had broken the lock to his house and looked inside after a neighbor reported him missing. Finding nothing untoward, the Austrian police had replaced the lock and seemed none too curious about the house’s dazzling array of art. Yet the break-in had unnerved Cornelius; to him it was a bad omen—or evidence of spying.
The senior Munich customs officer had given himself a crash course on the Washington Principles, the set of eleven tenets pledging research into and restitution of Nazi-looted art that forty-four countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, had endorsed on 3 December 1998 at a conference in Washington, DC. The Washington Principles stated that “art that had been confiscated by the Nazis,” once discovered, “should be identified,” that “relevant records and archives should be open and accessible to researchers,” and that “every effort should be made to publicize art that is found to have been confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently restituted in order to locate its pre-War owners or their
heirs.”30
Only a few months after the 1998 conference, Germany’s Culture Ministry had flagged Hildebrand Gurlitt as someone who had worked in a prominent position for Hitler, recommending that the German government research what had happened to the dealer and his collection. Yet nothing happened. Now, in 2010, the customs office reached out to its counterpart in Switzerland for help. Hearing nothing, it sent another plea, reiterating that the case concerned money laundering and the liquidation of Nazi-looted artworks seemingly in violation of the Washington Principles. The office never received a response from Zurich.31
The silence caused the senior officer to turn for help in March 2011 to Augsburg-based prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz. It turned out that Nemetz personified the general German mentality that the letter of the law and the spirit of ethical behavior—even in cases where the Holocaust is concerned—are unrelated. Known throughout Bavarian legal and political circles as an emotionless “bulldog for the law,” Nemetz disdained interactions with the media. To Nemetz, his professional role in the Gurlitt case had nothing to do with the horrific damage that the Third Reich had left in its wake. The stories of Jewish families who had spent seventy years searching for art that the Nazis had snatched from them after murdering their loved ones did not appear to move him. He knew that even if Cornelius did possess Nazi-looted art, the statute of limitations for the victims to reclaim it had expired in the 1970s.
To Nemetz, the Gurlitt case was purely a matter of tax evasion, and he was determined to extract a financial cut from the Gurlitt art trove to add to Germany’s coffers. His investigation soon stalled, however. There was no concrete evidence that Cornelius had committed any crimes, the Swiss would not divulge information about his finances, and the Austrians noted that Cornelius had paid taxes there as a Salzburg resident, shrugging off further responsibility.
Nemetz needed proof that Cornelius Gurlitt was selling off art from his father’s archive. If he had this, Nemetz knew, he could successfully bring Cornelius to justice for tax evasion, which had no statute of limitations in Germany, provided that the alleged evader was still alive.
As Cornelius’s heart condition continued to worsen, doctors in June 2011 recommended surgery. Though he staunchly refused, he realized that he needed a larger reserve of cash for potential medical expenses. For years, Cornelius had owned a plot of land thirty miles outside Munich, planning to eventually build a second cottage there. He decided to stay in Munich permanently to avoid the strain of travel to Salzburg and sold the plot for €100,000. Additionally, he decided to sell another piece of art.
In September 2011, Cornelius contacted the Lempertz auction house in Cologne. Initially, he wanted to sell off Max Liebermann’s Two Riders on the Beach. He had difficulty taking the painting off the wall, however, and instead opted to sell The Lion Tamer, the vibrant 1930 work on paper by Max Beckmann that his father had acquired in 1934, a year after the Nazis had started targeting Beckmann as “degenerate.”
A few days after Cornelius called Lempertz, a specialist visited him in Munich. She found him “friendly and charming,” yet was unnerved by how the apartment in which he received her seemed frozen in the late 1960s.32 Indeed, when she encouraged Cornelius to speak about his parents, he used the present tense as though they were still alive. Even his manner of speaking seemed unusual, though she could not quite put her finger on why. She would decipher it later: Cornelius had spent so little time in conversation over the past six decades that his cadence still contained the rhetorical tics of a bygone era.
Cornelius claimed The Lion Tamer was his “crown jewel,” a gift from his beloved mother.33 Inspecting it, the specialist noticed that the work was dusty and had two small tears on its left margin. Still, it was an obvious catch. In contrast to many of Beckmann’s cerebral works created in dark, muddled colors, The Lion Tamer featured a thrilling subject matter executed with bright colors that popped off the paper. Against a black-and-white striped background, a male lion with a flowing mane perches on a squat stool with his paws under his chin, as a shirtless circus trainer with a spear stares at him head-on, striking a dramatic pose with his fists on his hips. His legs, clad in sunflower yellow pantaloons, are spread in a fighting stance.
The specialist swiftly restored the work’s minor damage and prominently featured it in the catalogue for Lempertz’s December 2011 sale, just in time for the holidays. Perusing the catalogue, Jewish German lawyer Markus Stötzel spotted The Lion Tamer and immediately wrote to the auction house, explaining that it belonged to Stötzel’s longtime friend and client, the American Mike Hulton, who was now heir to Alfred Flechtheim’s estate. Stötzel sent the auction house a copy of a postcard that Flechtheim had written to George Grosz about The Lion Tamer in 1933, hoping that the news would delay the auction.
Karl-Sax Feddersen, Lempertz’s legal specialist, subtly informed Stötzel of what the lawyer already knew: it was not legally relevant that Flechtheim had lost dozens of pieces in fleeing for his life—or even whether Hildebrand Gurlitt knew this when he acquired the work. It did not legally matter if Stötzel could produce more evidence that the work belonged to the Flechtheim family. The statute of limitations on reclaiming the Beckmann had expired.
Lempertz feared bad press coverage, however. The auction house offered to give 30 percent of the sale price to the Flechtheim family, from which Stötzel would take a fee. With the sale in under two weeks, the auction house knew that it had the upper hand; if the family did not accept, the work would be sold and probably disappear once more. German law would protect not only the identity of the new owner but his or her right to possess the piece.
The family accepted the offer, and the auction house placed the estimate between €280,000 and €300,000. Demand was high. On 2 December, the piece sold for an astounding €871,200 and nearly broke the record for a Beckmann work on paper. The Flechtheim heirs received €216,000, while Cornelius Gurlitt earned €450,000; the Lempertz auction house took the remainder. The outcome irritated Cornelius. He told the auctioneers that the Flechtheim family members were “threats” to his father, who, Cornelius maintained, was the true victim of Hitler.34
Only days after the Lempertz specialist picked up The Lion Tamer, a judge issued the search warrant authorizing the breach of Cornelius’s apartment to search for evidence indicating tax evasion.
In shock after the raid, Cornelius took comfort in his daily routine. He sat in his chair and listened to the silence. Now, though, he stared at the bare crates that the government officials had emptied. He was never charged with a crime. He did not hire a lawyer. He told those who later met with him that he did not understand that he had the right to do so. On 3 May 2012, Benita died of breast cancer, and Cornelius’s isolation seemed complete—until eighteen months later when his secrets were splashed on the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
On 3 November 2013, Germany’s Focus magazine—a quirky blend of Time magazine–style articles and celebrity gossip—broke the silence surrounding the Gurlitt family by publishing the news that for nearly two years Nemetz had been holding a 1,200-strong “Munich Art Hoard” belonging to a ghostly-looking octogenarian recluse whose father had worked for Hitler.
The article, written by journalists who were intrepid but not art experts, wildly overestimated the value of the Gurlitt trove at $1 billion. Nevertheless, the names of the artists in the collection that had already leaked included Matisse, Renoir, Beckmann, Kokoschka, and Nolde. The collection clearly contained works that historians had presumed destroyed or that were utterly unstudied; if it was made public, resulting revelations could impact these artists’ legacies on both financial and historical levels.
The Focus exposé was risky under German press laws. The magazine had not only exposed a government investigation—however narrowly focused—but also revealed the identity of the man whom the government was investigating. German courts frequently employ gag orders to silence the domestic press, but once the story broke, it was impossible to suppress in
ternational outlets. Soon Cornelius Gurlitt’s front lawn was inundated with curious art enthusiasts, journalists, and Nazi hunters.
In the week after the Focus article was published, numerous other articles followed covering Hildebrand Gurlitt’s beginnings as an innovative museum director in Zwickau, his work for Hitler, and the lies he told the Monuments Men. The reporting made clear that despite being a signatory to the Washington Principles at the Washington Conference in 1998, Germany had amended almost nothing within its legal system regarding art restitution. For looted items held in government collections, the burden was on the alleged heirs to prove that artworks had been looted or “sold” under duress. Moreover, any claims were still ruled on by a commission that included colleagues of the very museums that the heirs were accusing of possessing their families’ artworks. Routinely, this commission violated tenet four of the Washington Principles that “consideration should be given to unavoidable gaps or ambiguities in the provenance [of the art] in light of the passage of time and the circumstances of the Holocaust era.”35
At this early stage in the breaking scandal, the US State Department’s Holocaust specialists, including Stuart Eizenstat, the man who drafted the Washington Principles, considered it wisest to urge Germany behind the scenes to publish information regarding the Gurlitt trove, reasoning that this would allow Eizenstat and his team to admonish Germany publicly as a last resort. Still, even after international news outlets and Holocaust advocacy groups requested that both Nemetz and Chancellor Angela Merkel comment publicly about the Gurlitt case, both leaders repeatedly refused to do so. These German public servants even refused to acknowledge, in more opaque terms, the need for Germany to increase its efforts to restitute Nazi-looted and Nazi-confiscated art. Furthermore they forbade their underlings from speaking even indirectly on their behalves.