The Rape of Europa Read online

  Acclaim for

  LYNN H. NICHOLAS’S

  THE RAPE OF EUROPA

  “An astounding book … rich and detailed … sure to become the standard work.”

  —Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post Book World

  “[Told] with a mastery based on very extensive reading and research. Nicholas brings to her task historical perspective, a remarkable command of the economics of the art business and a feel for the appropriate and telling anecdote. This is a book with heroes and villains and a strong narrative line.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “A little known saga that, thanks to Nicholas, is now restored to our collective memories.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Absorbing. … A superbly researched study.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “[An] engrossing, carefully researched account [that is] never less than interesting and fresh in numerous details.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Extraordinary and harrowing … make[s] your hair stand on end. Surely the most comprehensive and thorough account to date Excellent.”

  —Washington Times

  “Her attention to detail is simply astounding, and she clarifies legends and myths. Nicholas’s book is must reading for people with a passionate, academic or professional interest in the subject.”

  —Newsday

  “Edifying and fascinating … easily the most compelling work of the year’s releases on art.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  LYNN H. NICHOLAS

  THE RAPE OF EUROPA

  Lynn H. Nicholas was born in New London, Connecticut. She was educated in the United States, England, and Spain, and received her B.A. from Oxford University. After her return to the United States she worked for several years at the National Gallery of Art. While living in Belgium in the early 1980s, she began research for this book, her first. Ms. Nicholas and her husband live in Washington, D.C.

  FOR ROBIN

  AND IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER, MISS BECKY,

  WHO TAUGHT ME TO READ

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  I. Prologue: They Had Four Years: Germany Before the War: The Nazi Art Purges

  II. Period of Adjustment: The Nazi Collectors Organize; Austria Provides, Europe Hides

  III. Eastern Orientations: Poland, 1939–1945

  IV. Lives and Property: Invasion of the West; The Nazi Art Machine in Holland

  V. Lenity and Cruelty: Occupied France: Protection and Confiscation

  VI. Business and Pleasure: France: The Art Market Flourishes; Nazi Kultur Withers

  VII. Plus ça change: The Invasion of the Soviet Union

  VIII. Inch by Inch: The Launching of the Allied Protection Effort

  IX. The Red-Hot Rake: Italy, 1943–1945

  X. Touch and Go: The Allies Take Over: Northern Europe, 1944–1945

  XI. Ashes and Darkness: Treasure Hunts in the Ruined Reich, 1945

  XII. Mixed Motives: The Temptation of Germany’s Homeless Collections

  XIII. The Art of the Possible: Fifty Years of Restitution and Recovery

  Notes

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing this book has been a long and exciting voyage of discovery for me. The propaganda, fear, and fervor of World War II were an important part of my childhood. In 1948 my family and I went to Germany and saw the shambles of her cities; in Holland I heard tales of resistance and escape. Much later the fate of works of art in this ambience became of interest to me. This book is the result of my desire to understand what happened to both people and their possessions at that time.

  I have been amazed at the generosity of everyone with whom I have come in contact in the course of my research. Many of those I interviewed opened not only their archives but their hearts to me. All those concerned with the recovery of Europe’s patrimony are rightly proud of their achievement and their memories are vivid. My greatest regret is that I could not include every single story in this book; for each one told there are many more. I have also had to limit the number of countries covered. Events similar to those I have described took place in every nation overrun by the Nazis; each account could fill a book, all the more so given the recent opening of the archives of Eastern Europe.

  My very first thanks must go to the Brussels friends who encouraged me to start this project: Julia and Christopher Tugendhat, Carole Drosin, Penny Custer, and Michele Bo Bramsen.

  In Washington I have worked principally at the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art. Former director J. Carter Brown at the Gallery was enthusiastic from the beginning and generously allowed me access to the wartime correspondence of his father, John Nicholas Brown. John Wilmerding gave me precious work space. Maygene Daniels guided me through the newly organized archives and Lisi Ferber shared her amazing fund of knowledge. Most wonderful were the entire staff of the library—and especially Neal Turtell, Caroline Backlund, Ariadne DuBasky, Ted Dalziel, Lamia Doumato, and Thomas McGill (who can find any book in the world). Ruth Philbrick, Jerry Mallick, and Wendy Cole of Photo Archives supplied pictures and companionship. I was particularly fortunate to be able to work with Craig Smyth, Kress Professor at the National Gallery, 1987–1988, on his own book on the Munich Collecting Point. Among many others who assisted were Bob Bowen, Kathy and Ira Bartfield, and Anna Rachwald.

  The National Archives with its remarkable holdings of both German and Allied documents was no less important, and there I must above all thank Jill Brett, former director of Public Affairs, for her tremendous help, which included introductions to John Taylor, Dane Hartgrove, and Michael Kurtz. I wish I could mention every person in the various research rooms. Never have I met a more helpful group of people.

  In other areas I would like to thank Constance Lowenthal of IFAR, who persuaded me I could give a lecture, Irene Bizot of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Isabelle Vernus of the Archives Nationales in Paris, Ely Maurer of the State Department, Cynthia Walsh at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the staff of the Archives of American Art in Washington. Cay Friemuth, of Gütersloh, Germany; Dr. Klaus Goldmann of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Berlin; Agnieska Morawinska and Professor Wojiech Kowalski of Warsaw; Patricia Dane Rogers; and the late Christopher Wright (through Marcia Carter) all supplied valuable documentation. Others who helped in many ways include Roger Mandle, Mrs. Robert Seamans, David Rust, Lynn and Arnold Lipman, John Richardson, Pierre de Séjournet, Thomas Blake, Eliza Rathbone, Stuart Feldman, Doda de Wolf, Hector Feliciano, David Gibson, and most especially my brother Chip Holman, whose library I raided. To all who read and criticized unedited copy, particularly Professor S. Lane Faison of Williams College, my gratitude; and special thanks to Marion Evans, who dealt cheerfully with the stacks of paper.

  I am indebted to Alan Williams, Pat Hass, Deborah Shapley, and Robert Barnett, who gave me advice on the writing and publication process, and most particularly to Preston Brown and Stuart Blue, through whom this manuscript so serendipitously found its way (via Ash Green) into the unwaveringly patient and encouraging hands of my editor, Susan Ralston. Also at Knopf I would like to thank Jennifer Bernstein, who actually can read my writing; and Peter Andersen, who designed this volume.

  Most of all I am grateful to my husband, Robin, and my sons, William, Carter, and Philip, for their love and humor; to my mother, Daisy; and to all the rest of my family and friends who cheered me on.

  Washington, D.C.

  1993

  Advertisement for the Lucerne auction in Art News, New York, April 29, 1939

  I

  PROLOGUE:

  THEY HAD FOUR YEARS

  Germany Before the War: The Nazi Art Purges


  On the afternoon of June 30, 1939, a major art auction took place at the elegant Grand Hotel National in the Swiss resort town of Lucerne. Offered that day were 126 paintings and sculptures by an impressive array of modern masters, including Braque, van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Kokoschka, and thirty-three others. The objects had been exhibited for some weeks before in Zurich and Lucerne and a large international group of buyers had gathered.

  Next to the well-known German dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt and his wife, Marianne, who had moved in 1933 to the Amsterdam branch of the Berlin-based Cassirer firm to escape the drastic anti-Jewish laws at home, sat the famous producer of The Blue Angel, Josef von Sternberg. A group of Belgian museum officials and collectors led by Dr. Leo van Puyvelde, director of the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts, were in the next row.1 Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., in Europe on his wedding trip, was there with his two friends, dealers Pierre Matisse and Curt Valentin.2 Valentin, formerly of Berlin’s Buchholz Gallery, and only recently established in New York, had persuaded Mr. Pulitzer to attend; armed with commissions from various museums and collectors, he had come prepared to buy.

  An auction of this nature was not in itself an unusual thing in 1939. There had been large sales in London and elsewhere that spring. What made this one exceptional was not only the very contemporary nature of the lots but more especially their provenance. For these pictures and sculptures came from Germany’s leading public museums: Munich, Hamburg, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dresden, Bremen, the Wallraf-Richartz in Cologne, the Folkwang in Essen, and Berlin’s Nationalgalerie. Nor could the lots be considered minor examples of each artist’s work, which might be sold to clear a museum’s storerooms. They included Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker, described in the catalogue as “a masterpiece of the painter’s Blue Period”; van Gogh’s great Self-Portrait from Munich, which Alfred Frankfurter would buy for Maurice Wertheim for SFr 175,000, the highest price of the day; and Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle. Indeed, Pierre Matisse, bidding for Pulitzer, considered the Bathers one of his father’s masterpieces, and had been prepared to go far higher than the final bid of SFr 9,100.3

  Missing at Lucerne were the joy and excitement usually felt at such a sale. Joseph Pulitzer remembers quite different emotions: “To safeguard this art for posterity, I bought—defiantly! … The real motive in buying was to preserve the art.”4 It was widely felt that the proceeds would be used to finance the Nazi party. The auctioneer had been so worried about this perception that he had sent letters to leading dealers assuring them that all profits would be used for German museums. Daniel Kahnweiler, whose own collection had been confiscated and auctioned by the French government after World War I, was not convinced and did not attend.5 Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in Paris arranging its upcoming blockbuster Picasso show, did not go either, feeling that the museum should not be linked in any way with such an unpopular sale. He also instructed his staff to state firmly that recent acquisitions from Germany had been bought from the new Buchholz Gallery in New York.6

  Those who did attend were torn. Marianne Feilchenfeldt remembers that some who had agreed not to bid finally could not resist. She and her husband, appalled to note that one of the lots was a Kokoschka, Cathedral of Bordeaux, which they had donated to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, did resist, and the picture did not sell. Friends with them eventually succumbed to the temptation of the low prices and bought Nolde’s Red and Yellow Begonias.

  The French journal Beaux Arts called the atmosphere at the Grand National “stifling.” The hall, it said, was filled with curious Swiss spectators, interested in the politics of the sale. American dealers bid low, and no French bidders were in evidence. The auctioneer did not conduct the proceedings as one would expect:

  The sale was efficiently conducted by M. [Theodore] Fischer, who was not always able to hide his disdain for certain degenerate pieces. Presenting Man with a Pipe by Pechstein, he said, with a little sneer, “This must be a portrait of the artist” … when he withdrew other lots, which he had started at rather a high minimum, he took wicked pleasure in observing loudly, “Nobody wants that sort of thing,” or “This lady doesn’t please the public” … and he smiled when he said the word “withdrawn.”7

  Other accounts were not much kinder.

  Theodore Fischer (left, standing) takes bids for van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, formerly in Munich’s Neue Staatsgalerie.

  In the midst of all these passions, the quiet Belgian group did the best of all, acquiring a top Ensor, Gauguin’s Tahiti, Picasso’s Acrobat and Young Harlequin from Wuppertal, Chagall’s Maison bleue from Mannheim, and works by Grosz, Hofer, Kokoschka, Laurencin, and Nolde. In his wildest dreams, the Brussels banker who bought the Picasso could not have imagined that it would sell for over $38 million forty-nine years later.

  When the auction was over, twenty-eight lots remained unsold. The sale did not bring in nearly as much as had been hoped. The proceeds, about SFr 500,000, were converted to, of all things, pounds sterling, and deposited in German-controlled accounts in London. The museums, as all had suspected, did not receive a penny.

  These pictures had been banished from Germany as “degenerate art,” but the Nazi authorities were well aware of their usefulness as a convenient means of raising urgently needed foreign currency for the Reich. To Alfred Hentzen, a curator at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie who had been furloughed from his job for nine months in 1935 for showing excessive interest in modern art, it seemed that, with this auction of its national patrimony, the German government had reached a degree of shamelessness and cultural decay unparalleled in the history of art.8

  With hindsight, the gradual progress toward this “shameless” event is clear to see. In the world of art, as elsewhere, the Nazis simply took existing prejudices and attitudes to incredible extremes. Few could believe or wanted to acknowledge what was taking place before their very eyes.

  In 1933 Alfred Barr, while on a sabbatical year in Europe, wrote three articles on the National Socialist art phenomenon, which were universally rejected by major American periodicals as being too controversial.9 Only his young associate Lincoln Kirstein was bold enough to print one in his new magazine, Hound and Horn. The others were belatedly published in October 1945 by the Magazine of Art. Jacques Barzun noted in that issue that “Mr. Barr’s three pieces are an embarrassing reminder of the public apathy that very nearly cost us our civilization.”

  Barr, who attended the first public meeting of the Stuttgart chapter of the Nazi-affiliated Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur) only nine weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, was one of the first outsiders to hear the new regime’s cultural theories. To a theater crowded with the cultural elite of the city, the director of the Combat League set forth the new ideas:

  It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural. We stand in the first stormy phase of revolution. But already it has uncovered long hidden sources of German folkways, has opened paths to that new consciousness which up till now had been borne half unawares by the brown battalions: namely the awareness that all the expressions of life spring from a specific blood … a specific race! … Art is not international. … If anyone should ask: What is left of freedom? he will be answered: there is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art… there must be no remorse and no sentimentality in uprooting and crushing what was destroying our vitals.

  Applause, hesitant at first, by the end was stormy.10

  Action had, in fact, gone before words in Stuttgart. A major retrospective of the painter Oskar Schlemmer which had opened on March I was closed twelve days later, following an exceedingly nasty review in the local Nazi press: “Who wants to take these pictures seriously? Who respects them? Who wants to defend them as works of art? They are unfinished in every respect… they might as well be left on the junk heap where they could rot away unhindered.”11 Intimidated, the museum locked up the whole show in a remote gallery. The Nazi
s had won their first parliamentary majority only six days before.

  Alfred Barr, who was admitted to the show only because he was a foreigner, was so furious that he asked architect Philip Johnson to buy several of the best pictures “just to spite the sons-of-bitches.” Johnson complied and one, Bauhaus Steps, has been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ever since.12

  Acceptance of these warnings was not made easier by the very mixed reception all modern art had endured for many years. As late as 1939 a Boston art critic, reviewing a show of contemporary German works, many of which had come from the Lucerne auction, sadly declared: “There are probably many people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge.”13 In Germany itself there was a long antimodern tradition, reaching back to Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1909 firing of Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, for buying Impressionist paintings. Max Nordau, a Jew who fortunately did not live to see the use made of his theories, had declared all modern art to be “pathological” in his 1893 book, Entartung (Degeneracy). He included Wagner, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and the Impressionists.14 Newspapers covering New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913 picked up this catchy phrase, referring to the “degeneration of art” exhibited there. In the same year an exhibition of Kandinsky’s works was described in a Hamburg newspaper as a “shoddy tangle of lines” and the artist himself as “this insane painter, who can no longer be held responsible for his actions.”15 Before 1914 protests and counterprotests flew back and forth between conservative and modern painters. The fight became political enough to be discussed in the Reichstag, and the Prussian parliament even passed a resolution against the “degeneration” of art. But as was the case in other countries, the controversy remained in the realms of opinion and taste.