The Rape of Europa Read online

  Over the course of two years a thick file of letters, on impressive letterheads festooned with swastikas, flowed to Hitler’s offices in Berlin promoting the claim of Breslau to this assemblage of confiscated works. It has all the trappings of a major lobbying effort: a very long analysis of the existing collections written in flowery language, plans for a new museum building, obsequious letters from high provincial officials and art historians, and more lists of the desired objects. By early 1942, after numerous refusals Reichschancellery official Lammers wrote testily that in view of the fact that Hitler had declared the request of Breslau to be “completely out of the question, and had noted that he had decided to send the objects to Königsberg,” it did not seem useful to present the case to the Führer again. Nothing daunted, the Breslau group then requested part of a recently confiscated Dutch Jewish collection. Again they were brusquely put down; Posse himself wrote to say that the collection in question (of which we will hear more later) was to be used for “the enlargement of the Linz collections.”23

  Although Kajetan Mühlmann had successfully established his power base in the Generalgouvernement, the “annexed” provinces and, after the invasion of Russia, certain eastern areas remained the exclusive bailiwick of the SS, whose archaeological unit, the Ahnenerbe (est. 1935), was by now financing exotic projects worldwide. These ranged from the study of Indian medicines in South America to the gruesome analysis of human skulls collected from the death camps. By the late thirties the Ahnenerbe controlled virtually all the archaeological research in Germany. Its monographs were published by respectable houses, and were catalogued without suspicion by libraries. So determined was the Ahnenerbe to prove that the Germanism of the occupied areas reached to earliest prehistory, that even Hitler was embarrassed:

  Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past…. The present day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations.24

  Under the aegis of this august organization, SS functionaries were combing the annexed territories “village by village, castle by castle, estate by estate” for every possible object that might be subject to confiscation. From his office in Berlin, an SS Obersturmführer with the exceptionally appropriate name of Kraut sent out barrages of letters following up even the smallest fragments of art intelligence.25 There was no tolerance for the aristocracy in this operation. What had not been taken from private houses in the initial sweep at the time of the invasion went now. Armed with detailed lists, the SS searched for such treasures as Princess Elna Radziwill’s love letters to Kaiser Wilhelm I. The Reichsarchiv in Danzig sent a helpful catalogue of private libraries which were hauled off and heaped up in a church in Poznan—2.3 million volumes by February 1941.

  This thoroughness did not only apply to “acceptable” works. Jewish and Polish art, termed Kulturkitsch, was to be collected and preserved as well. The travelling commandos were ordered on February 23, 1941, “to also respect these things and collect them, so that they can be stored separately.” In the vein of the “Degenerate Art” shows at home, the SS had plans to exhibit some of the worst examples of this Kulturkitsch in Berlin. Paintings showing subjects such as Polish cavalry slaughtering German soldiers still in the trenches (“an especially gross example of Polish art chauvinism”) would further justify the conquest of Poland in the eyes of the German public. We do not know that any such exhibition actually took place, but an exhibition of photographs of the occupied areas was reviewed in glowing terms in the Berliner Morgenpost in February 1942:

  Exhibition of large photographs in the Kunsthalle. One of the experiences of the east is that astonishment at coming suddenly upon the gleaming white facade of a German baroque church amidst the waste lands of Polish mismanagement or Bolshevist lack of culture. … In lands which German culture has penetrated, foreign influence later came in. Now what was overcome awakens again.26

  SS Ahnenerbe archaeologists at work, 1935 (third from left, Himmler)

  Occupation officials dealing with more pressing problems often did not approach this “survey” of art objects with the zeal of the SS headquarters personnel. It had been so hard for his teams to obtain cars and gasoline in the weeks following the German attack on Russia that Kraut was forced to complain to Himmler himself. By December 1941 Kraut was concerned that local officials, although provided with lists of objects to be gathered and stored in the local museums “so that no sales of objects which are meant for museums will take place,” had not done so. The governor of Kreis Zichenau explained unconvincingly that the objects were too valuable “to be moved hastily,” and pled that personnel shortages and fuel rationing had made it impossible to pick up items from more remote areas. It took six more months to complete Kraut’s project, and by then the sequestered Polish works had company. Because of the now heavy Allied bombing of Berlin, the contents of the SS storerooms there were being evacuated to the East. Despite frequent incidences of officials helping themselves, most of the objects collected remained in storage, virtually uncared for, to the end of the war, vainly awaiting total German victory and the moment when Hitler would make his choices. With the exception of a few top items, only precious metals and jewelry were immediately sent back to Germany, where objects of museum quality were set aside and the rest melted down to replenish the Reich’s treasuries.

  Even the most distinguished German scholars were not immune to the opportunities presented by a cultural scene so open to exploitation. After the war the Poles accused these learned gentlemen of preparing for the looting of Poland’s treasures far in advance; it is certainly unquestionable that once the country lay at their feet many of these academics felt not the slightest qualms at transferring the collections, libraries, and even research notes of their erstwhile colleagues to their own use. There was no one around to make them feel guilty. All Polish universities, institutes, and schools had been closed, and their staffs dismissed. The entire faculty of the Jagellonian University at Cracow, called to a meeting ostensibly to hear a lecture entitled “The Attitude of the German Authorities towards Science and Teaching,” was summarily arrested and sent through a series of brutal detention camps before being incarcerated at the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen near Breslau. Similar treatment was given their colleagues at other institutions.

  Among the intellectual opportunists was the distinguished Michelangelo scholar Dagobert Frey, a professor at the University of Breslau, who had also written a series of studies on the monuments of his native Austria and eastern Germany. In 1934 and again in 1938, he and several colleagues had toured Poland to study Western influences on monuments there. They covered more than thirty-five hundred miles and visited innumerable sites and collections, kindly shown to them by local curators. Frey took rather bad photographs which, along with his notes, were sent to Breslau University, where, in the late thirties, he founded the Ost-Europa Institute, which specialized in studies of Silesia and Poland.

  When war broke out, Frey volunteered his services to the Ministry of Culture, urging the establishment of an Art Protection Unit to work with the Army, as had been done in World War I by Dr. Paul Clemen, who had afterward compiled several impressive and well-received volumes on the subject full of scholarly studies of affected monuments, photographs, and essays on the negative effects of war. The Ministry approved of Frey’s plan and he went to Warsaw. Certainly his studies of the past years had prepared him for this job, but his attempts to persuade the Wehrmacht to establish a post for him came to nothing, principally due to the fact that the old-school Wehrmacht command was no match for the true Party operatives such
as Mühlmann, Barthel, and Frank.

  There is little doubt that Frey opposed the physical destruction of Polish monuments; he is even credited with having argued successfully against the dynamiting of Warsaw Castle in 1939 and 1940.27 But he never questioned the propriety of the German presence in Poland or the right of his countrymen to exploit its patrimony in the cause of Germanism. Despite his failure to obtain an influential position in the “safeguarding” agencies, he remained very much on the scene for some time, acting as consultant for the SS Ahnenerbe and vainly attempting to promote the proper handling of churches, palaces, and their contents. Mühlmann and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy simply ignored him, and Frey eventually abandoned his efforts.

  He did, however, continue to pursue his intellectual interests in Poland, for we next find him speaking in Cracow at the elaborate ceremonies for the opening of the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit. His articles appeared regularly thereafter in its publications. The 1943 Baedeker of the Generalgouvernement contains his article on the art history of the region, in which he refers to Cracow as “an Eastern outpost of Nuremberg art.” The catalogue of “safeguarded” art put together by Mühlmann, which unblushingly lists the provenance of each object, includes him among its consultants, and in 1941 he published German Architecture in Poland (recommended reading in the Baedeker). In a posthumous volume of Frey’s essays, published in 1976, a colleague referred fittingly to his “intellectual agility and his capacity to adapt himself quickly and logically to new ideas and situations.”28

  Kajetan Mühlmann was not subject to such intellectual pretensions. Once he had secured and catalogued the confiscated Polish goods, other fields beckoned. In 1940 his Austrian colleague, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was transferred from his post as deputy to Dr. Frank to head the German occupation of Holland, and invited Mühlmann to come help with art operations there. Mühlmann accepted with alacrity, but this was not the end of his Polish connections—quite the opposite. The new ruling class of Poland was now very much at home in its conquered realm. German beer halls and restaurants, with suitable decor, were set up in former Polish palaces and houses. The statue of Copernicus in Warsaw was relabelled “the Great German,” and the new Baedeker for the Generalgouvernement, historically and culturally up-to-date, somewhat schizophrenically recommended the area as both a “strong reminder of home” for those returning from Russia, and “the first greeting of the East” for those going in the opposite direction.

  The occupiers, while keeping the populace in a state of constant fear, cultural deprivation, and near-starvation, had themselves developed an insatiable appetite for luxury. Frank’s extravagant lifestyle was considered scandalous by home office officials of both the SS and the Wehrmacht: not only did he occupy the Wawel Castle in Cracow, but in Warsaw he had the Belvedere Palace, formerly the residence and museum of Pilsudski, one of Poland’s greatest heroes, restored and decorated as his residence, and for country weekends refurbished a Potocki seat outside Cracow at Krzeczowice, renamed Kressendorf. Frau Frank and her friends regularly visited the Ghetto to bargain-hunt for objets d’art and furs in its thriving black market, which was a vital lifeline for the remaining Jews, and everyone shopped in the numerous antique shops stocked with leftover loot and pawned family possessions.

  Mühlmann soon had a nice business going selling works bought and confiscated in the West to clients in Germany and Poland. Frank regularly sent Polish occupation money to Seyss-Inquart in Holland, who deposited it in an account at Mühlmann’s disposal. Most of it went for lesser paintings and decorative objects, which were shipped by rail to Cracow. (On the way the train passed through the town of Auschwitz, described in the Nazi Baedeker as “a small industrial town on the rail line.”) Mühlmann shopped all over Europe, and spent freely. A single 1941 invoice from Jansen of the rue Royale, Paris, lists FFr 560,000 worth of rugs, crystal lamps, and antique furniture from Louis XIV to Louis XVI. Millions more were expended in this fashion for the account of M. le Docteur Frank, who also furnished a little pied-à-terre for his mistress in Munich with Mühlmann’s help. He was in distinguished company: other clients included Hitler and Goering. Dr. Lutze of the Germanisches Museum got a picture or two, as did Dr. Barthel, Frau Goering, Baldur von Schirach, and hundreds of others. The list of all Mühlmann’s known transactions compiled from his files after the war runs to over seventy single-spaced legal-size pages.29

  Mühlmann was replaced in 1943 by Dr. Wilhelm Ernst de Palezieux, an architect less interested in commerce, who had been on Frank’s staff for some time. Indeed, Mühlmann was so busy taking care of Goering’s interests and his own dealings in the West that he could not have spent much time on the maintenance of the Polish repositories, which were in some disarray, a situation much resented by Frank. Mühlmann withdrew without much protest, for the future of Poland was by now all too clear. One of his last acts was to bring the remaining works of art stored in Warsaw to Cracow. According to his later testimony, contacts in the Polish Resistance had warned him of “possible future violence” in the capital, and he was well aware of the unbelievable acts of destruction and murder which the SS had used to crush resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto that summer. The explosion did not come for almost a year, and when it did, in August 1944, the suppression of the uprising was again handed over to the SS, the Wehrmacht being otherwise occupied. In the two months of vicious fighting that followed, while the Russians cynically waited close by, the Germans bombarded what remained of the city almost continuously with aircraft and heavy artillery. Whole sections were methodically set afire. Carloads of uncatalogued loot of all kinds were sent to Poznan or stolen by the virtually out-of-control troops before order could be restored and the engineers could finally use the demolition holes drilled in the foundations of Warsaw Castle in 1939.

  By the late summer of 1944, those responsible for collections in the Eastern Reich knew that it was high time to move anything they wanted to save as far west as possible. Indeed, some collections had already gone. Count Alfred Potocki, sure that his lands would inevitably be in the center of combat, had started to pack the treasures of Lancut as early as March 1944. At first he thought of sending them to Cracow, but as the Russian advance continued, his thoughts veered toward Vienna. Governor General Frank authorized this move, and in fact must have helped Potocki procure space on the overburdened trains which moved back and forth through the Reich, carrying food, ammunition, wounded, and pitiful human masses to their deaths. Between May and late July 1944 the Count shipped more than six hundred cases filling some eleven freight cars first to Vienna and later to Liechtenstein. It was none too soon. The Russians arrived at Lancut on July 26.30

  Space to house the massive confiscated collections in Silesia and Thuringia was at a premium, as authorities in the western part of the Reich had simultaneously determined that they should move things as far east as possible. Arrangements for storage space in this area had been in place for some time. In 1942 Dr. Günter Grundmann, the Provincial Curator for Lower Silesia, had requisitioned nearly eighty repositories in castles, monasteries, parish houses, and warehouses for this purpose. In 1943 and 1944 a steady flow of objects from northern and central Germany came to these shelters and were distributed among them by Grundmann. By late 1944 he had begun to suggest that much of this be sent back to central Germany. These suggestions were considered “defeatist” by the Party hierarchy, who in turn arranged to send Grundmann to do manual labor on border fortifications. His superiors intervened, but before he could deal with the relocation of the objects, an official arrived from Warsaw to request space for works from the Generalgouvernement. Grundmann assigned them four castles to the west of Breslau: Muhrau, Kynau, Warmbrunn, and Konradswaldau. A fifth, Siechau, belonging to Count von Richthofen, had already been placed at Governor General Frank’s disposal. Shipments from the Generalgouvernement began to arrive in November 1944. Other shipments from the annexed areas flowed to repositories in Thuringia.31 By December, with the Red Army approaching Cracow, e
ven the Nazi party men had to admit that moving the most important objects to central Germany was not entirely defeatist.

  Portrait of a Young Man: the “Czartoryski” Raphael presumably taken to Germany by Hans Frank and still missing

  Not only works of art were moving west. Although Frank kept up appearances to the last—on December 17 he gave a long patriotic speech to a women’s group, extolling the achievements of the Reich and urging the ladies not to lose their nerve—his wife, administrators, and trainloads of records and possessions were rapidly leaving the city. The Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit too quietly moved itself and its libraries to two castles near Kotzding in Bavaria.

  On January 16 Frank, in Cracow, was told that the Russians were in Czestochowa, only sixty miles away. He was about to lose his little kingdom, but he did not intend to leave empty-handed. That night he called an aide in Kressendorf and told him to “drive the truck to Siechau” in view of “the importance of its cargo.” The Lady with the Ermine was on the move again. The next day he handed over the keys of the castle to the Sergeant of the Guard and left Cracow by car “in the most beautiful winter weather and bright sunshine.” His curator Palezieux rode with him. By the evening of the eighteenth they had arrived at the von Richthofen castle. By the next day the Russians were at the Oder, just north of Breslau, and only thirty miles away. Frank ordered everyone who could be spared to leave Siechau immediately. The morning of Sunday the twenty-first was spent burning documents, after which the von Richthofens calmly entertained Frank and Palezieux at lunch. On Tuesday the twenty-third, Palezieux and a companion set out in a truck loaded with art in the direction of Frank’s villa at Neuhaus, just south of Munich. The Governor General followed two days later. Here, in a small hotel on the Schliersee, the Generalgouvernement of Poland set up its offices in much reduced circumstances.32