The Rape of Europa Read online

  In 1936 Hoffmann took her to see the Führer. She brought along a selection of her wares. Hitler, a novice collector, felt quite comfortable with the unglamorous Dietrich. Having gained this entrée, she worked tirelessly to please him. Her physical stamina was astonishing: once, having shown Hitler a selection of pictures in Berlin, she flew back to Munich while he travelled there on his special train and had a new lot waiting for him at the Führerbau when he arrived. When Hitler’s collecting had become more sophisticated he kept her on, much to the horror of the experts, who were appalled by the exorbitant prices she paid for her finds, which were often fakes. Hitler himself fussed at her more than once, and Ernst Buchner, director of the Bavarian State Painting Museums, who was frequently called in by Hitler to give opinions, even threw her out of his office “in exasperation at being shown so many second-rate and fake pictures.” But in the end she sold more to Hitler than any other dealer, some 270 paintings.

  Hitler’s patronage is all the more mysterious, and Frau Dietrich’s frenetic activity all the more understandable, when one reads the postwar investigations into her background. At a very early age she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter fathered by a German-American Jew. Later she was briefly married to another Jew, this time a Turkish rug and art merchant with whom she had set up her shop. The Gestapo and Rassenamt investigated her at frequent intervals and she was denied German citizenship until 1940. As late as 1943 she had to be rescued from the Gestapo by Hoffmann. Her half-Jewish daughter was not allowed to marry her “Aryan” fiancé, and spent the war years semi-hidden in her mother’s shop. The Führer need not have feared dishonesty on the part of Frau Dietrich; her misattributions were due to ignorance, not guile. For her there was far too much at stake.11

  Quite another cup of tea was the next adviser to enter the Führer’s art circle. This was the same Karl Haberstock, well established in Berlin, with an office in London and international contacts, who would eventually serve on the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. Fortunately for him, he had made his name selling nineteenth-century German artists such as Trübner, Leibi, Thoma, and Feuerbach—Hitler’s favorites. As the National Socialists rose to power, Haberstock schemed unceasingly to ingratiate himself in right-wing circles by promoting Alfred Rosenberg’s Combat League and supplying important Nazi supporters with suitable art. To this group he demonstrated a ferocious anti-Semitism quite in sympathy with theirs, as well as the requisite contempt for modern works. He joined the Party in 1933, by his own admission, “because I hoped to gain influence, and be able to avoid extreme measures.”12 Haberstock used every conceivable method to influence officials at the Ministries of Culture and Propaganda, some of whom valiantly tried to maintain the traditional distance between dealer and museums, but who often suffered when Haberstock complained to his Party cronies.

  Because of his connection with the Combat League, he was one of the first to recognize what profits could be made from the coming purge of modern works and thereafter actively promoted it. As early as 1935 he was said to be behind a scheme concocted with Propaganda Ministry officials to sell French Impressionist works from German museums to an unnamed but “important” Parisian for RM 5 million, to be used to refurbish the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich and establish a fund for German artists in the Reich Chamber of Culture.13 The details were to be handled through a Swiss investment company represented by a Dr. Franz Seiler. Several German directors were approached by this gentleman. Hanfstaengl at the Nationalgalerie told Seiler that such a sale was not possible and suggested he try private collectors such as the Oppenheims, who were selling. The pictures Seiler had picked out were top quality: three each by Cézanne, Renoir, and Manet, including Manet’s famous In the Conservatory. Soon after Seller’s visits the museum directors received orders from the Propaganda Ministry to send photographs and valuations of the works discussed. The implication was that the Führer himself had instigated the operation. Suspicious, Hanfstaengl reported these events to the Ministry of Culture. Similar complaints came from other museums. A Ministry official named Kunisch wrote a strong letter to Hitler himself to say that such a transaction would not only insult the French, who would see it as derogatory to their culture, but would put Germany on the same level as the Bolshevists in Russia who had sold off their museum holdings for foreign currency. Later Kunisch forbade the museum directors to sell any work which would be “an irreplaceable loss to a public collection” or which had been donated or whose resale was forbidden on “legal or moral grounds.” For anything they did sell they must receive enough compensation to replace it with a work of equal stature—which of course eliminated all the pictures Seiler had chosen.14 When the matter was actually presented to Hitler, he rejected any such dealings.

  Haberstock had been a little premature, but the purges of 1937 would be just what he needed. During that operation he did manage to obtain Gauguin’s beautiful Riders to the Sea, newly removed from the walls of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Casting aside his anti-Semitism, he sold an interest in the picture to Georges Wildenstein in Paris, who, after some months, resold it through his New York branch to the actor Edward G. Robinson. Haberstock was upset and suspicious at the delay and Wildenstein was forced to write several times to explain that patience was necessary if the picture was to be sold “dans de bonnes conditions.”15

  Over and over again he tried to con the German museums. The director of Leipzig was offered a ludicrous price for a Hans von Marées on the grounds that Marées’s mother had been Jewish. Later Haberstock tried to trade a Spitzweg, which the mayor of Nuremberg wanted to give Hitler for his birthday, for a top Pieter de Hooch in the Germanisches Museum. When the director, Dr. Zimmermann, objected, Haberstock tried to use his influence to have him fired. Despite this, Zimmermann was later named director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Nothing daunted, Haberstock sent him a congratulatory cake. Zimmermann sent it back. In the meantime, the Spitzweg had proved to be a fake.

  After the director of Hamburg was fired for having invested in modern works, Haberstock tried to talk his way into the museum storerooms, to see what might be available. A city official who threw him out was reprimanded. Meanwhile, Haberstock had had the audacity to call the Jewish dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, who had long since fled to Amsterdam, to ask him which picture he should take from Hamburg, the “little Degas of Mlle. Daubigny” or a Renoir.16 He got the Degas, and later sold it abroad.

  Haberstock did help those who might be useful to him. Once he had become established as one of the Führer’s favorite dealers he persuaded Hitler to reinstate Dr. Hans Posse, who had been fired from his post as director of the Gemäldegalerie at Dresden for his refusal to join the Party and his purchases of unsuitable art. Posse, who had held the directorship at Dresden for some twenty years, wrote a thank-you letter to Hitler at his lodgings in Haus Wahnfried at the Bayreuth Festival, telling the Führer that he was “infinitely grateful” to have his “mission in life,” his work in one of the most beautiful museums in Europe, and one of the “most important monuments of the German Cultural Will,” restored to him.17 Posse was never allowed to forget this favor, which would soon bring him powers beyond his wildest dreams.

  Hitler seemed to be unaware of all these nefarious goings-on, and began his collection of Old Master paintings through Haberstock. His first acquisition was a Paris Bordone Venus and Amor, which hung in the salon at the Berghof, his mountain retreat, all through the war. Speer described it as “a lady with exposed bosom.”18 The Führer’s early buying was all very low key. Dealers would show their wares at little shows arranged at the Führerbau in Munich. Hitler would view the works and choose those he liked. Experts such as museum directors Büchner and Posse would sometimes be asked for their opinions. By 1938 Hitler had gathered a modest collection paid for from the royalties on Mein Kampf and by a surtax on the postage stamps bearing his likeness.

  In the four years it had taken to make quite clear what Hitler liked, Hermann Goering
had not failed to indulge his own collecting fancies. With vast amounts of government funds now at his disposal, he soon was operating on a large scale. Goering was virtually the only member of Hitler’s inner circle who had an upper-class background and who had moved in sophisticated international society. His adored first wife, Carin, was from an aristocratic Swedish family, and at Schloss Veldenstein, near Nuremberg, which belonged to his Jewish godfather, Baron Epenstein, he had become accustomed to considerable creature comforts. Immediately upon Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, amazing quantities of presents began to be showered upon the sociable Goering as industrialists and office seekers scrambled to establish themselves with the new rulers. No one was quite sure, at first, how to approach the austere Hitler, but it was abundantly clear that the way to Goering’s heart was through his collections.

  Released from years of living hand-to-mouth in exile, Goering wanted it all, and fast. He denied himself nothing. By 1936 he was Prime Minister of Prussia, head of the Luftwaffe, director of the Four-Year Plan, and official successor to Hitler. The salaries of all these posts flowed into his accounts. In 1934 he had obtained government funds to start the construction and furnishing of a country house fifty miles from Berlin. This was in addition to the refurbishment of the in-town villa which served as his official residence as Prime Minister of Prussia. The latter house, safely sheltered behind government buildings in the Leipzigerstrasse, was described by Speer as “a romantically tangled warren of small rooms, gloomy with stained glass windows and heavy velvet hangings, cluttered with massive Renaissance furniture. There was a kind of chapel presided over by the swastika, and the new symbol had also been reiterated on ceilings, walls and floors throughout the house.”19 The palatial effect was completed by two Palma Vecchios, a Jan Breughel St. Hubert, and five other very nice pictures “lent” by Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. Speer felt that this decor “rather fit Goering’s disposition,” but when Hitler criticized it as “too dark,” Goering immediately ordered Speer to do the whole thing over in the light and bare style favored by the Führer, complete with enormous study and oversize furniture designed to intimidate the visitor. Still, the baroque in Goering’s character could not be entirely denied, and he kept a few objects about, such as a huge Rubens Diana at the Stag Hunt, also borrowed from the museum, which he used to cover up his movie screen.20

  At the country house, named Carinhall in memory of his wife, Goering did not concede anything to Hitler’s style, but indulged his love of excess to the hilt. The house, which started as a rather elaborate log cabin, was constantly added to, until it reached Versailles-like proportions. To justify this display, he promised that the house and its contents would eventually be given to the German nation. Here, frequently toying with policies quite divergent from those of his Führer, the Reichsmarschall would receive dignitaries, foreign and domestic, and proudly show off his possessions. His costumes at these meetings were outlandish, ranging from forester to sultan, with an extraordinary range of specially designed uniforms, covered with medals and tending to pastel shades of white, blue, and gray. He loved jewelry, often wearing several very large diamond and emerald rings on each hand, and kept a pot filled with more diamonds on his desk to play with. Not everyone was favorably impressed by the spectacle. The American special envoy Sumner Welles, sent to Europe in March 1940 in a last-ditch effort to stop the spreading conflict, was contemptuously driven out to Carinhall in a drafty, canvas-covered touring car. After his interview, he wrote:

  Goering insisted upon showing me the vast and innumerable rooms of his palace. It would be difficult to find an uglier building or one more intrinsically vulgar in its ostentatious display. The walls of the reception rooms and of the halls were hung with hundreds of paintings. Many examples of the best Italian and old German masters were placed side by side with daubs by modern German painters. He had made a specialty of collecting Cranachs. Two of them I recognized as being from the collection in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. … In the entrance hall, lined … with glass vitrines, there were displayed gifts presented to the Marshal by foreign governments.21

  Goering’s interests were not limited to paintings, jewels, and objets d’art. “Renaissance man” that he was (or at least would later call himself), he also collected rare animals—bison, elk, and lions were apt to greet one at Carinhall. He had yachts, books, and toy trains, and his collection of houses soon numbered eight.

  By 1937 Goering’s art operations were very well organized. His early, disparate purchases from Sepp Angerer, a carpet and tapestry merchant who reported finds from his travels around Europe and was useful as an agent, and various other Berlin firms including that of the ubiquitous Haberstock, were now coordinated by a former small-time dealer, Walter Andreas Hofer, hired as a full-time curator. Frau Hofer, a restorer who had once worked for Duveen in New York, kept the collection in condition.

  After Goering had received a few unsuitable birthday presents, which his dealers had had to sell, even this aspect of his life was systematized. Hofer would leave a list of desired objects, at different price levels, with prominent dealers such as Walter Bornheim of Munich.22 All the prospective donor had to do was send a check to an “Art Fund” which Goering had set up especially for this purpose. One who did this on a truly princely scale was Philip Reemtsma, who controlled Germany’s cigarette production. His donations came to some million marks a year, possibly in gratitude for Goering’s pardoning of major tax liabilities he had incurred before 1933. The carefully kept records of donors list many others of all varieties from the city fathers of Cologne to Prince Bismarck, who gave Frau Goering “a single decorated goblet.”23 By early 1938 Goering’s collections had far surpassed those of his Führer, but this was soon to change.

  The interior of Carinhall: a few of Goering’s choice acquisitions

  In the early hours of Saturday, March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the Austrian border, followed later that afternoon by Hitler himself, who was received with wild rejoicing all along his route. For the Führer, overcome with emotion, it was the fulfillment of one of his fondest dreams: the union of his native land, corrupted by the decadence of the Hapsburg monarchy and its dangerous flirtations with the Slavic civilization to the east, with the soon-to-be pure German Reich which he now ruled. This triumph was also the culmination of several years of mostly subversive political and diplomatic effort which had reached a frantic pitch in February 1938.

  As Hitler responded to the enveloping crowds in Linz, his childhood home, he was met by his handpicked successor to the Austrian Chancellery, Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Then and there, to the Austrian’s surprise, Hitler insisted on preparing the legal documents which would transform the Austrian nation into an integral part of the Reich, henceforth to be referred to as the Ostmark. The next day, forced to linger in Linz by the embarrassing breakdown of large numbers of German tanks and trucks which had completely blocked the roads to Vienna (indeed, the British ambassador to Berlin described the whole invasion as “a slovenly performance”24), Hitler made the best of things by laying a wreath on his parents’ nearby grave and meeting with the director of the Linz Provincial Museum to discuss plans for rebuilding the town, which, along with Munich, Nuremberg, and Berlin, was to become one of Germany’s “ceremonial cities.”25 It was not until Monday, March 14, that an irritated Hitler was able to make his triumphal entry into Vienna, the armored vehicles in the parade having been rushed to the city on railroad flatcars.

  It was not a happy day for everyone. In the middle of the night of March 11—12, Heinrich Himmler and his SS staff had flown to Vienna to supervise “security” arrangements. The borders were sealed.26 Using intelligence carefully gathered in the previous months, plus Austria’s own files on political undesirables, the SS imprisoned thousands, first at Dachau and later at a new camp at Mauthausen. The Austrian Nazis, catapulted into power, now revealed a degree of vicious anti-Semitism which surprised even the Germans. Historian William Shirer, in Vienna for CBS, describ
ed the scene:

  On the streets today gangs of Jews, with jeering storm troopers standing over them, and taunting crowds around them, on their knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks. Many Jews killing themselves. All sorts of Nazi sadism, and from the Austrians it surprises me. Jewish men and women made to clean latrines….27

  Along with humiliations of this nature came the blatant looting of Jewish personal property from shops and houses. This too went far beyond anything which had thus far taken place in Germany. The magnificent collections of Vienna’s prominent families were among the first to go. Baron Louis de Rothschild was forcibly returned to his Vienna residence from the airport as he tried to leave on March 12, and jailed later in the day. His arrest was unusual: the first SS officers sent for him were told that the Baron was at table, and were asked to make a later appointment. They obeyed.28 A few hours after his incarceration, his cell is said to have been supplied by his valet with all the comforts of the Rothschild home, from tapestries to orchids. But the Nazis were deadly serious. The collections of Baron Louis’s brother Alphonse, who had left the country only days before, were immediately confiscated, as were the paintings and library of Baron Gutmann, the Bloch-Bauer porcelains, the Haas, Kornfeld, Trosch, Goldman, and Bondy collections, and many more. Shirer, trying to get to his own apartment near the Rothschild palace, saw the first things being taken away:

  We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed.29