The Rape of Europa Read online

  Less prominent families fared no better. Those who had managed to flee before the borders closed left houses full of possessions behind, which were quickly stripped by SS troops or the neighbors. Those who remained were soon required to register their property with the Gestapo, thus providing excellent inventories for future confiscation. No one could be trusted. Dealers, conservators, and friends suddenly revealed a new allegiance. Customs and shipping agents broke open packed cases and removed valuable items. It was Goering who had personally ordered the sealing of the borders. Although it was avowed Nazi policy to encourage Jewish departures, the demand for funds under Goering’s Four-Year Economic Plan was too great to allow their considerable assets to slip away.

  In the next year and a half, before the outbreak of war, more than eighty thousand Jews would be allowed to leave Austria, but only by buying their way out. Exit visas could be obtained by surrendering one’s possessions to the Office of Jewish Emigration, organized under the aegis of Karl Adolf Eichmann. Strict application of all the German racial laws and increasing imprisonments encouraged participation in this program. The expropriation of Jewish property was made even more torturous by requiring reams of paperwork, multiple notarizations, and visits to different agencies. The American Consul General in Vienna observed in July:

  There is a curious respect for legalistic formalities. The signature of the person despoiled is always obtained, even if the person in question has to be sent to Dachau in order to break down his resistance. The individual, moreover, must go through an endless series of transactions in order to liquidate his property and possessions, and proceed abroad penniless. He is not permitted to simplify matters by making everything over en bloc to the state.30

  By the fall of 1938 Eichmann’s office was requiring the completion of three hundred dossiers daily, a nearly impossible demand given the shocking reluctance of other countries to issue entrance visas.

  The liquidation of the Rothschild properties was particularly protracted. Because of the multinational character of their holdings, it took a year of negotiations to satisfy the Nazi mania for the “legal,” during which time Baron Louis remained in prison. In the eyes of the Reich Finance Ministry, the art collections were inextricably bound up with the rest. When at last the final signatures were affixed and Baron Louis was released, the Ministry initiated proceedings to sell off the works of art at auction in order to satisfy tax claims.31

  In the meantime, thousands of German officials and entrepreneurs poured into Austria to take over government posts and dispossessed businesses and to celebrate the Anschluss with sprees in the restaurants and shops of Vienna. Albert Speer, repelled by the frenzy, limited himself “to buying a Borsalino.”32 The influx left no doubt as to who would really be in charge in Austria. It was an unpleasant revelation to Chancellor Seyss-Inquart and his newly appointed State Secretary for the Arts, Dr. Kajetan Mühlmann, a sometime Goering confidant, both of whom had been intimately involved at the highest levels in the traitorous negotiations which had brought down the Schuschnigg government. Over their heads Hitler immediately installed a German “Reichskommissar,” Joseph Buerckel, thereby rendering the Seyss-Inquart administration virtually powerless.

  Delicious pastries and Borsalinos were not all some Party members wanted from Austria. The mayor of Nuremberg had a much bigger dream: the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. The thirty-two spectacular objects, which included Charlemagne’s bejeweled prayer book, several sceptres, orbs, swords, reliquaries, jewel-encrusted gloves, and other coronation arcana, had been kept in Nuremberg for some four hundred years before they were taken to Vienna in 1794 to save them from the French. There they had remained, enshrined at the Hofburg, since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.

  As early as 1933 Mayor Liebl had plaintively revealed his desires in a speech welcoming Hitler to his city. For the 1934 Party congress the mayor had reproductions brought to Nuremberg, after a vain attempt to borrow the real things. Immediately after the Anschluss the curators of the Germanisches Museum prepared a report enumerating which items had been “plundered” over the years, and which, in particular, had been removed from Nuremberg in 1794. And by June 1938 Liebl had written to the Reichschancellery saying that it was the “Führer’s wish” to have the regalia at the next Party congress on September 6, and that arrangements for its transfer should begin immediately. The city of Nuremberg paid for a heavily guarded special train and gourmet meals for the escort. Liebl must have been disappointed that Hitler had decided only the week before not to take part in the acceptance ceremony. Alas, the mayor’s long-hoped-for moment of glory had coincided with some of history’s most dramatic weeks: Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland, and the Munich Conference.33

  Meanwhile, the confiscated collections were being stacked up at the Hofburg and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Seyss-Inquart urged Hitler to distribute them quickly, as the accumulation of such valuables was inciting “various desires.”34 The attraction of this treasure trove was tremendous. According to several sources, “a consortium of three Jews” representing Lord Duveen, possibly sent at the behest of the exiles themselves, had contacted Mühlmann in the summer of 1938 and offered £1 million for the Alphonse Rothschild and Gutmann collections. Others were also interested, so much so that the new director of the Kunsthistorisches could not be sure if it was “a competition between Duveen, Fischer of Lucerne and German dealers, or an alliance between them.”35

  These overtures were rejected by Goering, who was negotiating the takeover of the Rothschild industries, and who had his own eye on the works of art. In early 1939 Karl Haberstock too appeared in Vienna claiming to be Hitler’s “commissioner for Jewish collections.” Mühlmann, closer to Goering than to Hitler, and hoping to keep the collections under his own control, “showed him the door” and told Martin Bormann that he and all the staff involved in cataloguing the confiscated works would resign if Haberstock were given control. Bormann replied that the Führer would come to Vienna and see the collections for himself before deciding their fate. In the meantime, Mühlmann was to draw up a plan for dividing them; when Hitler viewed the repositories in June 1939 Mühlmann presented a plan which would keep the whole lot in Austria. A short time later he was fired for being too pro-Austrian. Quite another fate awaited the now “ownerless” objects.36

  Hitler by now had his own dream. For years he had done little sketches for new buildings for the town of Linz. His visit there en route to Vienna had confirmed his determination to turn the city into a “German Budapest,” and much had happened since then to focus his vague ideas. In May 1938 he visited Mussolini in Rome, one of his first forays outside the Germanic world. The artistic and architectural glories of the Eternal City made Berlin seem inadequate to the Führer, though he must have felt some satisfaction at the thought that his architects were already at work on plans which would transform Berlin into a city of such monumentality that it might eventually eclipse the Italian capital.

  His tour of smaller-scale Florence, where he was welcomed by cheering crowds lining the decorated streets, made him feel much better. He was the more deceived: rumor had it that the city fathers had used most of the money sent from Rome for the ceremonies to improve the sewer system.37 Hitler exhausted his Italian host by spending four hours in the Uffizi. Mussolini, trailing behind, was heard to murmur in exasperation, “Tutti questi quadri… [All these pictures …].” Their guide, the anti-Nazi director of the German Art Institute, Dr. Friedrich Kriegsbaum, tried to keep the Führer moving along, fearing that Mussolini might give Hitler something he particularly admired, such as Cranach’s famous Adam or Eve.38 This trip made abundantly clear to Hitler that Germany’s existing public collections would not suffice to adorn the multiple new museums being planned for Berlin and Linz.

  Rome: Hitler and Mussolini, accompanied by Goebbels and Himmler, tour the Borghese Gallery (Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann)

  The confiscated Austrian collections instantly came to mind. In add
ition to these, large quantities of objects were becoming available in Germany itself. In the months following the Anschluss, perhaps as a result of events in the Ostmark, pressure on the Jews of Germany greatly increased. On April 26, 1938, a decree was issued requiring them to report their assets, but this did not yet include personal property. Arrests and anti-Semitic violence in the streets increased all during the summer and fall, culminating in the hideous and carefully orchestrated events known as Kristallnacht, which took place in the dark hours between November 9 and 10. Now the personal possessions and businesses of the Jews were fair game.

  Confiscation of private property was openly organized. In Munich, Gauleiter Wagner called together the directors of the state collections “for a conference about the safekeeping of works of art belonging to Jews.” The museum officials were told that teams of Gestapo officers and art experts, dealers, or curators were to carry out the confiscations. The hall of the study building of the Bavarian National Museum was requisitioned for storage; only the Gestapo had the key. Large objects were to be left in the houses; coins and jewelry would be taken over by the Gestapo itself. The victims would graciously be allowed to keep family portraits. “Protocols” were to be typed in the presence of the proprietors, who could make notes but would not receive a copy or a receipt. Hundreds of these documents survive in the National Archives of the United States. They make sad reading:

  25 November 1938. Protocol, recorded in the residence of the Jew Albert Eichengrun, Pilotystr. 11/1, presently in protective custody. The housekeeper, Maria Hertlein, b. 21/10/1885, in Wilpolteried, BV., Kempten, was present. Dr. Kreisel, Director, Residenzmuseum, and Criminal Investigators Huber and Planer officiated.39

  From this house five nineteenth-century German paintings were sent to the depot, where another museum official signed a receipt. On the same day, at the “residence of the Jew Moses Blum, his wife Frieda Moses being present,” fifteen paintings were registered, and picked up the next morning by a local moving company. Some were luckier: three faience platters taken from Dr. Ernst Darmstadter on January 18 were returned as being of “no cultural value.” A series of laws passed ex post facto over the next few years would “legalize” these procedures and change the status of the objects from “safeguarded” to “confiscated.” To speed emigration of the still reluctant, an organization based on Eichmann’s successful example in Austria was set up under the equally infamous Reinhard Heydrich. All sorts of ingenious schemes were devised to hide, sell, or export possessions, but by now, for most, it was much too late.

  And there was more: just one year after the Austrian windfall, the inventory of objects was increased by the taking of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Here the confiscations were not necessarily limited to the non-Aryan. The Czechs were not fellow Germans, but Slavs. Insufficiently Germanic private and public collections could be taken to benefit the master race. The library of Prague University, the Czech National Museum, the palaces of the “decadent” Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Count Colloredo, and Prince Schwarzenberg, and the Lobkowitz collections of armor, coins, and paintings (including Breughel’s famous Hay Harvest) were all eventually raided, and the Bohemian crown jewels joined the Holy Roman regalia in exile. In an attempt to legitimize this expropriation, the jewels were handed over by President Hacha of Czechoslovakia in an elaborate ceremony staged by the Nazis. But an official photograph tells all: the tiny, frail President stands sadly before the dazzling display, flanked by the newly named Reichsprotektor of his country and other Nazi officials, who tower over him, splendid in their dashing uniforms.

  By the early summer of 1939 the Führer had realized that the burgeoning storerooms of confiscated art and the greedy dealers and officials hovering about them must be dealt with in an organized fashion. On June 26, 1939, from Obersalzburg, Hitler authorized Hans Posse, only recently back in control of the museum in Dresden, to “build up the new art museum for Linz Donau.”40 From this moment on, there ceased to be any distinction between Hitler’s personal possessions and those destined for Linz.

  Posse was an excellent choice for this job, a totally professional art historian and an aggressive acquisitor. Not interested in politics but without any doubts as to the greatness of Germany, he threw himself into the already monumental job of sorting out the available works. He was backed by a large staff, and had access to the highest levels of the government and to virtually unlimited funds. The first appropriation for Linz in 1939 was RM 10 million; by December 1944 the total had reached 70 million.41

  All during its existence, the Linz organization remained under Hitler’s direct control. Until he died in 1942, Posse corresponded almost daily, in minute detail, with Martin Bormann. A great percentage of the letters are marked in Bormann’s writing: “shown to the Führer.” On July 24, 1939, Bormann informed Reichskommissar Buerckel and other authorities that all confiscated collections in the newly conquered areas were now to be kept intact so that Hitler himself, or his curator, could choose what they wanted for Linz.42 A bit later, just to avoid loopholes, he wrote again to say that “safeguarded” as well as “confiscated” collections were included in this order. The resulting mass of objects was henceforth known as the Führervorbehalt (Führer Reserve).

  It took a little time for this arrangement to sink in. As late as November 1939 Goering’s secretary was forced to write several times to the Viennese administrators of confiscated goods, to make clear that her chief “upon orders of the Führer … will have to desist from the purchase of secured art objects.”43 Bormann had also immediately written to a Munich official to tell him to look for “several very large spaces in which the art treasures for the new Linz galleries can be stored, as a large number of paintings—four to five hundred—would soon be arriving from Vienna.” Hitler himself wondered if a suitable schloss could be found in which the pictures would not be crowded together, as they now were at the Führerbau, but might be arranged “more like a gallery.”

  Hans Posse: Hitler’s grand acquisitor

  So varied were the works already assembled by 1939 that subordinate curators had to be appointed for armor, coins, and books. The plans for Linz soon expanded exponentially, from one museum for nineteenth-century German art to a complex with separate buildings for each discipline. By late October, Posse had won a few bureaucratic battles. With the backing of his colleague Fritz Dworschak, director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Vienna, he had managed to get the Führer to authorize the separation of the Rothschilds’ art collections from the rest of their assets and their inclusion in the Führervorbehalt. He had also looked through all the Vienna pictures and chosen 182 for Linz and 43 for other provincial Austrian museums. Forty-four more were designated for the Kunsthistorisches, a proposal later rejected by Hitler, who stated that Vienna, which he had always hated, “already has enough works of art, and it is right to make use of these art objects for Linz, or as a foundation for other collections.”44

  Posse also now had to deal with the objects which had been confiscated in Germany itself. In Bavaria, those gathered by the Gestapo teams had already been sorted out according to medium and quality. The best pictures were put on exhibition at the Munich Association of Artists, in the former premises of the well-known Jewish firm of Bernheimer, much of whose stock was included. Hitler and Posse both visited the gallery, and made their choices for Linz. It was then opened up to representatives of the German museums, who were allowed to keep their choices as “loans from the State.” What remained was made available to dealers or sold at auction. After this first show, the museums were obliged to buy what they wanted from the confiscated stocks, using money from their regular acquisition funds, special grants from the Ministry of Culture, or cash raised by selling off lesser museum holdings. The proceeds went, for the time being, into a special Gestapo account.45

  Keeping control of all the confiscated objects at home was not easy. The SS, Gestapo, Finance Ministry, Reich Chamber of Culture, local Nazi organizations, museums, and others
were all happily carting things away, or making plans and claims for them. The temptation to do a little dealing was overwhelming. Posse, who hated the idea that anything might escape him, wrote anxiously to Bormann in May 1940 to say that in various provinces of the Reich, officials were disposing of confiscated objects on their own. The valuable collection of the “expatriate” Dr. Fritz Thyssen, an early supporter of Hitler who had seen the light and fled abroad, was about to be divided up by the Rhenish museums, he complained, and the Goldschmidt-Rothschild collection had reportedly been sold to a private collector. Posse implored Bormann to ask Hitler to reserve the same exclusive rights to all confiscated collections in Germany for himself, as he had in the occupied areas.46 This was not done until much later—but of course things got to be rather busy at the Reichschancellery in the spring of 1940.

  Meanwhile, the energetic Posse had sifted through all the works in the Führervorbehalt and made his choices. For Linz it was nothing but the best. By July 1940, 324 paintings had been selected from the hundreds presented for his inspection, and 150 more chosen as a reserve. These included most of the pictures previously acquired on the market by Hitler. Although there were some impressive items, the collection was not yet in the class of those of the great museums and was top-heavy in the genre paintings that Hitler loved. To remedy this, Posse had already started to buy from dealers and collectors in Austria and Germany. He snapped up the drawings collection of the late Prince Johann Georg of Saxony in Leipzig, found a Waldmüller portrait of young Prince Esterhazy for “the exceptionally low price of RM 10,000,” and bought 37 more works by Rubens, Hals, Lorenzo Lotto, and Guardi.47 But he was hoping for much, much more.

  In a report cleverly designed to fuel Hitler’s competitive collecting instincts and lead him beyond his limited tastes, Posse set out his plans for Linz. Even with the vast funds at his disposal, he sadly recognized that it would be impossible to gather together an in-depth collection ranging from the prehistoric to the modern. The early German period would have to be limited to a “small but elegant” collection, an attitude which may have reflected Posse’s reluctance to tangle with Himmler, whose specialty this was. The Romanesque and Gothic periods, however, should be greatly increased “from the holdings of the monasteries of the Ostmark,” which could also supply objects for the German Renaissance galleries. For this reason “removal of works from the monasteries should be carefully monitored in future.” Posse had in mind, among other things, the great altar-piece by Altdorfer at the Monastery of St. Florian. He wrote that they could hardly hope to get works by Dürer, Holbein, or Grünewald, but that there were plenty of Cranachs available. The seventeenth-century Dutch school was already strongly represented, but major works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, plus some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italians, were needed to “round off the collection.” There was one bright spot: they could do a nice French gallery with the paintings, furniture, and tapestries already at hand, supplied almost entirely by the Austrian Rothschilds. To flatter Hitler, Posse hastened to conclude with the promise that the Hauptabteilung, or central collection, of the museum would, of course, be the “valuable collection already assembled in Munich,” i.e., Hitler’s favorite nineteenth-century Germans.48