The Rape of Europa Read online

  Posse knew exactly which pictures he wanted and where they were. He and his chief would stop at nothing to get them. The Vermeer Gap was the first to be filled. Negotiations for this prize went on for nearly a year and Posse almost lost it to Goering. The picture, which represented an artist in his studio, belonged to two brothers, Eugen and Jaromir Czernin, and had been exhibited to the Viennese public for years in a gallery belonging to the family. Previous offers from such majors as Duveen and Andrew Mellon, said to range from $500,000 to $6 million, had been blocked by the refusal of the Austrian courts to allow the picture to leave the country. Now that the Anschluss had made Germany and Austria one, this barrier no longer seemed a problem, at least to the rulers of the Reich.

  In December 1939 Count Jaromir Czernin, who was the majority (60 percent) owner of the picture, received a new offer of RM 1.8 million from Philip Reemtsma, the German cigarette mogul who had been supporting Goering’s Art Fund so generously. This supposedly private offer was accompanied by a telegram from Goering authorizing the transaction. The director of the Austrian Monuments Office, Dr. Plattner, was not pleased. He immediately appealed to Hitler to block the private sale of a work so beloved by Austrians and tourists alike, which had been officially reconfirmed as a national treasure subsequent to the Anschluss. In his letter he stated, as he must have regretted later, that the Vermeer should only be sold to a “state museum,” clearly with the Kunsthistorisches in mind. He then made the mistake of saying that Vienna’s cultural life should not be further diminished “so soon after the removal of the Holy Roman Regalia to Nuremberg.”

  Plattner had also expressed his opinion to Goering’s chief of staff, who had retorted that Reemtsma, “who had already given the Reich a great deal, would surely offer the picture to a museum if given the opportunity.” Before any action could be taken Plattner was furiously denounced by Gauleiter Buerckel, who said that he could not permit anyone in his service to interfere in the business of Marshal Goering. He then ordered Plattner to release the painting and send it to Reemtsma in Hamburg. In the meantime, Hitler’s staff had consulted the German Ministry of Culture, which backed Plattner, noting that the Vermeer was mentioned in the Baedeker, and that without it the Czernin Gallery would be worthless. Buerckel was advised by telegram that the Führer wished the picture to stay in the Czernin Gallery and not be moved without his personal permission. To save some dignity, Goering also wired Buerckel to say that he had had no idea that it was for sale and that his chief of staff had “mistakenly sent off the telegram before I saw it.” The wire thanked the Gauleiter for his loyalty. The Vermeer would have been a nice present for Goering’s birthday, which was only a few weeks off.

  A month later, stimulated by this success, Plattner wrote to the Reichschancellery again, proposing in a rather flowery letter that the painting be bought for the Kunsthistorisches, which, although it was a great museum, had not one Vermeer. He suggested that the Czernins might lower the price if they were forgiven certain taxes or were paid with land in Czechoslovakia. Cash could be raised by selling the confiscated collection of the Czech Jew Oscar Bondy, worth over RM 1 million. Plattner felt that Count Jaromir Czernin would be pleased by the “state” purchase. The only trouble was that Plattner had the wrong museum. Hitler wanted the picture for Linz, not Vienna, though he did not say so.

  Plattner was ordered to ask for an exact price, which he put at RM 1.75 million. In late April 1940 he asked for a subsidy of RM 750,000 from the Führer so that he could close the deal and “enter the picture in the Kunsthistorisches’s inventories.” By July, not only had no funds arrived from Berlin, but the Bondy collection, instead of being sold, as Plattner had hoped, had been made part of the Führervorbehalt. Hitler would have to come up with the whole price, which he considered high. He now had the Czernins investigated for outstanding tax liability, to see if they could be forced to auction the Vermeer, but could find none. There was another problem: Eugen Czernin did not wish to sell, and a special envoy had to spend three days convincing him that resistance was useless. It was not until September that Hitler authorized Posse to buy the picture. The contract was signed on October 4. There was no mention of Linz in any of the documents. Indeed, on October 7 Reichschancellery assistant Hans Lammers wrote that the “question of whether or not the work will be assigned to Vienna is still open.” It was not very open. The painting was secretly taken to the Führerbau in Munich by Dworschak on October 12, where it was immediately given Linz No. 1096 by registrar Hans Reger. The financial details were not settled until more than a month later. Once the money was in the bank Count Jaromir Czernin wrote a gushing acknowledgment on his elegant blue notepaper with its little seal and crown. For him there seemed to be no mystery about the destination of the Vermeer. His deepest thanks were augmented by the “wish that the Picture may, My Führer, always bring you joy.”49

  Posse would soon be able to begin buying all over Europe at this level. The powers he held would be the dream of any museum director whose acquisitions are limited, in the normal course of events, by lack of funds, reluctance of owners to sell, and the need to convince boards of trustees or Ministries of Culture of the need for a particular item. Posse had none of these problems: there was no end to the money, and pressure of an unpleasant nature could be applied to reluctant sellers.

  It is rare for a museum to acquire more than two or three major works in a year, unless it happens to get a whole collection. Washington’s National Gallery of Art opened in 1941, just as Linz was getting started, with 497 paintings. Fifty years later, the vastly expanded museum has about 3,000. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has 5,000. Posse’s total of 475 paintings for his first year was, therefore, impressive. By 1945 it would be an incredible 8,000, not counting those acquired by other Nazi agencies, which he and his successor could call in at any time.

  Despite their determination to maintain business as usual, those responsible for Europe’s museums were very aware of the imminence of war and could not ignore the happenings in the nations annexed by the Reich. They did not always have an easy time convincing their governments that precautionary measures were necessary. Uppermost in their thoughts were the increasing dangers of long-range artillery barrages and aerial bombs, which had been the principal causes of damage in World War I. As early as 1929 the Dutch Minister of Education had requested a study of plans to protect his national collections, and a British committee had begun discussions of air-raid precautions in 1933. There was still no sense of urgency. But events in Madrid in the fall of 1936 dramatically focused curatorial thinking.

  At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which was to become a testing ground for the latest models of weaponry produced by the supporters of each side, the Prado’s collections had been taken down and stored in interior galleries on the lower floors. Large paintings such as Velázquez’s great Lanzas were rolled and carefully packed. Although the Prado had no underground storage, everything seemed quite safe in the darkened ground-floor areas.

  On October 21 news came that the Escorial, the monastery-palace only thirty miles from Madrid, was under attack. Museum officials rushed out to evacuate its galleries and library. As planes bombed the local hospital and strafed the roads, packers, curators, and the mayor of Escorial himself worked frantically, rolling El Greco’s huge St. Maurice onto a wooden cylinder, and packing van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and dozens of other masterworks into a truck which took them to Madrid, where space had been cleared for them in the Bank of Spain. Defeated by the narrow, six-foot-wide opening to the vaults, the exhausted rescue team went on to the Prado.

  Two weeks later the bombs began to fall on the roofs and garden of the museum itself. All around, buildings including the Palacio de Liria, containing part of the collections of the Duke of Alba, lay in flames. The Prado did not burn, but all its windows were broken, and the upper galleries were filled with glass and debris. As the bombing continued, the curators, horrified by the destructive power of the new incendiary bombs a
nd the great range of the aircraft, decided to send their most important paintings to Valencia, where the established government had already fled. Wood for packing cases had to be brought in an armored train from a lumberyard near the front lines. At dawn a few days later, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Goya’s “Black” paintings and Disasters of War, and three hundred other major works left in trucks surmounted by “enormous castles of wood” to cross Don Quixote’s old territory on their way to Valencia. The motorcycle escort was told of the marvels they guarded. Every hour, mayors and citizens along the route telephoned back to report on the safe arrival of the convoy to the anxious museum staff in Madrid, who followed its progress all through the night and into the following day. A year later the collections had to be moved again, to the Castle of Peñalda, near Barcelona.50

  Galvanized by the Spanish operations, and mindful of the too hasty evacuation of the Louvre’s holdings to Toulouse late in World War I, when an invasion of Paris had seemed imminent, the French began immediate planning. Preparations of the most meticulous nature were well under way by 1937. Lists were drawn up of all important works in the museums of Paris and the provinces. Each French département was surveyed for châteaux, abbeys, and churches suitable for storage. Evacuation routes were carefully planned. The works would go first to staging depots and from there be spread among the designated refuges. These were chosen both on the basis of their distance from the presumed front, which would, according to French military thinking, be at the Maginot line, and their proximity to England, to which the collections could be quickly evacuated in case of total disaster.51

  In 1938, as the Czechoslovakian crisis deepened, the Service d’Architecture des Monuments Historiques started stockpiling sandbags and lumber. Two thousand specially fitted cases were built for the most valuable pictures in Paris, which were adorned with dots of different colors according to their importance. Arrangements were made with packing companies for trucks, and lists of expert workmen were compiled. Special attention was lavished on the great stained glass windows in the cathedrals of the north of France. Hard cement surrounds were replaced with a soft putty-like material so that the windows could be removed quickly and be gently packed into the special case assigned to each one.52

  British museum directors also had begun preparations in 1938. They too planned the removal of objects to repositories in the northwest of the country, principally in Wales, but, unlike the French, the British intended to rely almost entirely on their rail system. This limited the choice of sites. Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, wrote:

  The difficulties were great. The house had to be near a town and a station, but remote, as far as we could then suppose, from any target that might invite air attack. It had to be strong and dry; and above all it had to have one door or window big enough to allow the passage of the largest [367 × 292 cm] picture in the gallery, Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback.53

  One of the few places that met these requirements was Penrhyn Castle near Bangor, which was reserved for the big pictures. In London itself, unused sections of the Underground were set aside for storage. Military planners, convinced that England would be invaded immediately, advised armed escorts for the trains. At the National Gallery, the frames of the larger pictures were specially cut so that the paintings themselves could be pulled out quickly and rushed to their packing cases in the basement. After many drills, a big gallery could be emptied in seven minutes. For things which could simply not be moved, such as Raphael’s enormous, fragile cartoons at the Victoria and Albert, ingenious and bizarre protective structures were built right in the museums.54

  The Munich crisis gave everyone a little practice. At the Tate, in London, major pictures were taken down and replaced by similar but lesser ones. The National Gallery was closed, section by section, and the pictures removed. Before the crisis ended, several carloads had reached Wales. The Louvre pictures were sealed in their cases too, and the Mona Lisa was rushed to Chambord. In Holland (still relying on its neutrality), the report requested some ten years earlier was finally produced, but its suggestions for shelters to be built under the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum were rejected as too expensive. Officials were merely advised to put things “in the safest place in each building.”

  Nineteen thirty-nine did not begin in an encouraging manner. The plight of the exiled Prado pictures again gave the museum world a foretaste of what was to come. As the Civil War had closed in around Barcelona, the collection had been moved several times to more and more remote areas. Now it was cornered between the two belligerents in rock quarries near the village of Figueras only a few miles from the French border. The desperate guardians managed to send an appeal for help to museum administrations in London and Paris. Messages were transmitted to General Franco through the Duke of Alba in London, imploring him to halt bombing operations near Figueras so that the pictures could be removed. Franco agreed. In an extraordinary international effort, a Committee for the Salvage of Spanish Art Treasures, cooperating with the League of Nations, as well as French and British cultural agencies, and backed by private money raised in little more than twenty-four hours from collectors in Europe and America, organized a truck convoy to move the collection to France. There the precious cases were loaded on a special twenty-two-car train and taken to Geneva, where they were exhibited in a show not likely to be equalled, for these are things which never normally travel, and certainly not en masse: all the great Velázquezes, Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, 26 El Grecos, 38 Goyas, Dürer’s Self-Portrait: 174 paintings in all.

  Anyone who could, from Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson to Matisse and Picasso, travelled the long road to see it.55 Late in August one of the last visitors, the Paris dealer René Gimpel, wrote in his diary:

  The conflagration is not far from bursting upon us. We have been here for forty-eight hours to see the Prado Exhibition…. Death hangs over our heads, and if it must take us, this last vision of Velázquez, Greco, Goya, Roger van der Weyden, will have made a fine curtain.56

  A year later, Gimpel, a Resistance fighter, would die in a concentration camp.

  The pace of preparation in the great museums intensified during the summer of 1939 and Europe’s inexorable progress toward war. Everyone feared that closing the museums would be a terrible blow to public morale, but the breaking point was reached with the announcement, on August 22, that a German-Soviet nonaggression pact was about to be signed. The National Gallery in London closed on the twenty-third. King George had stopped by to watch the packing at the Tate, which cleared its galleries one by one at midday on the twenty-fourth. Along with the trains taking millions of Londoners to safety went the Royal train, filled with the packed treasures of the capital, creeping along at ten miles an hour to keep vibration to a minimum. The Dutch museums got word of their colleagues’ actions and immediately followed suit. The museums of Paris were authorized to close their doors on the afternoon of Friday, August 25. Like an enormous kaleidoscope, the treasures of Europe would soon be flung outward into a strange new pattern.

  Rembrandt’s Night Watch rolled for storage

  The careful preparations were now more than justified. Most of the British objects reached their designated refuges even before the formal declaration of war on September 3. By the fifth virtually everything of importance had been moved. In Holland, after dutifully putting some things in the storage areas of the museum, the director of the Rijksmuseum sent the Night Watch and his other most important pictures to a castle in Medemblik, north of Amsterdam. The Mauritshuis availed itself of the vaults of a local bank, and in one of the most unusual solutions to the problems of protection, the Stedelijk Museum stored its collections on barges grouped on a canal near Alkmaar. On September 13, nearly two weeks after the outbreak of war, the Ministry of Education appropriated DFl 2 million for the building of shelters. The Belgians, more relaxed, also put their collections in their basements and vaults, but decided they might as well leave the Memling show in Bruges open, as it o
nly had a few weeks to run.57

  At the same time the carefully designed French plan was initiated. Orders to take down the stained glass windows were issued on August 27; within ten days more than eighteen thousand square meters of windows from the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and the cathedrals of Bourges, Amiens, Metz, and Chartres were secured. At the museums, curators and technicians who had left for the sacred August vacation were recalled by telegram. Within hours the great gallery of the Louvre looked like a gigantic lumberyard. In the midst of boxes and excelsior, secretaries typed lists in quadruplicate of the contents of each case, marked only with numbers to disguise their contents, while the official assigned to each section coordinated the order of packing. One curator was amazed to find her packers, recruited from two department stores, the Bazar de l’Hôtel and the Samaritaine, dressed in long mauve tights, striped caps, and flowing tunics, as if they had just stepped out of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian pictures they were about to wrap.58 As the ultimatums flew back and forth the pace increased. Many of the exhausted, dust-covered workers slept their few hours during the nights of September 1 and 2 in the Louvre itself.