Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (11 page)

Predictably, Hermann Göring turned the situation to his pecuniary advantage. All the confiscated works of art from the nation’s museums were stored in a warehouse on Kopernikusstrasse in Berlin, and when Göring sent his art agent to forage through this Aladdin’s cave he came away with a veritable feast of Impressionist paintings, including four by Vincent van Gogh. A single Cézanne and two van Goghs, including
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
, were sold to a Dutch banker for 500,000 reichsmarks. (In 1990,
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
sold for $82.5 million.) With the money raised, Göring purchased more Old Masters and his favorite Gobelin tapestries to adorn the walls of his country mansion Carinhall.

Following Göring’s example, the other Nazi leaders now profited from the activity of a
Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art
that released purged artworks onto the international market. Despite their greed, however, the sales of Germany’s heritage that were held in London, Paris, and Switzerland from 1937 until early 1939 effectively dumped these despised works. Some
extraordinary bargains
were to be had: a Paul Klee for $300, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; a Kandinsky for $100, now in the Guggenheim Museum in New York; and Henri Matisse’s
Bathers with a Turtle
, purchased by Joseph Pulitzer for 9,100 Swiss francs, which now resides in the St. Louis Art Museum.

The Austrian
Anschluss
of March 12, 1938, saw Hitler’s native country annexed to the Third Reich, to the rapturous enthusiasm of a large part of the Austrian people. Within hours, every public building was bedecked with swastika flags, while gangs of thugs rampaged through the streets hunting down Jews. Two days later, Hitler made a
triumphal progress through Vienna
. In the meantime, SS officers were pillaging Jewish homes in search of artworks and valuables. They knew exactly where to look since German scholars had been commissioned to prepare catalogs and inventories of private collections across Europe in anticipation of Hitler’s conquests. The art collections of the
Rothschild
banking family were primary targets; Baron Alphonse de Rothschild was stripped of 3,444 artworks from his Hohe Warte villa in Vienna and his country estate at Schloss Reichenau, while his elder brother Baron Louis lost 919 pieces to the Nazis. All such items were carefully cataloged and photographed and an extensive inventory was prepared before the chosen pieces were transferred to Germany and the residue to Austrian museums. In the month following the Anschluss, Hitler decided to create the greatest art museum in the world in the city of Linz, close to his birthplace. The Führermuseum was planned to become the repository for all the great works of art looted during the Nazi wars of conquest—except, of course, for those pieces diverted to the private collections of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and a select few others of the Nazi elite.

ON JUNE 23
,
1940
,
THE DAY FOLLOWING
France’s humiliating armistice, Hitler conducted a triumphal tour of Paris. He was accompanied by his favorite sculptor Arno Breker, his architect Albert Speer, and several general staff officers, traveling in three G4 Mercedes six-wheel touring cars. Speer recalled that when they visited the famed nineteenth-century Paris Opera house, Hitler “seemed fascinated by the Opera, went into ecstasies about its beauty,
his eyes glittering
with an excitement that struck me as uncanny.” The entourage sped past Madeleine church and the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, past the Eiffel Tower, and on to Les Invalides, where Hitler spent a considerable time at Napoleon’s tomb, communing with the previous great European tyrant. At the conclusion of his tour of the City of Light, he stated, “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.”

That dream had cost the lives of 27,074 Germans and left another 111,034 wounded, but Allied casualties in the Battle of France were a staggering 2.292 million. The greatest toll was paid by the French, with 97,300 killed and missing, 120,000 wounded, and 1.54 million captured. The latter were doomed to become forced laborers for the German war effort. After this colossal victory, achieved in just six weeks, continental Western Europe lay helpless and ripe for plunder. A galaxy of the world’s great art museums had fallen into the hands of the Nazis—the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris, as well as a host of provincial galleries and private collections. The greatest hoard in the history of military conquest since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte now became subject to the greatest art theft in recorded history.

THE TASK OF PERFORMING
this grandest of larcenies fell to Alfred Rosenberg and an organization named after him, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzen Gebiete (Special Staff of National Leader Rosenberg for the Occupied Territories) or ERR for short. Rosenberg’s role, defined in a personal directive from Hitler, was to comb every public and private collection in the occupied countries and “to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him, and to safeguard them there.” France, Belgium, and Holland were the responsibility of ERR Dienststelle (Agency) Western
,
headquartered in Paris. Within a few weeks, a fabulous body of art had been assembled at the Louvre and the German embassy awaiting a decision as to final disposal. This included twenty-six “
Jewish-owned works of degenerate art
,” comprising fourteen Braques, seven Picassos, four Légers, and a Rouault, which were retained for “trading for artistically valuable works.”

Even as his Luftwaffe was fighting in the skies over England during the Battle of Britain, Göring was scouring the museums of the Low Countries in his insatiable quest for artistic loot. By October 1940, he had lost his “Channel War,” and the contemplated invasion of Britain was canceled. On November 3, he consoled himself with a trip to Paris to view the accumulated treasures that had been gathered in the
Jeu de Paume
museum. The haul was so extensive that it took Göring two full days to make his choices—mostly French and Dutch masters from the Rothschild and Wildenstein collections. Above all, he craved the painting titled
The Astronomer
by Jan Vermeer, stolen from Baron Alphonse de Rothschild; but as the Führer’s collection lacked a Vermeer, Göring was out of luck. In the pecking order of plunderers, Hitler had first choice through his chief art procurer, Dr. Hans Posse, both for his personal collection and for the planned museum at Linz. The diligent and resourceful Posse wrote to Martin Bormann almost every day, in great detail, about his various acquisitions for the Führer and the state of the art market. Second came Reichsmarschall Göring, and after he had taken his pick, then sundry German museums received the remaining spoils.

While the search for Jewish valuables continued tirelessly, with the ready cooperation of officials in Vichy France—even individual safety deposit boxes were opened—the harvesting of conquered Europe was not confined to items of obvious value. In the occupied countries, millions more Jews were now at the disposal of the Nazis, to be registered by their national authorities and to await the bureaucracy of genocide. At any time they were subject to deportation to Germany and on to the concentration camps that spread like plague pits across Eastern Europe. At first, Jewish homes were simply abandoned and then ransacked by neighbors, but the Nazis soon realized that this was a waste of resources. However humble and mundane, furniture and household items could be of benefit to the Reich, where the manufacture of most domestic goods was seriously curtailed in favor of war production.

Accordingly, the ERR set up another division tasked with expropriating all Jewish belongings once their owners had been dispatched to the death camps. This new organization, known as
Aktion-M
(Project M) for
Möbel
(furniture), operated across Europe. Once a Jewish family had been expelled from their home, local police under the direction of the Nazis would arrange for vans to collect all the furniture and kitchen appliances, which were taken to a central repository to await shipment to Germany. The Dutch even invented a word for the process—
pulsen
—after the name of the Amsterdam moving company Abraham Puls & Sons, which was employed by the Dutch police for this task. In one year alone, Project M was responsible for the clearing of 17,235 Dutch homes of items totaling loads of almost 17 million cubic feet; these were crated for dispatch to Germany or to the ethnic German populations living in the occupied Eastern Territories. During 1942, 40,000 tons of furniture were also shipped from France to Germany. A report by ERR Dienststelle Western dated August 8, 1944, records that after 69,512 Jewish homes had been stripped of household goods, it took 674 trains with 26,984 freight cars to carry the plunder to Germany.

THE NAZIS SYSTEMATICALLY LOOTED
artworks—using that term to embrace everything from ceramics to church bells and from sculptures to silverware—from every country they occupied, while also inflicting untold destruction on cultural buildings. The
Soviet Union lost 1.148 million artworks
as the Germans ransacked 400 museums, 2,000 churches, and 43,000 libraries inside Soviet territory. In Poland, some 516,000 individual pieces of art were looted, representing about 43 percent of the country’s cultural heritage. Much of this plunder was intended to reside in the Führermuseum at Linz, the symbol of Hitler’s artistic vision and the
cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich
, which would finally expunge his rejection at the hands of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In the meantime, however, the Führermuseum existed only in blueprint and tabletop models, and it was essential to protect Hitler’s loot from the ever more destructive Allied bombing campaign.

Across Germany, numerous repositories were created in cave complexes and salt mines where the appropriate conditions of humidity and temperature could be maintained. Thanks to the meticulous records of the ERR and Dr. Hans Posse, Martin
Bormann knew the location
of every single crate of plunder across the length and breadth of the Third Reich. He was therefore able to inform the Führer of the exact whereabouts of any particular piece, should Hitler wish to view or display it at any time. Bormann himself had little interest in the subject, but he realized the potential value of even “degenerate art” on the world market. He arranged for many pieces to be sold at international auctions held in Switzerland; the funds from these sales were deposited in Hitler’s personal account at the Union Bank of Switzerland or in a separate account to purchase essentials for the war effort. Unlike other Nazi leaders, however, Bormann never appropriated state funds for his own personal ends. The rewards he craved were power and control.

Following the occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, this avenue for art sales closed, since international dealers were unable to visit Switzerland and U.S. customs regulations forbade trading with the occupied countries of Europe. Bormann promptly established
bogus art dealerships in Latin American locations
ranging from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. Degenerate art was now transported to the Americas from Genoa, Italy, on ships sailing under the flags of neutral countries. Many pieces thus continued to reach the American market, and Bormann had the proceeds from these sales salted away in the Banco Alemán Transatlántico and the Banco Germánico in Buenos Aires. The shipping companies involved included the Argentine firm Delfino S.A. and the Spanish line Compañia Naviera Levantina; the latter was purchased by a German front company to make supply voyages under the Spanish flag to the beleaguered German forces in Tunisia during the winter of 1942–43. On their return trips from South America, these vessels brought back much-needed foodstuffs and strategic materials—such as vanadium from Argentina, which was crucial for the production of synthetic fuels. In addition, many crewmen from the Kriegsmarine pocket battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
, who had been interned in Argentina and Uruguay since their ship was scuttled off Montevideo in December 1939, were carried home to Germany.

The
flow of confiscated art
from France to Germany continued right up until the Allied advance was threatening Paris in July 1944. By then, 29 major shipments of artworks had been undertaken since 1941,
involving 137 freight cars
carrying some 4,174 crates of plunder, comprising about 22,000 objects from 203 different collections.

Similar streams of plunder continued to flow from all the other occupied countries of Europe and from the Soviet Union, and even from Italy after its surrender to the Allies in September 1943. Under orders from their titular chief, the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring Panzer Division plundered artworks from Naples and all points northward as the German forces gradually retreated up the length of Italy. This industrial-scale looting provided a massive infusion of funds to the Third Reich and amassed for both Hitler and Göring the finest individual collections of art ever known. The plundered art was also to become a vital element in the master plan that Martin Bormann developed as the tides of war turned against Germany: Aktion Feuerland.

Chapter 5