The Rape of Europa (14 page)

Posse did not return to Poland, feeling that his decorative arts and coin curators could take care of what would be of interest to Linz. The “Big Three” were never actually catalogued in the Linz collection, but there is no question, as Mühlmann testified at Nuremberg, that they would have gone there had Germany won the war. Meanwhile, Frank was allowed to keep them.

Rather as an afterthought, the German authorities issued a series of decrees
“legalizing” the confiscation of the property of the Polish state during November 1939, and another more definitive one on December 16 which authorized taking “the entire range of objects of art… in the public interest.” This included private and church collections. Curators and owners were required to report their holdings, and the concealment, sale, or removal of works of art from the Generalgouvernement was punishable by imprisonment.

Once things had settled down, eager German museum directors, heavily backed by their city governments, scrambled to fill the gaps in their collections from the Polish stocks. The mayor of Nuremberg, not content with the Holy Roman regalia, came to Cracow in early 1940 to get the rest of the Veit Stoss altarpiece for his Germanisches Museum.

Stoss had became the darling of the Poland-is-really-German school. Elegant portfolios of high-grade photographs were published showing his works from every angle. The Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for German Eastern Studies), a sort of Nazi think tank dedicated to the Germanization of Poland, put on a big Stoss show in 1942 with objects graciously lent by Mühlmann’s agency and Governor General Frank. The artist’s German birth remained unsullied by the unfortunate Italianate ideas which had somewhat diminished Dürer in Nazi eyes. Everyone forgot that Stoss had worked not only for the German community of Cracow but also for the Polish King Kasimir IV Jagiello, and that he had died in disgrace, blind and forsaken by his children, having been convicted of forgery upon his return to Nuremberg after seventeen years in Cracow.

The mayor had persuaded Hitler that what was left of the altarpiece would be damaged by Polish saboteurs if left in place, and should be protected in Nuremberg’s unique bomb shelters. The director and a curator of the Germanisches Museum were dispatched to bring back the framework. Special railroad cars had to be built for the purpose, after the museum officials managed to prevent SS engineers from sawing the enormous forty-by-thirty-four-foot structure into more convenient segments. There was no doubt of the expertise of the Nuremberg delegation: the curator, Eberhard Lutze, had published a monograph, considered definitive to this day, on Stoss in 1938 and had helped organize a major exhibition of his works at Nuremberg in 1933. Once the armature was safely there, Lutze was also sent to collect the glorious figures which had been stored in the Reichsbank in Berlin. Nuremberg could now display a second purloined national treasure next to the Hapsburg crown jewels. A German official reported to Frank that the stripped Church of Our Lady in Cracow really looked better now, “due to the space gained by the removal of the altar.”
²¹

Less successful were the efforts of the mayor of Breslau and the director of its museum, Dr. Gustav Barthel. Dr. Barthel, one of Mühlmann’s principal assistants, was another strong believer in the Germanic origins of anything of value in Poland. As early as December 1939 he sent a memorandum to Mühlmann listing his choices for Breslau. The first few lines give us an idea of his mentality:

Due to the comprehensive safeguarding of works of art in the Occupied Polish territory, there are today again available to us works which Polish scholars have falsely claimed as the achievements of their own artists. Their place in the true context of the mighty Germanic cultural tradition in the East can now be assured.
²²

After continuing in this vein at some length, Barthel gets down to specifics. First come works “made in Silesia,” but as there do not seem to be too many of these, he moves on to “works made under Silesian influence,” rather a large selection made up principally of sculptures from Polish churches. He would also like selections of furniture, textiles, and goldsmith’s works—none specified as to national origins. By the time we get to the paintings, Germanism has given way fully to greed: if he cannot have an entire collection such as the Lazienski (mostly Dutch), he will be happy with a list which includes the Czartoryski Rembrandt, Rubens’s
Descent from the Cross
from Warsaw, and a Canaletto “of the quality of those from Warsaw Castle.” Ethnographical objects and books should be included, as they will be “handled from the political point of view” in Breslau. To top it all off, he would like the entire library of the Warsaw Museum (about eleven thousand volumes) and the holdings of the former Art Institute of Cracow.

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.