The Rape of Europa (21 page)

If the Reichsmarschall displayed a certain noblesse oblige on these occasions, he was not forgiving when he was the supplicant. Soon after the German takeover, the Belgian Emile Renders had let it be known that he would sell his collection of some twenty very nice, if somewhat retouched, early Flemish works if the buyer would agree to keep them together. Included in the package were several supposed Memlings and a van der Weyden. Goering was interested and turned over details of payment to his staff. Renders, trying to make the most of the deal, kept changing the mode of payment from dollars to gold to securities. Irritated by this, Goering had the collection frozen by his Currency Control unit, the Devisenschutzkommando. Miedl, who had bank connections, was sent to pursue the negotiations. Unbeknownst to his underlings, Goering also sent Renders a little note saying, “Should you this time again not be able to decide, then I should be compelled to withdraw my offer and then things would go their normal way, without my being able to do anything to impede it.” (Mühlmann later wryly commented that Goering “did not usually put that sort of thing in writing”) Renders settled. Miedl paid him about BFr 12 million in securities—not an easy thing to arrange, as the stock market was officially closed. All the paintings went to Miedl in Amsterdam. The collector’s desire to keep the collection intact was ignored; six were reserved for Goering, and the rest were put in Miedl’s stocks. Renders could not have been too intimidated: two years later he offered Goering his sculpture collection on the same basis. Hofer, who did not think much of it, bought it for Miedl, and reserved five pieces for his chief.
⁵⁴

Native Dutch dealers, many with problems similar to those of the refugees, but not loath to partake of the millions being spent, awaited Goering’s visits with mixed emotions. Next to Miedl the largest seller to Germans in Holland was Pieter de Boer. De Boer had been head of the Dutch Association of Art Dealers since Goudstikker’s death. His wife was Jewish too, and he and his brother, who had dual Swiss citizenship, had applied for entry there. On his first visit in August 1940, Goering kissed Mme de Boer’s hand in the most courtly manner, examined their stock with great attention, but bought nothing. As soon as he left, the de Boers rushed a number of pictures into hiding. A few days later they reserved an early German altarpiece for the representative of a Cologne museum. When Goering suddenly reappeared in September he noticed immediately that certain pictures were missing, and declared that he wanted the altar-piece. The frightened de Boers said that the paintings had been sold and the altarpiece reserved for Cologne. Goering laughed and said that that
was no problem in an authoritarian state, and bought it along with fifteen other pictures.

From then on, the de Boer firm did very well, actively courting major German clients. Baldur von Schirach spent DFl 127,000; representatives of the Dorotheum and all the major German museums poured through the shop. Private Dutch citizens, pretending not to know who de Boer’s customers were, brought in things to sell on consignment. By war’s end the house had sold nearly DFl 2 million worth of art (more than three hundred pictures) to their enemies and DFl 2.3 million to their compatriots. In 1943, when Jewish deportations began in earnest, the de Boers’ Swiss citizenship was approved. They did not leave right away. The heyday of trading was nearly over, but there were other deals to be made. Four panels by Jan Breughel representing the Elements, taken from their hidden private collection, were exchanged with Hitler’s curators for the freedom of their Jewish employee Otto Busch and his fiancée. The paintings were to be handed over to a representative of the Linz Museum upon written proof that the Busches had “crossed the frontier of a neutral nation.” The Breughels went to Dresden, where they are said to have adorned the office of Hans Posse’s successor, Hermann Voss, until they perished in the fire bombing of that city.
⁵⁵

Another firm which did well while it lasted was that of Nathan Katz of Dieren, near Arnhem. They had opened a branch in The Hague on May 1, 1940, just in time to partake of the coming boom. This was an old house that had gone from small beginnings to the big time very rapidly, helped by the establishment of a branch in Switzerland. The really good Katz pictures, which everyone knew were there, were never put on the market. The Germans tolerated this because Nathan Katz was the conduit for major works from several extremely important private collections. For Goering, in 1941, he procured Rembrandt’s 1630
Portrait of Saskia
and Hals’s
Portrait of a Sacristan
from the Ten Cate collection, plus the van Dyck
Portrait of a Family
from the recently sold Cook collection. But the real reason Katz survived was his connection to the widow of Otto Lanz, a former Swiss consul in Holland to whom belonged the collection Schmidt Degener had just put on show at the Rijksmuseum.

Both Posse and Hofer coveted this uneven group of mostly Italian works, plus others which had gone back with Mme Lanz to Basel. Posse had personally proposed to the Führer that he keep the cream of this collection and sell the large number of leftovers at auction, which would surely bring in large sums. Mme Lanz refused to deal through anyone other than Katz, and also wished to be paid SFr 2 million. Such a quantity of foreign currency Goering could not manage, and Posse, with his direct pipeline to Hitler, won the day.

A visa to Switzerland for Nathan Katz was also part of the deal, and this was much harder to obtain than the money. Posse wrote to the Reichschancellery that Katz, “with whose activity I have always been pleased,” had told him of very valuable works for sale in Switzerland, which could be obtained if the dealer could go there to arrange things. The visa request was sent on to Bormann, with the suggestion that he speak to the dreaded SS Gruppenführer Heydrich, as the fact that Katz was Jewish was “a problem.” It is indicative of Posse’s power that Nathan Katz indeed went to Basel in late 1941, where he of course remained for the duration of the war.

The affair did not end there. In return for Rembrandt’s
Portrait of a Man—Member of the Raman Family
from his private holdings, twenty-five other Katzes, it was said, were given visas to Spain, and were able to make their way to the Americas. Posse went to Basel and from there personally spoke to German officials at the Spanish border in order to be sure they had passed; only then was the Rembrandt put into his hands. And, last but not least, Katz’s mother was released from the Dutch concentration camp at Westerbork in exchange for a picture which a high SS official wanted to give Hitler for his birthday.
⁵⁶

Goering was never unpleasant in his dealings. He would arrive in high spirits on his palatial train, complete with oversize bathtub and phalanxes of elegantly uniformed adjutants, and go from one gallery to another. Even the most endangered agreed that he had a certain charm, and considering the amounts he spent, they were not reluctant to see him arrive. The less agreeable realities of the financial and human arrangements were left to the likes of Hofer and Miedl. The non-Jewish house of Hoogendijk was one of Goering’s particular favorites. By prearrangement with Hofer, the management always had high-quality works, outrageously overpriced and carefully vetted by Friedländer, waiting for him.
⁵⁷
Goering, who seemed quite amused by this tough trader, bought forty-two pictures from him in the course of the war.

Hoogendijk was particularly known as the dealer who handled the remarkable series of Vermeers which came to light in the occupation years and which he sold for high prices to Dutch collectors and museums. These were later found to be brilliant forgeries by the unsuccessful artist Hans van Meegeren. Hoogendijk was not the only one taken in. In 1943 de Boer too tried to sell one entitled
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
, duly authenticated by Vitale Bloch, to Goering. Hofer refused it on grounds of its price and condition. Linz director Voss thought it was a fake and also refused. Terrified that they would lose this national treasure, the Dutch museums snapped it up.
⁵⁸

Hofer meanwhile had heard from Miedl of yet another of these “Vermeers,”
this one entitled
Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery.
Miedl took it to Carinhall on approval in September 1943. Like the others, its provenance was unclear, and the asking price was a steep DFl 2 million. Vermeer had become all the rage among the Nazi leaders, and Goering deeply desired a picture by this artist, having been done out of both the Czernin Vermeer and, as we shall see later, the Rothschild
Astronomer
, by the Führer. But the price for the
Woman Taken in Adultery
was still too high. Unable to bring himself to relinquish it, Goering kept it at Carinhall for months, leaving Miedl to deal with pressure from the Dutch. Finally the Reichsmarschall resorted to his favorite device for acquisition without cost: the exchange. Miedl was given 150 second-quality pictures from Goering’s now enormous inventory, and the “Vermeer” stayed at Carinhall.
⁵⁹

After his tours of the dealers Goering would celebrate with friends at various Amsterdam night spots. Miedl too lived high on the hog while it lasted, entertaining lavishly at his newly acquired Castle Nyenrode. Even the wife of the Nazi governor of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, was impressed by the opulence of his dinners, which featured hard-to-get delicacies served on Goudstikker’s magnificent silver and china. Such VIP visitors were also routinely given a tour of the storage rooms containing recently confiscated objects, jewelry, and clothes. When Frau von Schirach, repelled, declined to choose anything for herself, Miedl cheered her up by giving her a little Italian primitive, plucked from the walls of Nyenrode.
⁶⁰

The dour Hans Posse, unlike Goering, avoided Amsterdam’s high life and stayed at the gloomy Hotel Centrale in The Hague. He was not at all pleased by the trading free-for-all which had developed in Holland, and continually urged Bormann to have Hitler issue orders which would reserve first choice for Linz. At one point he even suggested that private purchases be limited to DFl 2,000 a throw. This Hitler declined to do, as the flourishing Dutch market’s profits were doing the economy no harm. Posse in most cases preferred to deal directly with collectors and leave negotiations with the trade to his underlings. His first instincts were to pursue top-grade collections and individual works he knew to be available, either for sale or by confiscation. The Lanz collection secured through Katz was one. But far more important was one of Europe’s major drawings collections, comprising some 2,700 works which the banker Franz Koenigs had built up in the years between the wars.

After the crash of 1929 Koenigs was forced to negotiate loans from the Lisser-Rosencrantz Bank of Amsterdam, an institution owned by
Siegfried Kramarsky, who, as we have seen, would later leave for the United States with other works which Koenigs had been obliged to sell. The drawings were offered as collateral and in 1933 deposited for safekeeping at the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, where they were regularly exhibited.
⁶¹
As war approached, the directors of the bank, thinking of escape, began to call in their loans. The director of the Boymans Museum, Dr. Hannema, was asked to either buy the collection or ship it to the United States for sale. To save the collection for Holland, he persuaded Dutch coal broker D. G. van Beuningen to buy it for the very reasonable sum of DFl 2 million.

By June 1940 Posse had begun his campaign for the collection. Hannema resisted a sale of the whole thing, and indeed Posse was only interested in the best of the Italian and Northern works. By October he had made his choice and persuaded Hitler and Bormann to authorize DFl 1.5 million for the purchase. Using his favorite ploy, he urged them not to hesitate, as he wished to “arrive earlier than certain other people and catch them napping.”
⁶²
Despite this, the deal was not completed until December. It is clear that Hannema did not wish to give up any of the drawings, but the interests of van Beuningen were paramount: he needed cash to pay for paintings he had bought at the sale of the Cook collection just before the war began. He also needed to stay in the good graces of the Germans in order to protect his livelihood, his company being responsible for all transportation of German coal to the Netherlands. He therefore agreed to sell 525 of the drawings to Posse for the DFl 1.5 million, which still left him more than two thousand pieces. Van Beuningen quickly donated the remaining drawings to the Boymans Museum, thereby making them part of the Dutch national collections. Posse’s relationship with the Dutch coal purveyor did not end there. A few months later he bought eighteen major paintings from him, including Watteau’s
L’Indiscret
and a
Maja
by Goya.
⁶³

Another collection embroiled in financial trouble both in Holland and in France was that of Fritz Mannheimer, a onetime director of the Amsterdam branch of the Mendelsohn Bank. This was an enormous assemblage of more than three thousand objects, from paintings to jewelry to furniture, especially strong in decorative arts of Germanic origin: Meissen, medieval German goldsmiths’ work, Gothic tapestries, silver busts once in the Cathedral of Basel, and silver table ornaments by Jamnitzer of Nuremberg, considered in the Reich to be the equal of Benvenuto Cellini. Mannheimer, a German who had of necessity become a Dutch resident in 1936, lived mainly in Amsterdam. But he was fond of France, and in 1933 had bought a large house in Vaucresson near Paris, plus a few other investment
properties. All this real estate, and his collection, were financed through the Mendelsohn Bank, as were loans he made to refugees coming through Holland. By 1934 his debt was so large that his bank too insisted on some protective arrangements. Mannheimer was also made to promise that he would collect no more.
⁶⁴
This promise he did not keep. He died in France on August 9, 1939, a few months after having married the young woman who had taken care of him in his last year. At the same time the Mendelsohn Bank found itself in great difficulty, and closed its doors on August 12. Mannheimer’s estate was thus embroiled in the bankruptcy, and on top of all this his taxes were found to be in arrears. Inspection of his Amsterdam house revealed that many of the most important objects had vanished. What remained was to be sold off to pay the Dutch state, but this the creditors put off, due to the low state of the market, the war in Poland having in the meantime started. It was also discovered that the missing works had been put in the name of Mannheimer’s wife, and had been taken to Paris and London in a complicated operation. Even more complicated suits were brought in England and France by the Mendelsohn creditors. Soon it was discovered that Mme Mannheimer had taken twenty-seven paintings with her to the south of France, and that Mannheimer had added some DFl 2 million more in objects since his promise
to stop collecting. The exact ownership of this part of the collection was unclear.