The Rape of Europa (28 page)

Faced with all this, the Vichy Minister of Education, Abel Bonnard, who also had not been informed by the Germans, while condemning the petition of his curators, allowed some sympathy to creep into his correspondence. To Jaujard he wrote that he should control his emotions, “natural though they might be,” and he told the Belgian consul that the altarpiece had been handed over “not by my order, but by order of the Chief of State,” adding that the consul should consider “the general circumstances in which France and Belgium find themselves” before allowing himself to be “bitter.”

More important was the propaganda effect abroad. The
New York Herald Tribune
ran a long article with an entirely false headline proclaiming, “Van Eyck Art Believed Vichy Gift to Goering,” assuming that it had been intended as a birthday present for the Reichsmarschall, and enumerating other dubious gifts such as the Sterzing altarpiece given to him by Mussolini.
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For Goering, who indeed had his eye on various items in French
museums and private non-Jewish collections, a different technique of acquisition would now clearly be needed.

On November 11, 1942, Hitler, who did love to rub in that date, ordered his armies to take over unoccupied France in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8. Pétain, Laval, and their cronies were left in office for the time being, but there was not much doubt about their future. As Hitler jovially told Laval, “You are the last government of France. After you there will be a Gauleiter.”
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Goering was perhaps less sure of this. In the Soviet Union, German progress had again been halted, and Allied forces were doing rather well in North Africa. A negotiated peace treaty with France seemed remote. It seemed best to get anything he particularly wanted safely within the confines of the Reich as soon as possible.

The Reichsmarschall started with a private collection, making it known that he would welcome the gift of two fifteenth-century tapestries spotted early in 1942 in the remote Château de Bort by dealers pretending to be Beaux-Arts officials. The extraordinary hangings, each more than thirty feet long, were indeed magnificent. Their owner, the Marquise de Sèze, suspicious of the “inspectors,” had reported their visit to the local police. When questioned they were found to be carrying large sums of money and admitted that they were in Goering’s employ.

Alarmed Beaux-Arts officials immediately asked the de Sèzes to agree to the classification of the tapestries as national treasures. To this they consented, and to be doubly safe donated them to the Musées Nationaux, which promptly whisked the hangings away to Aubusson for restoration. This did not at all suit Dr. Funk, the German Minister of Finance, who had planned to buy them for Goering’s fiftieth birthday. Direct pressure was put on Laval to reject the gift. A special decree was issued to “declassify” the tapestries, and they were returned to the owners. When the de Sèzes still refused to sell, the tapestries were removed from their château by police and sent to Carinhall. Funk did pay, but not directly to the recalcitrant Marquise. He sent funds to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, an account used by the occupation administrators for expenses.
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The works Goering desired from the national collections were all of the German schools. For propaganda purposes any raid on the French patrimony would have to be billed as a “cultural exchange” as any more outright “gifts” would, after the Ghent altarpiece flap, be bound to excite further negative press. In late November 1942 Goering approached Laval himself on the subject. Laval, who despite all was still eager to please the Germans, approved the idea. The details were left to Dr. Bunjes, now head
of the German Institute in Paris, who would negotiate with the French authorities—a grave tactical error.

Jaujard was informed of the “exchange project” by Bunjes, who unconvincingly emphasized the “European” cultural aspects of it. A few days later the museum direction was given the first summary of desired objects. From the Louvre were listed a triptych by the Master of the Holy Family and a fifteenth-century wooden figure of St. Mary Magdalene, known as
La Belle Allemande
, by Gregor Erhardt. This, in the words of a later report, was particularly suited to Goering’s taste, “being both German and nude.” Especially for the Führer the Rheims Museum was asked to contribute three Cranach drawings representing German nobles, and from two private collections, those of M. Martin-Leroy and M. Robert de Ganay, were to come medieval objects. To this, a bit later, Goering added one of France’s rarest treasures, the Cluny Museum’s solid gold eleventh-century bas-relief known as the
Antependium of Bale
, a part of the Basel altar which depicted the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II and his Luxembourgeois wife, Kunigunde, praying at the feet of St. Benedict. Most of these items were on Kümmel’s list. In return, the Germans offered a number of works from public and private collections in the Reich.

Resistance by the Musées, which had adamantly opposed the idea of such exchanges since the Ribbentrop fiasco, was immediate. Their very considerable bureaucratic energies were mobilized to the hilt in order to delay and obstruct the transfer of each item. Germain Bazin produced a long and complicated report in which the mayor of Rheims stated that he could not part with his drawings as they were an eighteenth-century legacy to the city which he was not empowered to change. To this the mayor adhered despite pressure by Vichy, and promises of two other Cranachs, not representing German luminaries, as replacements.

From then on things did not improve much for Bunjes. In March, Goering, visiting Paris, expressed a desire to see the Basel altar, which was kept at Chambord. The museums regretted that it was very fragile, and could only be brought to Paris by direct order of Pétain. Goering’s curator Hofer and Posse’s successor, Hermann Voss, were forced to go to Chambord to inspect it. There, despite the representation of the indubitably German Henry II, French curators challenged the idea that it was Germanic in origin, claiming that it was “a Benedictine work of international character.” They also mentioned that any unequal exchanges would have a bad effect on public opinion in France. Voss and Hofer again left without the prize, but it was clear that the French arguments had not been taken seriously. Goering meanwhile increased the pressure on the Vichy government, which ordered the Musées to take the Basel altar to Paris. It came
accompanied by three curators and Minister Bonnard himself, who astonished everyone by saying that the altar could only go to Germany as a personal gift from Marshal Pétain to Reichsmarschall Goering, just what the latter wished to avoid.

From the anteroom the waiting curators could hear Goering’s screams of rage and accusations, quite true, of obstruction by the French museum administration. Not to be defeated, he demanded that the altar, the
Belle Allemande
, and the triptych be delivered to Carinhall by René Huyghe and Marcel Aubert, chief curators of painting and sculpture, respectively, of the Louvre, who would then choose the objects they would like in return, and thereby be seen as consenting to the exchange. Jaujard again called a meeting of the Comité des Musées. There, on December 30, after an impassioned speech from Huyghe, the curators declared that they would give up the Basel altar only to an armed force. The other objects they would allow to be traded for items to be negotiated with Bunjes.

Bonnard was in a fix. He would have loved to fire Jaujard, and threatened to put Huyghe “below ground.” But the possible resignation of all his museum personnel restrained him. Jaujard, Huyghe, and Aubert were allowed to meet with Bunjes. Before getting down to business, Jaujard managed to disconcert the German by asking politely what had happened to a former colleague whose photograph was displayed on the wall. The sly director knew full well that this unfortunate Nazi, who had displeased the Party, had been sent to the Eastern Front, where he had been killed, but he murmured sympathetically as Bunjes explained. There followed two hours of discussion during which it was made clear that further efforts to take the altar would lead to the resignation of the entire Louvre staff, and that “the English will find out.” Jaujard and Huyghe, active in the Resistance, would make sure of that. Furthermore, all exchanges would have to be approved by the Comité des Musées. Bunjes conceded. The altar was saved, but the other two works did go, unaccompanied, to Carinhall.

The Musées now waited for the objects promised from Germany. Instead of the objects promised from German museums, the Louvre received a number of second-class works from Goering’s collection, all of which had been acquired outside Germany by Hofer during the war. The most cynical stroke was the inclusion of a work entitled
Renaud et Armide
by Coypel, which amazed French officials immediately recognized as having been confiscated from the Seligmann collection in Paris. This exchange was never formally accepted by the Louvre, and although Bunjes continued to talk vaguely of some arrangement whereby the French would be given the much-discussed
Gersaint’s Shopsign
, no other works left France in this manner. Perhaps to console himself, Goering ordered copies in
bronze or plaster of some of the most famous sculptures in the French collections, and thus could gaze out at his own
Winged Victory
and
Diana of Fontainebleau
from the terraces of Carinhall.
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The ever-increasing penetration of the Unoccupied Zone by German agencies after November 1942 was a terrible blow to those who had taken refuge there and after the fall of France become accustomed to their secretive lifestyles. Their ranks had gradually thinned as one after another found a way out. Never easy, these escapes soon went from bureaucratic nightmares to physical ones. It had taken some time for the realities of the situation to sink in. Certainly no one had expected things to go on for so long. The first shock was the German ordinance of September 17, 1940, forbidding all Jews to return to the Occupied Zone. This was followed by the enforcement of the Armistice provision requiring the surrender of refugee German nationals to their countrymen. All travellers were subjected to constant and unpleasant document checks. By late fall of 1940, food, even in restaurants, could only be obtained with ration stamps, for which proof of permanent domicile was needed. Nonresidents were driven to shady black-market dealings or reliance on friends.

Fortunately many local authorities were not entirely enthusiastic about enforcing the new rules and managed to ignore the illegal presence of certain residents in their districts, even if they were as conspicuous as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. These two ladies, despite repeated warnings by the U.S. consul in Lyons, had decided to stay on at their country house in Bilignin, just north of Aix-les-Bains, where they had been since the summer of 1939. Their only foray had been in September of that year, when they had gone to Paris to retrieve the pictures which adorned their famous apartment. But the packing proved too difficult for them, and they were forced to call Daniel Kahnweiler for help. He found Miss Toklas trying to separate the canvas of Cézanne’s
Portrait of Hortense
from its frame with her foot.
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In the end the ladies took only that picture and Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude back to Bilignin with them. For a time they lived frugally but undisturbed, keeping goats and chickens. Until 1941 they were protected by the neutral status of the United States, but this was of no help to them by 1943, when the local subprefect warned them that they must immediately cross over into Switzerland by mountain paths, or be arrested. The twosome still refused to go, but did move into a much more remote house at Culoz. Overhead, day after day, they could now hear the countless Allied bombers heading toward Italy.
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Peggy Guggenheim, after her initial flight, had moved on to Grenoble, where she spent the winter of 1940–1941 in a miserably cold hotel. She
too was urged to leave by the consul in Lyons. In February 1941, with the help of a dealer acquaintance (and temporary lover), she packed her pictures in with her household goods and managed to ship them to the United States.
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In the spring she, like so many others, progressed to Marseilles.
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The ancient Mediterranean port city, for centuries a haven for smugglers and lowlife of myriad nations, had reached near-saturation. It seethed with desperate German refugees hiding from the Armistice-decreed roundup, Americans trying to get home, Jews and political refugees of every country, and the profiteers who preyed upon them. One passage-seeker described it as “a beggar’s alley gathering the remnants of revolution, democracy and crushed intellect.”
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In this Bosch-like atmosphere there were a few islands of hope. One of these was an extraordinary operation sponsored from the United States known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, whose aim it was to help artists, intellectuals, and political refugees escape to America. Formed three days after the fall of France, its organizing committee included six college presidents and such media names as Dorothy Thompson and Elmer Rice. They had recruited Eleanor Roosevelt, who was to push for liberalization of the mercilessly strict visa regulations. Varían Fry, a former editor for the Foreign Policy Association who spoke French and German, was dispatched to Lisbon with $3,000 and a list of people who presumably needed help. On it were the writer Franz Werfel and his wife, the redoubtable Alma Mahler, and many artists of the calibre of Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.
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