Susan Roland. Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt,
the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015. xiv + 386 pp + 16 pp of unnumbered
black-and-white and coloured plates.
Since the early 1990s, books and articles on Nazi art
looting, plundering and confiscations from private Jewish collectors and public
museums have proliferated, and these added to the innumerable courtroom
documents and legal reports prepared by lawyers, co-opted scholars and
bureaucrats to fight for and against cases of restitution make up an
irrefutable argument for the extent of the crime, its significance to the
history of the Holocaust, and, more and more, to the way in which the trade in
stolen paintings provided much-needed cash to keep the Third Reich fighting at
least two or three years beyond that its own industrial and financial base
would have allowed. How many millions of
lives could have been saved had not the Swiss provided a means for using art
sales to finance the purchase of vital materiel for the Wehrmacht and
the Luftwaffe, let alone the construction of death camps and crematoria?
Or what destruction could have been prevented throughout the battlefields and
cities of Europe had not the greedy private and institutional dealers in North
America circled the auction houses to feed off the vast amount of under-priced
masterpieces that flooded into the market from the late 1930s through to the
end of World War Two (and even beyond)?
Documentary and feature films, glamorous and gritty, as well
as novels and television dramas, romantic and ridiculous, provide another
dimension, the human tragedy of so many millions of lives ruined and so much
art lost and the grotesque and even farcical scenes of perfidious buffoons
stealing and cheating from one another. Some
of these materials deal with the victims, some with the victimizers, and some with the inadvertent
heroes or abetters of further grief and humiliation, naïve judges who have no
sense of history, perplexed family members who are bamboozled into bad deals,
ambitious lawyers blinded to the personal feelings they trample on, cynical
politicians trying to hide their own or their parents’ collusion during the
war, idealist scholars trudging on through the mud unaware of how far their own
careers are being stunted….
Art was not just big business in the Third Reich run by
wretched little creatures, it was what mattered, at a time when currencies
around the world had suffered enormously during the Great Depression, often as
philatelists know from a hyperinflation that made a letter across town cost
several million marks or pengos, objets d’art substituted for other
kinds of investment and savings, so that robbing Jewish families of their
possessions was effectively destroying their lives. Not just outright pilfering but also forced
sales imposed on desperate people—some made to sign documents while already in
a concentration camp—and huge taxes that had to be paid in order to cross
borders, all this signalled a feeding frenzy among the unscrupulous dealers,
auction houses, museum directors and individuals seeking bargains at the
expense of other people’s misery.
And there they all are laid out before us in this book, from the
bigwigs, like Hitler and Goering, who credited themselves with enormous
knowledge and sensitivity as art connoisseurs, to the lesser beings who
scurried about like rats and cockroaches, doing their duty, cheating on one
another, trying to protect their personal collections and their families,
willing to betray anyone and everyone and especially to see Jews and political
dissidents be taken away to certain death, preparing complicated lies and
half-truths to exonerate themselves when the inevitable end came to the Third
Reich.
The whole enterprise of documenting this sad and ridiculous,
horrible and pathetic series of events is far from over, not just because
museum directors and legal experts still clash over unresolved cases in
hundreds of unresolved cases—in the United States, as well as in Europe—as
second and third generation heirs to murdered and plundered victims become
aware of what had been done to their families and where long-lost or presumably
destroyed objects of great financial as well as sentimental value emerge in auction
catalogues and provenance records of respectable institutions, as well as in
misattributed displays in scholarly tomes and much-touted travelling
exhibitions. Moreover, after the fall of
the Soviet Union and the running out of time-limits on locked archives around
the world, greater stores of documents, photographs and private memoirs become
available to be sifted through.
What Susan Roland does, for she is more novelist than
historian, is extrapolate from the evidence the feelings, personality and thus
the motivations of the family she focuses on, especially Cornelius the
grandfather who was an architect historian, Hildebrand the father who as the
title indicated was Hitler’s art thief (or “king Raffke”), and Cornelius
Gurlitt the son who recently was discovered to be hoarding thousands of
supposedly lost paintings in his Munich flat.
She synthesises many of the latest books on Nazi Art Looting, ferrets
out details from the scholarly articles, legal documents and private memoirs
now available and sets these facts within the contexts of political, military,
diplomatic and artistic events and theories; but then, what fictional writers
have always done in creating historical novels and romances, Roland imagines
what the characters think, and feel, paints word-pictures of how they converse
and dream, and creates the illusion of coherent understanding where
professional historians are limited to probable scenarios, debatable missing
links in the chain of cause-and-effect, and honest confessions of ignorance as
to the meaning of it all.
After the death of the elder Hildebrand in an automobile
accident and soon after that of his mother by cancer, young Cornelius was left
alone, and had only his married sister to relate to. He eventually became, in Roland’s expression,
a “phantasmagorical man”, perhaps autistic, certainly withdrawn, secretive, and
cut off from most of the post-war and then even the digitally communicative
world, but all in all no fool. Living within
the law, as he understood it, he kept to himself and “his friends”, the
paintings his father had collected through means that for the most part
Cornelius—who is presented as a somewhat pathetic figure of a child whose
personality and mind was blighted by his parents’ greed—was unaware of, always
maintaining to himself and others that Hildebrand had been a heroic saviour and
protector of art from the Nazis. After
nearly seventy years of a rather furtive existence of selling one painting at a
time for cash, he was finally caught put on suspicion of tax evasion, hounded
by the police and the press, bewildered by the unwanted attention, grieved by
the confiscation of his “friends,” and then, shortly before his death in his
nineties, he made a will, leaving his whole collection to a small museum in
Bern, Switzerland. That museum agreed to
accept all but contested works of art, and thus the matter stands, with few
instances of restitution made, much gnashing of teeth by German officials, and most
of the world not much the wiser as to the full extent of whereabouts all the
hoard Hildebrand Gurlitt had amassed by one shady deal or nefarious transaction
or another
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