Hitler’s Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reich by Mary M. Lane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fascinating exploration of the roots and branches of the curious Gurlitt case, from the young journalist who covered the story for the Wall Street Journal in 2013. A reclusive old man was investigated for a suspicious border crossing from Switzerland, carrying 9000 Euros in cash. The German tax authorites raided his apartment, to find it stuffed with over a thousand astonishing works of art. Mary Lane has put together a fuller account of this drama, from the rise of Hitler, his obsession with art (Lord, don’t we wish that art school had let him in??), through the Nazi confiscations, art-and-book-burnings, “degenerate art” exhibitions balanced by “Great German Art” shows – sometimes with the same artists represented in both – to conniving, opportunistic art dealers out to save their own skins and line their pockets and walls by fleecing frantic families trying to escape before the Nazis pounded on their doors. One of these art dealers was Hildebrand Gurlitt, and it was in his son Cornelius’s apartment that this particular trove was discovered.
The story has been told before, of course, but Lane’s thorough and detailed (perhaps too detailed sometimes?) account is still compelling. Hitler’s youth and rise to power is covered, focusing largely on his artistic aspirations and passions. The biographies of various prominent artists of the era are also provided, notably George Grosz and Emil Nolde – the first a veteran of the Great War and a brilliant illustrator and painter who warned against the rising evil through his savage images, who fled to the US days before the Nazis came looking for him; the second a confused, self-pitying and also dazzling painter who became a fawning Hitler supporter to the extent of reporting a fellow painter as Jewish, who was not. I was familiar with some of these artists, but not others… mostly the “approved” Aryan / German / heroic types favored by Hitler. Here’s where it got interesting, as I Googled away on my iPad to see what kind of work they produced, like Adolf Ziegler (“master of pubic hair”) and Hermann Hoyer. Sources on these fellows was much sparser, and I discovered I had almost immediately fallen down a white supremacist rabbit hole in NeoNaziLand… Ai yi yi. I shudder to think what kind of Facebook and Google ads I’ll be seeing.
Coverage then shifts to the lootings, confiscations, and shady dealings that deprived many households of their art belongings. Gurlitt was very shrewd about covering his tracks – or not leaving any, and accumulated a massive collection he squirreled away as the war ended. A selected fraction was obediently turned over to the Allies’ “monuments men,” whose resources were stretched so thin and under such pressure they couldn’t unravel the hidden treasures. And so this particular trove winds up stacked on shelves, stuffed into cupboards, and leaned against the walls of an isolated, paranoid old man. The German authorities were – are still are, mostly – interested only in the tax aspects. In terminally failing health – and no fool – Cornelius hastily writes up a will from his hospital bed, leaving his collection entirely to a small art museum in Switzerland. Upon his death, that’s where it goes. Two paintings – TWO! – were eventually restored to their original owners after literally years of lawsuits, which the German government has little interest in discussing. Their stance is that the statute of limitations for reclaiming these stolen works has run out. Of course it has: the art has been stashed away in utter secret for decades, and reclamation would require proofs and papers that the owners would not have. Well, one did: the Toren family managed to send out their papers with a child gotten out via the Kindertransport before the parents were sent to death camps. The son kept them, ended up as an attorney in the US, and kept the papers in a safe in his office. His office was in the World Trade Center.
George Grosz, the expat painter, returned eventually to Germany after the war, in hopes of relocating some of his work left behind. He did not, and died a sad alcoholic’s death. I have not been able to find an image of a drawing he did in 1940: Adolf Hitler, dead in an armchair from a self-inflicted gunshot, and a news story on the wall about Germany’s defeat by Russia. 1940! Though we perhaps get more pages of Grosz than is strictly necessary, I came away with a new admiration and sympathy for this damaged, angry, gifted, tragic man.
Even with some of the content well-known historically, there is still something to surprise (I didn’t know the disturbing story of Hitler’s half-niece, Geli), unsettle (Hitler’s aides knew to present him with only brief summaries of issues as “the Fuhrer doesn’t like to read reports,” and his insistence on the military swearing their oaths of loyalty to him personally, not the citizens or state of Germany), infuriate (the current German government’s unwillingness to exert any pressure to restitute looted works of art), and fascinate. Crisply written, well-researched, with perhaps a little pacing trouble, this is well worth the read.
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