Hitler Versus Picasso and the Others (2018) - full transcript
An extraordinary report on how Hitler looted 'the great beauty' of Europe: the art that was the expression of its culture.
The 9th of August 1945,
the American armed forces
interrogate Gisela Limberger,
personal secretary to
reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.
She said,
"Goering used to select the objects
for himself and for the Fuhrer.
My duties included compiling
the lists of paintings,
tapestries and pieces of
furniture, attending auctions,
and keeping the masterpieces
safe in the air-raid shelters,
until February 1944,
when everything was handed
over to Walter Hofer."
Walter Hofer...
Goering's personal art agent
and director of his collection.
One thousand three hundred seventy
six paintings, 250 sculptures
and 168 tapestries.
Here he is, just after the
surrender to the Americans.
He cooperated eagerly and helped
to catalogue Goering's hoard.
Interrogated by lieutenant colonel hinkel
on the 6th of November 1945, he said,
"I bought art in Goering's name.
My reward was to keep
the works he didn't want."
And when asked where the money to buy
these works came from, he replied,
"I can't be sure, but I think
the money belonged to the state."
We will meet several men
like Hofer in this story,
an army of curators, critics,
historians and even artists,
who placed their talent at the
service of the Nazi regime,
and participated in the raids,
especially on the homes and
galleries of Jewish collectors.
Six hundred thousand artworks were
purloined from private owners,
museums, churches and galleries.
One hundred thousand
are yet to be found.
Of the rest, little
or nothing is known.
This is the story of how Hitler
looted the great beauty of Europe.
And how he stole not
just human lives
but the artistic flowering
of an entire culture.
It was more than
just an obsession for art.
It was an obsession
to wipe out an entire culture.
They were looking to destroy
Jewish people.
It was a weapon for them.
Another weapon to the Germans.
Every one of these
pictures has a story.
And the backdrop to this great
looting is the holocaust.
Now, over 80 years later,
these recovered works have been
put on display at four exhibitions.
In Paris, France. In Bern, Switzerland.
in Bonn, Germany. And in
deventer, the Netherlands.
Many owners and institutions
are still battling to regain
what once was theirs.
Some people maybe don't
understand the connection between
the theft of our art,
and families like mine
actually losing their lives.
The two things
are very directly connected.
In many cases,
they had collections seized,
merely saying that the owners
were "away" or "on the run".
But often, the Nazis themselves
had deported them to the camps.
So it was sophistry,
macabre sophistry.
It all began in 1937.
Two exhibitions took
place in Munich.
The first, on "degenerate art,"
the works and the artists
the Nazis decried.
From Marc Chagall to
Wassily Kandinsky.
The cubist style of the spaniard
Pablo Picasso was frowned upon, too.
Matisse, monet and the
impressionists fared no better.
Their works were requisitioned
and auctioned off
through amenable dealers and
collectors, especially in Switzerland,
and were used by the regime as
an investment and to raise cash.
The other exhibition
is this one.
The great German art exhibition,
in which the Fuhrer
took a personal interest.
It marked the start of the great
obsession with classical art,
that would see Goering
and Hitler locking horns
for the heritage
of the occupied countries.
We have met many people.
Researchers, historians,
and the descendants of those who
were robbed and often killed.
They have all helped
to reconstruct a story...
That still today has yet to end.
By doing all the work that we do
to document what happened,
we're also restoring
to the historical record
people who've been erased from it.
They stole everything.
Thanks to the Mobel Aktion
they looted entire apartments,
with pendulum clocks, bed linen,
children's toys and cars,
and then the paintings.
Does evil have a face?
Can you see it in
someone's eyes?
Charlie Chaplin was born
in the same week
of the same month
of the same year as Hitler.
In 1940, when he parodied him in the
great dictator, they were both 51.
One was a star of Hollywood. The
other was devastating a continent.
Edgar feuchtwanger was seven years
old when he met Hitler in 1930.
The future Fuhrer was 41,
they were neighbors in Munich.
Edgar remembers
him in his book.
"He's right in front of us,
outside his apartment block.
I see that he has shaved his
beard, as my father sometimes does.
He has blue eyes. I never knew.
You can't see in the photos.
I thought his eyes were
completely black.
I've never seen him so close.
He has hairs in his nose and ears.
He's shorter than I thought.
Shorter than my father.
The passers-by stop, so do we.
He looks at me. I ought
to look away.
But I can't. I stare at him.
Perhaps I should smile at him?
I am his neighbor, after all!
Does he recognize me?
Does he know I watch
him from my bedroom?
Does he know I'm a Jew?
I don't want him to hate me.
Or my father. Or my mother."
Because it's very difficult...
About a person
you've actually seen like that.
The idea that he will turn
the whole world upside down,
is something... you can't grasp.
"I have now decided before the
closing of my earthly career,
to take as my wife that girl, who after
long years of faithful friendship,
entered of her own free will
a practically besieged city,
in order to share her
destiny with mine.
At her own desire, she goes as
my wife with me to death."
On the marriage certificate
signed by them both,
Eva braun corrected her
surname to Hitler.
On the 29th of April 1945,
Adolf Hitler dictated his
private will to his secretary.
Then he put a pistol
to his right temple and fired.
By his side, Eva braun had
taken her own life with poison.
She was wearing her
black wedding dress.
The destiny of the Fuhrer's art collection
featured prominently in his will.
"What I possess belongs to the
party.
Should this no longer
exist, to the state.
Should the state
too be destroyed,
no further decision on
my part is needed.
I have acquired collection of
paintings over the years,
not for my private enjoyment,
but solely out of a desire to endow a
picture gallery in my birthplace, Linz."
The Fuhrer had planned the
ultimate museum for Germany,
the louvre of Linz,
the city where he grew up,
where he had begun
his mediocre painting career,
rejected twice by the
Vienna academy of fine arts.
Hermann Goering, Hitler's
deputy,
also left a record
of his own obsession with art,
a catalogue, listing all the
works in his collection,
ordered with teutonic
discipline from 1933 onwards,
with the artist, provenance,
description, date, dealer
and location.
After the war, the manuscript would
be used as evidence against him.
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, holocaust scholar
and lecturer at Manchester university,
has reconstructed the journey of the
Generalfeldmarschall's collection.
He has edited the French
edition of the manuscript,
with historians and archivists
from the Quai d'Orsay.
Goering's gallery was valued in
1944 at 50 million deutschmarks.
In today's money, that's
18 million Euros.
He had a kind of hunger,
a bottomless gluttony for riches.
He was one of the greatest
looters in history,
even more so than Hitler.
This is confirmed
by the statement of the party newspaper's
most important art critic, Robert Scholz.
He worked for the err,
the special Nazi unit
led by Alfred Rosenberg that
looted the occupied territories.
"Goering had asked Hitler
for permission
to examine the collections confiscated so
far and to decide what to do with them.
Hitler received about
40 masterpieces,
including works by Vermeer,
Rubens, Boucher.
Most of them belonged
to the rothschild collections.
Hermann Goering kept
around 700 works for himself,
including paintings by Van Dyck,
Goya and Van de Velde."
It was the finest art collection
bar none in the Nazi era.
All the greats of European
painting, of European heritage,
were there.
Leonardo da Vinci, Tiepolo, Titian.
There was a real fixation with Cranach.
Carinhall, a residence 60
kilometers north of Berlin,
was Goering's gallery
of wonders.
This place, in the heart
of the imperial forest,
became a hedonists' heaven...
With dinners and
hunting parties,
where Goering entertained the German
and international aristocracy,
at Hitler's behest.
The Nazis were possessed with
status.
And art is a traditional
means of...
Rising status.
People who dread power,
try to look as much as they can,
on the old power.
Germany had this tradition
of high nobility,
connected to the German emperor,
old family ties.
And the Nazis were
just bourgeois.
So they built hunting lodges
because the nobility liked to hunt,
they'd buy hunting scenes.
They do everything to
show the old power
that the new power
speaks the same language.
Which they don't, eventually.
Goering had blue
blood from his mother,
and felt at ease
in the role of an aristocrat.
His first wife was Danish
baroness, carin Von kantzow.
He worshipped her,
and after her premature death
in 1931, aged just 43,
he dedicated the villa to her
as a mausoleum.
Here, surrounded by portraits of carin,
Goering lived with his second wife,
playing with his train sets,
always on a diet, always obese.
He was a very complex, childish character.
He liked to wear make-up,
as the photos show,
and dressing up,
we see him in various outfits.
At one point, he was likened
to a brothel manager, a pimp.
All very odd yet he was also
a powerful, highly intelligent man.
Goering was consumed by his
passion for art and money.
In January 1945, when the Russians
were already at the gates of Berlin,
he waited to the last minute
before ordering
his gallery to be evacuated.
Before giving the order
to blow up carinhall,
he had the bronzes by arno
breker, the sculptor of the reich,
thrown in the waters
of the wuchersee.
The special trains that had brought
artworks to the villa over the years,
were now packed with statues and paintings
and sent to secure hiding places.
Amid the peaks of styria, in
Austria, lies altaussee salt mine.
From August 1943,
giant racks were built in chambers
hewn from the rock by the miners,
to keep thousands of artworks
safe for the Fuhrer's museum.
Here, in may 1945,
the Americans found part
of Hitler's treasure trove.
Six thousand five hundred
paintings, statues,
coins, weapons,
antiquarian books and
pieces of furniture.
There were Michelangelo's Madonna
and child, stolen in Bruges,
the imposing Ghent Altarpiece
by the Van Eyck brothers,
removed from the cathedral in Ghent and
dismantled to fit through the tunnels,
and one of the paintings
that Hitler craved the most.
The astronomer by Jan Vermeer,
plundered from the rothschild family,
the ultimate symbol of the Jewish enemy.
Along with the works
in Hitler's hoard,
there were several masterpieces
from Goering's.
They included Titian's
Danae...
A Madonna by Raphael...
The blind leading the blind
by Brueghel the elder...
And Antea by Parmigianino.
The paintings, now all in the
museo di capodimonte in Naples,
had been placed in montecassino
Abbey for safekeeping.
The German troops in Goering's division
stole them and brought them to Berlin,
as the reichsmarschall's
51st birthday present.
The American army
had set up a special unit in Washington
made up solely of art historians,
called "the Monuments Men",
enlisted soldiers who monitored
all artwork movements around Europe.
The monuments men worked in
the field in war-torn Europe,
while in New York,
in this library,
other experts planned
the efforts
to safeguard the cultural heritage of
the countries involved in the conflict.
Here, they studied maps
and art history manuals,
they compared photographs
and street plans,
and marked out the
monuments to save.
Churches, museums,
historic buildings
and archaeological sites.
They gathered together here at
the frick art reference library,
partly because it is
this institution
that had the resources to help
them get this information together.
And then eventually prepare maps
to give to the army air corps,
that would allow the pilots to
avoid important monuments in Europe,
in the many, many bombing raids
they launched during 1943 and '44.
In merkers,
north of Frankfurt,
the us troops under generals
eisenhower and patton,
found the reichsbank's hoard of
gold and cash in a potassium mine.
It was worth over 520
million dollars.
Piled up in a corner were 400 paintings
evacuated from some Berlin museums,
including in the conservatory
by eduard manet,
and goya's carnivorous vulture.
One of the caves contained
207 sealed containers,
part of the SS Booty,
not yet laundered
by the Reichsbank,
full of valuables,
seized from concentration
camp deportees.
Coins, silverware and jewelry.
And the prisoners' gold teeth.
It would emerge,
that all the transactions for the SS Haul
went through an account
in the name of Max Heilinger,
aka Heinrich Himmler,
the architect of the genocide.
Five hundred kilometers to the
south, in Berchtesgaden,
home to Hitler's retreat,
the eagle's nest,
the statues and paintings
transported by Goering's trains
were found hidden in
another salt mine.
That is where the paintings of
Jacques Goudstikker also ended up,
thanks to Goering.
Goudstikker was a respected
Amsterdam art dealer.
This is a catalogue
of his exhibition from 1930.
He was Jewish,
and when the Nazis invaded
Holland on the 10th of may 1940,
Goering and his dealer, Hofer,
had already earmarked 1,240
of his works for themselves.
Goudstikker's story
typifies how these affairs
dragged on for decades,
leaving the grandchildren the task
of achieving closure with the past.
In an apartment in New York,
in a central district built in the 1930s,
the walls are hung
with some of the masterpieces
from the Goudstikker collection,
recovered after protracted legal battles.
Charlene Von Saher
is Jacques's granddaughter.
She lives here with
her mother, Marei.
After the war, Goudstikker's wife
had asked the Dutch government
for her husband's collection
to be returned,
but only part of it came back.
The bulk of the collection
had been declared
"national property of the Netherlands,"
and shared among the country's museums.
In 1997,
a journalist from Rotterdam,
who was investigating the
non-return of assets after the war,
tracked down Charlene and
her mother here in New York.
With his help, and thanks
to the gallery labels
that her grandfather had put
on the back of the pictures,
she decided to make
a new claim...
A step towards reuniting
the collection of paintings
that goudstikker had exhibited
many times in nyenrode castle,
before the Nazi occupation.
He used the castle
to display his art.
He brought his customers from
Amsterdam on the amstel on the boat,
to the castle, and showed them
all the beautiful paintings
he had acquired.
What a great way to display art.
Nyenrode castle stands in
the utrecht countryside.
It's now a university.
In 1930, Jacques Goudstikker
had bought it
to hold cultural soirees
and charity events.
Every room was furnished in
the style of a different era.
It was at one of his
big charity parties
that he called vienen
an der werkt,
where he created Vienna
on the werkt river
brought in a big orchestra
and oriental carpets,
and chandeliers with candles
and invited my grandmother,
Desi Von Halban, a soprano,
from Vienna,
to sing at this party.
And that's where they first met.
And they fell in love and were
married shortly afterwards.
Charlene's grandmother desi was
Jewish, originally from Poland.
The castle's rooms
were her stage,
which she graced with elegance
but without ostentation.
She loved the skies and clouds of
Holland and singing Puccini arias.
She and Jacques were a wealthy,
happy couple.
After 1938,
many Jews living in the Netherlands
had begun to leave the country.
Jacques put off the decision and
continued to run his gallery,
meanwhile, their son,
eduard, was born.
Before leaving, he tried to save his
vast, cherished art collection,
especially the masterpieces
of the great flemish masters,
and the Italian baroque.
To no avail.
Of those 1,240 works,
three hundred ended
up at carinhall,
fifty paintings were given to Hitler.
The rest were put up for sale.
Hermann Goering showed up on the
doorstep of my grandfather's gallery,
the minute they left.
But he knew well in advance
what was there.
They all did their research
before the war.
Jacques, Desi and their son,
aged just a few months, fled westward.
They wanted to reach england and
then the usa, but they had no visas.
At the north sea
port of Jmuiden,
a soldier recognized Desi,
who had often sung for the troops.
He helped them to board the last
ship before it left, the bodegraven.
They were safe.
But there would be no American
dream in store for Jacques.
He went up for some air,
and it was dark,
and he fell into a trap
hole in the deck,
and he was killed instantly.
And my grandmother waited
and waited for his return,
and he never came back.
Normally, they would throw
people overboard, but...
My grandmother was lucky she could plan
a funeral for my grandfather in Falmouth.
She planned the funeral,
but she was not allowed
to attend the funeral.
And she wanted to make sure they
sang, Cole Porter's "night and day."
Desi was left
with a babe in arms,
and a little black book
found by her husband's body.
It listed all the
works he owned,
many of which were already
in Goering and Hitler's hands.
On his 45th birthday, the Reich
air force minister, General Goering,
was awarded numerous decorations
and honoured by a visit from the Fuhrer,
who gave him a priceless painting
that would have
pride of place in his house.
Hitler and Goering
were great friends,
they had both fought
in World War I,
they were side by side
in the Munich beer hall
during their attempted
coup of 1923.
And they were together
on the 30th of January 1933,
the day Hitler became
chancellor of the reich.
But when the great looting
of Europe's art heritage began,
they became rivals,
vying for the finest pieces.
A great rivalry emerged between
Goering and Hitler,
they even tried to pinch works
from under each other's noses.
Hitler himself, who had
only recently realised
that he could exploit the situation,
issued an order that the Fuhrer
had first choice of the works.
For the leaders of the reich,
the need to build a strong,
absolute identity,
became an obsession that was
increasingly bound up with art.
The process of constructing
the Nazi narrative
also involved the quest
for an absolute aesthetic
harking back to the classical
ideals of perfection.
The relationship between
art and politics,
thus became central to the
organization of the new German empire.
Propaganda minister, Joseph
Goebbels,
led the campaigns against
anyone, who was out of step.
The Nazis knew full well how effective
art is in the public domain,
and they exploited art for propaganda
purposes - with great success.
The Day of German Art in Munich.
Chancellor Hitler attends
the impressive parade
commemorating German art
over the centuries.
On the 18th of July 1937,
Munich celebrated the opening
of the house of German art
designed by Paul Ludwig troost,
one of the Fuhrer's
favorite architects.
It was a triumph of swastikas,
floats and virile power.
The parade included a model
of the new building.
Hitler had just opened the great
exhibition on German art there,
"the art of the people,"
as he termed it in his speech.
"Majesty and beauty,
purity and wellbeing
to counter the last elements
of our cultural decay."
The next day, the 19th,
the exhibition of degenerate
art opened in the hofgarten.
And so in Munich, a few hundred
metres apart, began the clash
between what was now to be the
official art and the art that...
yes, it's no exaggeration to
say, that was to be destroyed.
The exhibitions were
polar opposites,
as art historian berthold
hinz explains.
One featured expressionism,
impressionism, surrealism, cubism
the art of the "isms," as the
Fuhrer scornfully dismissed it:
Fleeting fashions,
deviancy, chaos.
The other was about
classical art,
with its reassuring,
beautiful, immortal works,
like the paintings
of Adolf ziegler,
delegated by Hitler
to curate the exhibition.
In no other city were these two
extremes so dramatically expressed.
Distortion, expressivity,
radical questions, on one hand,
state-endorsed classical
beauty, on the other.
Joseph goebbels also
appointed Adolf Ziegler
to select the works
of the "degenerate" artists,
from Paul Klee to
Oskar Kokoschka,
from Otto Dix to El Lissitzky.
In just over two weeks,
650 paintings and sculptures
were commandeered from
32 German museums.
The exhibition would tour
to another 12 cities
in Germany and Austria.
It would be seen by an audience
of over two million people.
A remarkable success.
Many of the works were
hung haphazardly, askew,
some without frames, to make
it all look especially ugly and chaotic.
Freedom of expression and the
extreme languages of modern art
were presented to the public as a
threat to the aesthetic of the reich
and to Hitler's ideology.
That exhibition marked
a point of no return.
Some artists were Jewish,
but so, moreover,
were many collectors of the avant-garde.
And anti-semitism was
at the root of Nazi doctrine.
Teacher and architect
Paul Schultze-Naumburg
published a book,
"Art and Race",
which depicted human clinical
cases alongside modern artworks.
He was trying to create
a visual link between
artworks and disease, enfeeblement
and racial inferiority.
This text,
first published in 1928,
served as a reference for the
exhibition on degenerate art.
But the origin of this term
is quite ironic.
It was coined in 1892
by a Jewish doctor, Max Nordau.
He had studied modern social phenomena
and the decadence of the ruling classes.
He admired lombroso and his
theories of physiognomy.
He believed that the
artists of his era
had been seduced by the neuroses
and madness of the times,
and that their works were the
expression of a terrible epidemic
that had led to a
degenerate art.
So, the Nazis made
the most of this.
And since the new artistic
trends were supported,
above all, by the
Jewish dealers...
The connection became
tragically clear.
The Nazis' love for art
entered the realms of the absurd
with the sculptor Rudolf Belling.
His works actually appeared
in both the 1937 exhibitions.
His expressionist sculptures
the triad and head in brass,
featured in the degenerate
exhibition,
the boxeur, a portrait of boxer
Max Schmeling, in the German one.
- Max Schmeling.
In may 1936 in New York,
the German boxer Max Schmeling
knocked out the American Joe Louis,
nicknamed the "brown bomber."
For the regime, Schmeling became
the Aryan symbol to show the world,
in the year when Germany
hosted the Olympics in Berlin.
Two years later, when Schmeling
returned to America for the rematch,
he was the fighter
with the swastika.
Louis knocked him out.
Schmeling was no longer
of use to Hitler.
But in 1937, the year of the
two exhibitions in Munich,
he was still the
lord of the ring.
This is surely also why
the Rudolf Belling bust
was allowed to remain
in the exhibition.
Indeed, this provides
an interesting end to the whole story.
"The Triad" and "Head in Brass" were
removed from the degenerate-art exhibition
so that Max Schmeling could
stay in the other one.
Schmeling found himself amid
the swastikas,
lauded as an Aryan man
and portrayed like a Greek god.
This and the next seven editions
of the great German art exhibition
were a paean to rustic life,
to the old crafts and trades,
to bucolic landscapes,
to the family and motherhood.
It was simple rustic painting;
naturally, the mother and child
now became a strong theme,
and nudes were painted, incredibly,
that verged on the obscene.
This was clearly supposed to encourage
mothers to "give"the Fuhrer,
as they put it, many children.
Healthy, handsome, blond children.
Genes to improve the race,
in life and in the museums.
Those who failed to meet those
standards were to be eliminated
from art and from the world.
But even the most rigid ideology
can be prey to contradictions.
Emil nolde, a Nazi party member
and diehard anti-semite,
found his expressionist works
among the degenerate artists.
Yet Goering would keep
collecting his paintings.
The same applied
to Max Beckmann.
His art was suppressed,
yet it still hung in the
parlors of Berlin's elite,
frequented by the party's
leading lights.
In those tumultuous days,
many important German Jews
deplored the Nazi party's
ingrained anti-semitism...
While valuing the idea
of a strong, stable Germany.
They all felt German.
Soon, they would
become just Jews.
This is what happened to
Fritz and Louise Gutmann,
Simon's grandparents,
and his father, Bernard.
The affair would rear its head
many years later,
as a huge delivery of boxes
came from Germany
to invade his life in the usa.
The boxes arrived at my
brother's house in the valley.
And he called me over,
said, "you have to come.
All these things have just arrived.
What are we going to do with them?"
Simon knew that there was
something unspoken in his family.
His father had always
been sad and pained.
Now he was dead,
and here in front of him,
a mountain of old papers,
letters and exhibition catalogues
that had arrived in Los Angeles.
It all revolved around Fritz and
Louise Gutmann, his grandparents,
and those all-too-brief years
between the wars.
They lived here in the Bosbeek
estate, near the hague.
In that endless garden
full of centuries-old trees,
Simon's dad and his
sister, Lili,
played with a mini
Bugatti pedal car
surrounded by
all their white terrier dogs.
The Gutmanns were German,
they belonged to a
dynasty of bankers.
They had established
the Dresdner bank.
The founding father, Eugen,
a convert from judaism to catholicism,
had assembled the world's
most extraordinary collection
of renaissance gold
and silver objects.
Eventually I discovered
even the kaiser was jealous
of our renaissance gold
and silver collection
he muttered to Bismarck,
"this is fit for a prince."
The most priceless items
included three bracket clocks
with remarkable,
perfectly preserved mechanisms,
now kept in the landesmuseum
Wurttemberg, Stuttgart.
They measure the time
and the movements of the stars.
They are extraordinary objects,
like this piece
where monkeys, stags, lions,
elephants and unicorns listen,
spellbound, to the music of orpheus.
The ostrich flaps its
wings on the hour,
and the little bear beats the
drum, you know like a clock.
After the great war,
Fritz Gutmann left Germany
and settled in the Netherlands.
He was entranced by Guardi
and Cranach the elder,
Memling and Bosch.
But he also loved modern art.
In Paris, he bought
Le Poirier by Renoir in 1928,
Femme se Chauffant
by Degas in 1929,
and an another Degas,
Paysage, in 1931.
Meanwhile, the family decided
that he would become the trustee
of the renaissance collection.
But peace would quickly end.
And, as we have seen
with the Goudstikkers,
the Netherlands would fall
very soon to the German army.
Fritz and Louise still believed
that the rules of the civilized
world applied to the Nazis, too.
They stayed put in Bosbeek.
Then, the visits from
Goering's intermediaries began.
There was Walter Hofer again,
with Alois Miedl and
Julius Buhler, Jr.
The three of them came
to part the Gutmanns
from their gold and silver
at knock-down prices.
Fritz agreed to sell some of it in
return for a visa to leave the country.
When he went to the bank to deposit
the money from the forced sale,
he found his account frozen
and no visa in sight.
In march 1941, a new dealer
knocked at his door.
Karl Haberstock.
He left with the Memling,
Van Goyen,
all sorts of wonderful pieces.
Somebody like Karl Haberstock when
was arrested after the war, you know,
quite plainly declared
to the American soldiers,
"I didn't do anything wrong.
It was just normal business.
I had commissions,
I had to find out for my clients."
His clients were the biggest
mass murderers in history, but...
Gutmann had seen
what was coming
and transferred the administration of
the collection to his brother-in-law,
the Italian fascist
senator Luca Orsini,
whom his sister had married
and moved to Florence with.
He was the official owner,
and the Germans didn't dare touch him.
Their retaliation was to declare
gold and silver to be state assets,
to be locked in a depository in Munich.
Gutmann tried to hold firm.
There were several occasions,
where they tried to make him...
Because if he revoked that transfer,
the shares would come back to him.
And then it would be
a Jewish company again.
And then they could just
legally, under Nazi law,
confiscate everything
as "abandoned Jewish property."
On the 26th of May 1943,
a black Mercedes with two ss men
picked up the Gutmanns from their home.
They promised to take them
to Berlin and on to Italy,
where the brother-in-law
had negotiated safe passage.
But in the German capital,
they were greeted by Goering's henchmen.
Fritz rejected their
offers once again.
And that was it.
They were put on a train, bound for
the theresienstadt concentration camp.
After another ten months,
and refusing yet again to
sign away all their property,
on the 13th of April 1944,
the Gutmanns were told
that they would be freed.
It was the final insult.
Fritz ended up at the "small
fortress," run directly by the gestapo.
And I found the cell
that Fritz was locked up in,
for the last three
or four weeks of his life...
And it had no window.
It just had a little hole
at the bottom of the door,
where they could slide
some stale bread and things.
There was no light.
And from what I can deduce...
The last day of April 1944,
the guards drag him out...
And they were quite sadistic.
They drag him through
this awful dank corridor,
that follows inside the
old castle walls,
which housed all these
prison cells.
And he was taken out by this...
They call it the
"killing fields,"
and he was strangled.
By one report,
he was garroted with a wire,
by the captors, the guards.
And his body was thrown away.
So he doesn't have a proper
burial, a grave site.
His wife, my grandmother...
Was also in a cell,
but she wasn't in solitary confinement.
I don't know which is worse.
She was crammed into the women's
cell in the next section,
where about 40 women were
locked in a room half this size.
And they were there
for about a month...
Until they were put on a train
to Auschwitz,
where she was killed
the day she arrived.
They always say
that the Nazi past is history,
that we must let it lie.
But once again,
the Gurlitt case shows otherwise,
that our present and our future is
conditioned by the Nazi past every time.
In 2012,
fifteen hundred works that
had vanished without a trace,
reappeared in the Munich apartment
of an elderly gentleman...
Cornelius Gurlitt.
He was the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt,
faithful art dealer to the Fuhrer.
Masterpieces by Rodin,
Matisse, Monet, Renoir,
Kandinsky, Klee and Dix
came back to life.
It is the greatest rediscovery
of recent years.
Now, for the first time,
two exhibitions
have put some of the works,
now restored, on display.
It is often hard to establish
how and when these paintings,
drawings and sculptures
became part of the collection.
It's about the provenance of the works
the history, the biography of an artwork.
Gaps are a risk, of course,
especially between 1933 and 1945,
for then you wonder
how the work changed hands.
On show at the Bundeskunsthalle
in Bonn
are old-master prints,
seascapes and portraits
all genres that are easy
to appreciate and to sell.
Here in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn,
we focus on works that could
have been stolen. There are suspect cases.
In Bern, the city of bears,
the Kunstmuseum
mainly exhibits works on paper.
The works we see here in Bern
were all legally owned
by Cornelius Gurlitt.
The German state - the Nazis -
had confiscated them
from their own museums.
We are showing them in the context
of the Degenerate Art campaign.
The Gurlitt affair has been
shrouded in mystery from the outset.
We didn't know his name,
we didn't know exactly what he was called,
and we didn't know where he lived,
as he wasn't registered anywhere,
in any office, or in any document.
Gurlitt was a person
who did not exist in Germany.
He simply wasn't there.
Cornelius Gurlitt ceased to be
a ghost
one day in September 2010,
on the Zurich-Munich train.
In a random check,
customs inspectors found 9,000 Euros
in 500-euro notes in his pocket.
Suspicions were raised,
and his Munich home was searched.
It was dirty and untidy.
Gurlitt had lived
alone for years,
kept company
by a huge wealth of paintings,
officially lost in the bombing
of Dresden in February 1945.
The bavarian authorities
decided not to reveal the find.
But focus, a German
weekly, found out.
After a year and a half
of checks and research,
the paper was ready to break
the conspiracy of silence
in November 2013.
They published.
The scoop caused a scandal.
The state was forced
to confirm it was true.
The works belonged to him,
and the suspected
tax offences could be forgiven.
The state knew it had found
a real treasure trove
but couldn't really lay hands on it.
It hoped to reach
some kind of deal with Gurlitt.
Gurlitt was to agree to bequeath
the paintings to Bavaria after his death.
Various ideas of restitution
had been to restitute the Nazis.
But not their victims.
You know the Germans have done so much
to address the wrongs of the past.
But the art is a field
that they've really...
It's their achilles heel.
You know they have
never quite dealt with it.
The art hoard kept by Cornelius was
inherited from his father, Hildebrand,
who, before becoming
one of Hitler's dealers,
was an art historian and
supporter of the modern painters,
especially the expressionists
and the "die bruecke group."
That was enough to lose him
his job as a museum director
not once but twice.
A quarter Jewish, he became an
accredited mediator with the Nazis
when the racial laws
were issued,
thus keeping himself and his
family clear of any persecution.
Hildebrand Gurlitt
acquired works mainly in France,
and in 1942 he became
director of the museum in Linz.
He was stopped and questioned by
American soldiers in June 1945.
He said.
"I have never told anyone,
in Paris, about what I bought,
because the art business
is generally very secretive."
Gurlitt always used a broker
in all of his dealings,
to avoid any direct
responsibility.
He said.
"In all, I have bought
about 200 paintings in France.
My earnings have grown steadily,
with the acquisitions in France,
my income for 1943 reached
200,000 marks."
That is the equivalent
of 720,000 Euros today.
But what was interesting was,
that when the Gurlitt collection
was found by the allies
after the end of the war,
and they interrogated Hildebrand Gurlitt,
and they said to him,
"we've got a 148 paintings
we found of yours.
Do you have any others?"
And he said, "No, I had others,
but they were bombed and destroyed."
But actually he had another
1,100 up the road,
in the castle belonging to
friends of his in Bavaria,
Hildebrand Gurlitt
can't have been the only one,
who had 1,100 paintings
hidden somewhere else,
and so they didn't exist.
So the size of those collections have
not yet been properly established.
Hildebrand continued
to work serenely as a dealer
until his death
in a road accident in 1956.
The paintings that he hid,
and that would be found at the
home of his son, Cornelius,
included femme assise,
a masterpiece by Matisse
seized from parisian gallery
owner Paul Rosenberg.
In fact femme assise did not
even have a stretcher on it.
It was laid flat in a drawer...
Amongst valuable works
of art in fruit.
Some were kept in suitcases
amidst boxes of rotting food,
in cabinets and cupboards.
It was a horrendous way to live,
and a horrible way to store art.
After the scoop in focus,
Paul Rosenberg's descendants realized
that the family's Matisse was
among the confiscated works.
The legal battle to
reclaim it began.
They appointed an American lawyer
based in venice, Christopher Marinello,
an expert in recovering
stolen artworks.
After protracted negotiations,
he reached an agreement
with Cornelius' lawyer.
During that period,
a horrible thing happened.
Mr. Gurlitt passed away.
And then, it was a
complete disarray.
We discovered of course
that there was a will.
He was angry with the German
authorities for stopping him on a train,
for seizing his assets,
for questioning him,
for disturbing his very
bizarre lifestyle.
So he left everything
to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.
Femme Assise
by Henri Matisse
was one of the ill-starred works
exhibited at 21 Rue la Boetie,
where Paul Rosenberg, a sophisticated
art dealer and Jewish collector,
had opened his gallery in 1910.
His heirs were among the first
to raise the taboo topic of restitution
in the international courts.
Almost 80 years on,
his granddaughter Anne Sinclair
succeeded in paying tribute
to her grandfather
with an exhibition in Paris,
which was named after that street.
There were 70 modern
art masterpieces,
from Picasso and Leger to
Braque, Matisse and Laurencin.
In the early years of
the 20th century,
Rosenberg collected
the most innovative painters.
He was friends with
Braque, Matisse,
and especially Picasso,
whom he called, simply, "pic."
The two were neighbors
in Paris,
they talked of pictures, payments and
commissions from the kitchen window.
Picasso lived at number
23, Rue la Boetie.
From 1932 until the war,
the only agent
to represent him was Rosenberg.
His gallery was furnished
like a lounge.
The avant-garde artists
on the first floor,
the established masters, romantic
painters and impressionists on the second.
Paul loved paintings like people,
he documented their form and
genealogy on dedicated index cards,
he had them photographed
one by one.
And so they appear today,
impressions on old glass plates.
Black and white,
dusty and as fragile as memory.
This is the Rosenberg fund,
donated by his heirs
to the French culture ministry.
When the Germans entered Paris
on the 14th of June 1940,
Paul Rosenberg was fleeing to
Spain with his wife and daughter.
On the 17th, they boarded a Polish ship,
"the batory", which took them to America.
A few days later, Hitler,
accompanied by architect Albert Speer,
and the regime's favorite
sculptor, Arno Breker...
Visited the freshly conquered
capital like luxury tourists.
Paris was deserted.
La Madeleine...
Place de la Concorde...
Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile.
A view of the Eifel tower.
Professor Speer is to
the Fuhrer's left.
France's cultural heritage was
already being monitored from 1937.
Paris, for the Nazis the ultimate
city of culture and good living,
was the key battleground
for art.
The ERR,
the Nazi intelligence organization
that appropriated property
and led the looting of France,
was run by Alfred Rosenberg - no
relation to the parisian gallery owner.
It operated alongside the ss
in all countries
occupied by the German army.
It requisitioned books,
artwork, and political material.
The texts were used by the institute
for study of the Jewish question,
founded by Rosenberg in
Frankfurt in 1940.
The aim was to ideologize
anti-semitism
and to prove the inferiority
of the Jewish race.
There were dozens,
hundreds of art historians,
specialists and antiquarians.
The finest. This is awful.
Those who worked
for the Nazis were the best...
they all worked for the ERR.
up to 2,000 people, in the end.
The paintings now recovered
after being stolen by the ERR
from Paul Rosenberg's collection
also include baigneur
et baigneuses by Picasso
and Profil Bleu Devant la
Cheminee by Matisse.
Everything was seized.
Sometimes, the outcome was oddly ironic.
the Rosenberg gallery, for example,
was requisitioned as the Institute
for Study of the Jewish Questions.
As you can imagine,
it was not an academic
but a racial,
racist undertaking.
At 21 Rue la Boetie,
in place of the Matisses
and Picassos
appeared the poster promoting
the exhibition "Jews and France,"
which opened on the 5th of September
1941 at the Palais Berlitz.
It invited spectators to recognize the
physical traits of the "Jewish enemy,"
described as a vampire
with a long beard,
fleshy lips, and
an aquiline nose,
who was corrupting
the French institutions,
and every field of culture.
Meanwhile, Paul Rosenberg had
opened a new gallery in New York,
and was working with
what would become
the most important contemporary art
museum of the 20th century. Moma.
The fact that so many people had
to flee Germany, France and Europe,
and so many paintings
came to the United States,
definitely influenced
the migration of art,
and the center of the
modern art market,
and the modern art world
from Paris to New York.
In 1942,
Paul Rosenberg had an exhibition
in New York on Vincent van Gogh.
It included the portrait
of Dr Gachet.
The painting had been confiscated
in 1938 at Goering's behest
from the Staedl museum in Frankfurt
and sold to a German banker.
The work was resold and came
to America in the early 1940s.
The story has been pieced
together by Cynthia Saltzman,
a scholar of the Dutch painter.
Many modern-art masterpieces
reached America
through auctions in
Switzerland, as she explains.
On June 1939,
they had the fischer auction...
In Luzern,
that was advertised in art news
in the United States.
And Americans had people bidding
at the auctions.
The art world was
conscious of it,
except for people who I think
just wanted not to know.
In lot 49, for example,
is a self-portrait by Van Gogh.
The Van Gogh self-portrait
that he painted for Gauguin
in October 1888,
it made the highest price there,
175,000 Swiss francs.
The painting is now in Boston,
in the fogg art museum at Harvard.
The Nazi occupation
had often unexpected effects
on Europe's art heritage.
The walls of a house
in the Boston countryside
hang with priceless paintings...
Including a flemish altarpiece...
And 17th-century works
by Sebastiano Ricci,
Alessandro Longhi and
Alessandro Magnasco.
The owners are Tom Selldorff
and his wife.
He is the grandson
of Richard Neumann,
a textile industrialist and
Jewish collector from Vienna.
Tom proudly shows his
pictures of his grandfather,
who fought for the kaiser
in World War I,
and was then betrayed
by his own country.
When the Nazis annexed Austria...
Neumann left many of his paintings
behind and went to Paris.
Then he was able to leave
Austria with 38 paintings.
And so those are the paintings,
which wound up in the louvre,
and others have just disappeared
in the fog of post war.
One reason we were able
to recover them,
was that the custom's declaration
listed all these paintings.
So they were clearly identified
as having belonged to him,
at the time he left
Vienna for Paris.
Many of his paintings
were channeled via the ERR
to the collections of the future
Fuhrer's museum in Linz...
Or to Goering's residence,
Carinhall.
A period photo shows
the deputy leader of the reich
examining two matisses seized
from gallery owner Paul Rosenberg.
Alongside Goering
is dealer Walter Andreas Hofer.
Holding the paintings is Bruno
Lohse, critic and art dealer.
The photo was taken in 1941
at the Jeu de Paume.
The parisian museum was used
to house the sequestered Booty.
Goering often went there
to choose the best pieces.
Another dealer, Gustav Rochlitz,
told under interrogation
how Goering wanted to buy from
him for a staggeringly low price
a portrait by Titian
and a still life by Jan Weenix.
Bruno Lohse, Goering's man,
forced Rochlitz to accept an exchange
with works of degenerate art.
These are his words.
"You must exchange the pictures.
That's what Goering wants,
and when he gives an order,
it must be executed,
or you will pay the price."
The err hierarchy
regularly sent Hitler
leather-bound albums with
photos of the stolen objects...
Many belonging to the French
arm of the rothschild family.
They would be submitted
at the nuremberg trial
as evidence of what
the ERR had done.
These 39 volumes,
which are before me,
contain photographs of works of
art, secured by the "Einsatzstab,"
and are volumes, which were prepared
by members of the Rosenberg Stab.
And I offer them in evidence.
The aisles of the Bergkerk,
the medieval church of Deventer
in Holland,
hosted an exhibition
of 75 paintings,
that had been earmarked
for the Fuhrer's museum
and Goering's collection.
Hitler would receive the
16th- and 17th-century works,
paintings of flemish
families and couples,
still lives with animals,
books and fruit,
bucolic scenes and
Dutch landscapes.
The Reichsmarschall would get
the hunting scenes and nudes,
the venuses, the three graces.
Art historian Eva Kleeman
and her husband Daaf Ledeboer
curated the exhibition after extensive
study of the Dutch art archives.
They realized that while
part of the paintings
had been returned
to their rightful owners,
many others were still
in museums and galleries.
The exhibition also presented
thousands of police reports
compiled straight
after the war,
including the list of items
reported missing by the victims.
Difficult is, when people want
to reclaim their own goods,
they had to provide
ridiculous proofs.
"Can you prove?
Do you have a ticket that you bought it?"
"Do you have a photograph
that you can show it on?"
People coming back
from the camps.
Ridiculous questionings,
but it was done.
The exhibition included Christ
and the adulteress by Vermeer.
Goering had yearned
for one of his works for years.
He bought it for himself in
1942 through his usual dealers,
Alois Miedl and Walter Hofer.
Unfortunately, it was a forgery.
He was very happy to acquire it.
However, it was forged.
It was made by Han Van Meegeren
from the city of deventer,
which is where we are now.
He managed to forge it
by using a particular technique.
He used bakelite.
He mixed pigments with bakelite,
and he baked it off.
And he used an actual
17th century painting,
he stripped the paint off.
There was a lot of craquelure
he got by baking it off.
And then he put ink
in the crackles.
It was exactly the colors
that Vermeer used,
the yellow of Vermeer,
the blue of Vermeer.
And to every art historian in Holland,
it seemed like this was the real Vermeer.
Van Meegeren was one of
the most skillful forgers
of the 20th century.
After the war,
he was accused of
collaborating with the Nazis,
and risked the death penalty.
In his defense, he confessed
to making the forgery.
The court did not believe him
and made him paint a new work,
under close supervision.
Thus he proved that he really
had painted the Vermeer
that had fooled Goering.
He got away with a
minor conviction,
and for duping the Nazis,
he even became a national hero.
Goering sold many of his works
to amass more than 1.5 million
guilders of that period,
and to buy this forgery.
And before he died,
he was told that it was a forgery.
So he was quite unhappy,
of course, at that point.
Many of the paintings in
the exhibitions in Paris,
Bern, Bonn and deventer...
Have an often difficult and
painful restitution story to tell.
Tracing an artwork entails
identifying it,
discovering whose hands
it has passed through,
whether the title or artist's name
has been changed to cover its tracks,
and whether it is in a museum
or about to be auctioned off.
With museums,
there is a balance to be struck
between public interest
and personal claims.
As Anne Webber well knows,
she and her staff in London
have been on the trail of missing
artwork since the early 1990s.
Often they say that these works
of art
are better in public collections
than in private collection,
I think obviously there's a point
that museums are there to keep,
to look after the art,
not to give it away, but,
museums are also repositories
of our values,
of our values of societies.
And our societies don't
believe in theft,
and theft when it is associated
with murder as this was.
In Paris, Elizabeth royer,
an art expert and gallery owner,
began investigating the provenance of
the missing works in the mid 1990s.
Some say it's only about money. It's not.
Some heirs do it for the money,
but most don't.
A young woman came to see me.
She told me her family
had been robbed
with the Mobel Aktion
(the Furniture campaign),
there were very few artworks.
three paintings and a drawing,
nothing very important.
But her father had spent his whole life
and everything he had
in the hope of seeing
one of them again.
Many stories
have not been heard.
Many people have preferred
to forget
to resume their lives,
almost to blank out the horrors
and wrongs of the past.
For over 80 years,
Edgar Feuchtwanger,
whom we met at the start
of this story,
never spoke of the man who lived
in the block opposite in Munich.
When Hitler became leader
of the third reich in 1933,
Edgar's desk mate at school stopped
speaking to him, because he was a Jew.
In the evening,
his mother signed his homework
in his exercise books, red-eyed.
I was told,
"Do what the teacher tells you."
And she straight away put out
all this Nazi stuff.
This is the most
striking picture.
Normally, on labor day.
This was labor day, 1933.
One would have hammer
and sickle...
And here we have hammer
and swastika.
And I used to draw it
with my own hand.
I was told to do what my
teacher told me, so I did.
In November 1938, the gestapo
knocked on the Feuchtwangers' door.
Furniture and books were seized.
His father was taken to Dachau.
Edgar played the piano with the soft
pedal every afternoon after school,
until his father
returned home a month later,
in a sorry state, but alive.
The Feuchtwangers soon sent Edgar
away, before joining him in England.
Rarely in the history of our people
has there been a time of peace
so fervent as these 5 and a half years,
which from that memorable day
of 30 January 1933
have inaugurated the era
of National Socialist
government for our people.
Hitler,
Edgar's neighbor...
Opened the first three
great German art exhibitions,
held every year from 1937
to 1944, with a speech.
He waxed lyrical about the Aryan art
"of the sublime and the beautiful,
a vehicle of the natural
and the healthy."
He declared war on the artists guilty
of the country's cultural disintegration
and railed against cultural
bolshevism and the Jewish dealers.
The cultural programme
of the new Reich
is of a magnificence
without precedent in our history.
Many in the art world
followed him.
Historians, intellectuals and
academics made a pact with the devil
and opted to serve the Nazi regime
and the great looting of Europe.
All the art dealers whom
we have mentioned in this story,
returned after the war to
resume their former profession,
as if nothing had happened.
Timothy Garton Ash
has made an extensive study
of how people act
in a dictatorship.
I did not find a single,
truly evil person.
I found people like you and me,
weak human, all too human.
But I found a big evil.
So it's a way in which
an evil regime
can exploit and manipulate
all our weaknesses,
to build what was essentially
a kind of orwellian regime.
The head of the labor movement
of the Nazis said,
"the only time when someone
is a private individual,
is when they are asleep."
So a Mark of a totalitarian
regime is. Every area of life,
every area of art has to be controlled
because they're all dangerous.
And they are.
Art is often a key...
A trojan horse...
A brush that helps to portray
and to erase dictatorships.
Its power is immense
yet contradictory.
Art can be a means and an end...
It can Redeem and Condemn.
Be a tool of subversion
and a vehicle for consensus,
an expression of freedom
and the face of totalitarianism.
In Nazi-despoiled Europe...
Many Jewish families
saved themselves
by selling their entire collections for
an exit visa that meant staying alive.
Millions of others were exterminated
in the concentration camps.
One day, while all
this was happening,
a gestapo official was visiting
Picasso's studio in Paris.
The painter told the story
on the 24th of march 1945
to journalist Simone tery.
On the table was a postcard
of his painting, Guernica.
The officer asked,
"did you do this, maestro?"
"No," replied Picasso,
"this is your work."
Later in the interview,
he said to tery,
"what do you think an artist is?
An imbecile who has only his
eyes if he's a painter,
or ears if he's a musician,
or if he's a boxer, just his muscles?
An artist is a political being,
alive to the heart-breaking,
passionate or happy
events of the world.
How can one be indifferent
to other people?
Painting is not done
to decorate apartments.
It is an instrument of war
for attack and defense
against the enemy."
the American armed forces
interrogate Gisela Limberger,
personal secretary to
reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.
She said,
"Goering used to select the objects
for himself and for the Fuhrer.
My duties included compiling
the lists of paintings,
tapestries and pieces of
furniture, attending auctions,
and keeping the masterpieces
safe in the air-raid shelters,
until February 1944,
when everything was handed
over to Walter Hofer."
Walter Hofer...
Goering's personal art agent
and director of his collection.
One thousand three hundred seventy
six paintings, 250 sculptures
and 168 tapestries.
Here he is, just after the
surrender to the Americans.
He cooperated eagerly and helped
to catalogue Goering's hoard.
Interrogated by lieutenant colonel hinkel
on the 6th of November 1945, he said,
"I bought art in Goering's name.
My reward was to keep
the works he didn't want."
And when asked where the money to buy
these works came from, he replied,
"I can't be sure, but I think
the money belonged to the state."
We will meet several men
like Hofer in this story,
an army of curators, critics,
historians and even artists,
who placed their talent at the
service of the Nazi regime,
and participated in the raids,
especially on the homes and
galleries of Jewish collectors.
Six hundred thousand artworks were
purloined from private owners,
museums, churches and galleries.
One hundred thousand
are yet to be found.
Of the rest, little
or nothing is known.
This is the story of how Hitler
looted the great beauty of Europe.
And how he stole not
just human lives
but the artistic flowering
of an entire culture.
It was more than
just an obsession for art.
It was an obsession
to wipe out an entire culture.
They were looking to destroy
Jewish people.
It was a weapon for them.
Another weapon to the Germans.
Every one of these
pictures has a story.
And the backdrop to this great
looting is the holocaust.
Now, over 80 years later,
these recovered works have been
put on display at four exhibitions.
In Paris, France. In Bern, Switzerland.
in Bonn, Germany. And in
deventer, the Netherlands.
Many owners and institutions
are still battling to regain
what once was theirs.
Some people maybe don't
understand the connection between
the theft of our art,
and families like mine
actually losing their lives.
The two things
are very directly connected.
In many cases,
they had collections seized,
merely saying that the owners
were "away" or "on the run".
But often, the Nazis themselves
had deported them to the camps.
So it was sophistry,
macabre sophistry.
It all began in 1937.
Two exhibitions took
place in Munich.
The first, on "degenerate art,"
the works and the artists
the Nazis decried.
From Marc Chagall to
Wassily Kandinsky.
The cubist style of the spaniard
Pablo Picasso was frowned upon, too.
Matisse, monet and the
impressionists fared no better.
Their works were requisitioned
and auctioned off
through amenable dealers and
collectors, especially in Switzerland,
and were used by the regime as
an investment and to raise cash.
The other exhibition
is this one.
The great German art exhibition,
in which the Fuhrer
took a personal interest.
It marked the start of the great
obsession with classical art,
that would see Goering
and Hitler locking horns
for the heritage
of the occupied countries.
We have met many people.
Researchers, historians,
and the descendants of those who
were robbed and often killed.
They have all helped
to reconstruct a story...
That still today has yet to end.
By doing all the work that we do
to document what happened,
we're also restoring
to the historical record
people who've been erased from it.
They stole everything.
Thanks to the Mobel Aktion
they looted entire apartments,
with pendulum clocks, bed linen,
children's toys and cars,
and then the paintings.
Does evil have a face?
Can you see it in
someone's eyes?
Charlie Chaplin was born
in the same week
of the same month
of the same year as Hitler.
In 1940, when he parodied him in the
great dictator, they were both 51.
One was a star of Hollywood. The
other was devastating a continent.
Edgar feuchtwanger was seven years
old when he met Hitler in 1930.
The future Fuhrer was 41,
they were neighbors in Munich.
Edgar remembers
him in his book.
"He's right in front of us,
outside his apartment block.
I see that he has shaved his
beard, as my father sometimes does.
He has blue eyes. I never knew.
You can't see in the photos.
I thought his eyes were
completely black.
I've never seen him so close.
He has hairs in his nose and ears.
He's shorter than I thought.
Shorter than my father.
The passers-by stop, so do we.
He looks at me. I ought
to look away.
But I can't. I stare at him.
Perhaps I should smile at him?
I am his neighbor, after all!
Does he recognize me?
Does he know I watch
him from my bedroom?
Does he know I'm a Jew?
I don't want him to hate me.
Or my father. Or my mother."
Because it's very difficult...
About a person
you've actually seen like that.
The idea that he will turn
the whole world upside down,
is something... you can't grasp.
"I have now decided before the
closing of my earthly career,
to take as my wife that girl, who after
long years of faithful friendship,
entered of her own free will
a practically besieged city,
in order to share her
destiny with mine.
At her own desire, she goes as
my wife with me to death."
On the marriage certificate
signed by them both,
Eva braun corrected her
surname to Hitler.
On the 29th of April 1945,
Adolf Hitler dictated his
private will to his secretary.
Then he put a pistol
to his right temple and fired.
By his side, Eva braun had
taken her own life with poison.
She was wearing her
black wedding dress.
The destiny of the Fuhrer's art collection
featured prominently in his will.
"What I possess belongs to the
party.
Should this no longer
exist, to the state.
Should the state
too be destroyed,
no further decision on
my part is needed.
I have acquired collection of
paintings over the years,
not for my private enjoyment,
but solely out of a desire to endow a
picture gallery in my birthplace, Linz."
The Fuhrer had planned the
ultimate museum for Germany,
the louvre of Linz,
the city where he grew up,
where he had begun
his mediocre painting career,
rejected twice by the
Vienna academy of fine arts.
Hermann Goering, Hitler's
deputy,
also left a record
of his own obsession with art,
a catalogue, listing all the
works in his collection,
ordered with teutonic
discipline from 1933 onwards,
with the artist, provenance,
description, date, dealer
and location.
After the war, the manuscript would
be used as evidence against him.
Jean-Marc Dreyfus, holocaust scholar
and lecturer at Manchester university,
has reconstructed the journey of the
Generalfeldmarschall's collection.
He has edited the French
edition of the manuscript,
with historians and archivists
from the Quai d'Orsay.
Goering's gallery was valued in
1944 at 50 million deutschmarks.
In today's money, that's
18 million Euros.
He had a kind of hunger,
a bottomless gluttony for riches.
He was one of the greatest
looters in history,
even more so than Hitler.
This is confirmed
by the statement of the party newspaper's
most important art critic, Robert Scholz.
He worked for the err,
the special Nazi unit
led by Alfred Rosenberg that
looted the occupied territories.
"Goering had asked Hitler
for permission
to examine the collections confiscated so
far and to decide what to do with them.
Hitler received about
40 masterpieces,
including works by Vermeer,
Rubens, Boucher.
Most of them belonged
to the rothschild collections.
Hermann Goering kept
around 700 works for himself,
including paintings by Van Dyck,
Goya and Van de Velde."
It was the finest art collection
bar none in the Nazi era.
All the greats of European
painting, of European heritage,
were there.
Leonardo da Vinci, Tiepolo, Titian.
There was a real fixation with Cranach.
Carinhall, a residence 60
kilometers north of Berlin,
was Goering's gallery
of wonders.
This place, in the heart
of the imperial forest,
became a hedonists' heaven...
With dinners and
hunting parties,
where Goering entertained the German
and international aristocracy,
at Hitler's behest.
The Nazis were possessed with
status.
And art is a traditional
means of...
Rising status.
People who dread power,
try to look as much as they can,
on the old power.
Germany had this tradition
of high nobility,
connected to the German emperor,
old family ties.
And the Nazis were
just bourgeois.
So they built hunting lodges
because the nobility liked to hunt,
they'd buy hunting scenes.
They do everything to
show the old power
that the new power
speaks the same language.
Which they don't, eventually.
Goering had blue
blood from his mother,
and felt at ease
in the role of an aristocrat.
His first wife was Danish
baroness, carin Von kantzow.
He worshipped her,
and after her premature death
in 1931, aged just 43,
he dedicated the villa to her
as a mausoleum.
Here, surrounded by portraits of carin,
Goering lived with his second wife,
playing with his train sets,
always on a diet, always obese.
He was a very complex, childish character.
He liked to wear make-up,
as the photos show,
and dressing up,
we see him in various outfits.
At one point, he was likened
to a brothel manager, a pimp.
All very odd yet he was also
a powerful, highly intelligent man.
Goering was consumed by his
passion for art and money.
In January 1945, when the Russians
were already at the gates of Berlin,
he waited to the last minute
before ordering
his gallery to be evacuated.
Before giving the order
to blow up carinhall,
he had the bronzes by arno
breker, the sculptor of the reich,
thrown in the waters
of the wuchersee.
The special trains that had brought
artworks to the villa over the years,
were now packed with statues and paintings
and sent to secure hiding places.
Amid the peaks of styria, in
Austria, lies altaussee salt mine.
From August 1943,
giant racks were built in chambers
hewn from the rock by the miners,
to keep thousands of artworks
safe for the Fuhrer's museum.
Here, in may 1945,
the Americans found part
of Hitler's treasure trove.
Six thousand five hundred
paintings, statues,
coins, weapons,
antiquarian books and
pieces of furniture.
There were Michelangelo's Madonna
and child, stolen in Bruges,
the imposing Ghent Altarpiece
by the Van Eyck brothers,
removed from the cathedral in Ghent and
dismantled to fit through the tunnels,
and one of the paintings
that Hitler craved the most.
The astronomer by Jan Vermeer,
plundered from the rothschild family,
the ultimate symbol of the Jewish enemy.
Along with the works
in Hitler's hoard,
there were several masterpieces
from Goering's.
They included Titian's
Danae...
A Madonna by Raphael...
The blind leading the blind
by Brueghel the elder...
And Antea by Parmigianino.
The paintings, now all in the
museo di capodimonte in Naples,
had been placed in montecassino
Abbey for safekeeping.
The German troops in Goering's division
stole them and brought them to Berlin,
as the reichsmarschall's
51st birthday present.
The American army
had set up a special unit in Washington
made up solely of art historians,
called "the Monuments Men",
enlisted soldiers who monitored
all artwork movements around Europe.
The monuments men worked in
the field in war-torn Europe,
while in New York,
in this library,
other experts planned
the efforts
to safeguard the cultural heritage of
the countries involved in the conflict.
Here, they studied maps
and art history manuals,
they compared photographs
and street plans,
and marked out the
monuments to save.
Churches, museums,
historic buildings
and archaeological sites.
They gathered together here at
the frick art reference library,
partly because it is
this institution
that had the resources to help
them get this information together.
And then eventually prepare maps
to give to the army air corps,
that would allow the pilots to
avoid important monuments in Europe,
in the many, many bombing raids
they launched during 1943 and '44.
In merkers,
north of Frankfurt,
the us troops under generals
eisenhower and patton,
found the reichsbank's hoard of
gold and cash in a potassium mine.
It was worth over 520
million dollars.
Piled up in a corner were 400 paintings
evacuated from some Berlin museums,
including in the conservatory
by eduard manet,
and goya's carnivorous vulture.
One of the caves contained
207 sealed containers,
part of the SS Booty,
not yet laundered
by the Reichsbank,
full of valuables,
seized from concentration
camp deportees.
Coins, silverware and jewelry.
And the prisoners' gold teeth.
It would emerge,
that all the transactions for the SS Haul
went through an account
in the name of Max Heilinger,
aka Heinrich Himmler,
the architect of the genocide.
Five hundred kilometers to the
south, in Berchtesgaden,
home to Hitler's retreat,
the eagle's nest,
the statues and paintings
transported by Goering's trains
were found hidden in
another salt mine.
That is where the paintings of
Jacques Goudstikker also ended up,
thanks to Goering.
Goudstikker was a respected
Amsterdam art dealer.
This is a catalogue
of his exhibition from 1930.
He was Jewish,
and when the Nazis invaded
Holland on the 10th of may 1940,
Goering and his dealer, Hofer,
had already earmarked 1,240
of his works for themselves.
Goudstikker's story
typifies how these affairs
dragged on for decades,
leaving the grandchildren the task
of achieving closure with the past.
In an apartment in New York,
in a central district built in the 1930s,
the walls are hung
with some of the masterpieces
from the Goudstikker collection,
recovered after protracted legal battles.
Charlene Von Saher
is Jacques's granddaughter.
She lives here with
her mother, Marei.
After the war, Goudstikker's wife
had asked the Dutch government
for her husband's collection
to be returned,
but only part of it came back.
The bulk of the collection
had been declared
"national property of the Netherlands,"
and shared among the country's museums.
In 1997,
a journalist from Rotterdam,
who was investigating the
non-return of assets after the war,
tracked down Charlene and
her mother here in New York.
With his help, and thanks
to the gallery labels
that her grandfather had put
on the back of the pictures,
she decided to make
a new claim...
A step towards reuniting
the collection of paintings
that goudstikker had exhibited
many times in nyenrode castle,
before the Nazi occupation.
He used the castle
to display his art.
He brought his customers from
Amsterdam on the amstel on the boat,
to the castle, and showed them
all the beautiful paintings
he had acquired.
What a great way to display art.
Nyenrode castle stands in
the utrecht countryside.
It's now a university.
In 1930, Jacques Goudstikker
had bought it
to hold cultural soirees
and charity events.
Every room was furnished in
the style of a different era.
It was at one of his
big charity parties
that he called vienen
an der werkt,
where he created Vienna
on the werkt river
brought in a big orchestra
and oriental carpets,
and chandeliers with candles
and invited my grandmother,
Desi Von Halban, a soprano,
from Vienna,
to sing at this party.
And that's where they first met.
And they fell in love and were
married shortly afterwards.
Charlene's grandmother desi was
Jewish, originally from Poland.
The castle's rooms
were her stage,
which she graced with elegance
but without ostentation.
She loved the skies and clouds of
Holland and singing Puccini arias.
She and Jacques were a wealthy,
happy couple.
After 1938,
many Jews living in the Netherlands
had begun to leave the country.
Jacques put off the decision and
continued to run his gallery,
meanwhile, their son,
eduard, was born.
Before leaving, he tried to save his
vast, cherished art collection,
especially the masterpieces
of the great flemish masters,
and the Italian baroque.
To no avail.
Of those 1,240 works,
three hundred ended
up at carinhall,
fifty paintings were given to Hitler.
The rest were put up for sale.
Hermann Goering showed up on the
doorstep of my grandfather's gallery,
the minute they left.
But he knew well in advance
what was there.
They all did their research
before the war.
Jacques, Desi and their son,
aged just a few months, fled westward.
They wanted to reach england and
then the usa, but they had no visas.
At the north sea
port of Jmuiden,
a soldier recognized Desi,
who had often sung for the troops.
He helped them to board the last
ship before it left, the bodegraven.
They were safe.
But there would be no American
dream in store for Jacques.
He went up for some air,
and it was dark,
and he fell into a trap
hole in the deck,
and he was killed instantly.
And my grandmother waited
and waited for his return,
and he never came back.
Normally, they would throw
people overboard, but...
My grandmother was lucky she could plan
a funeral for my grandfather in Falmouth.
She planned the funeral,
but she was not allowed
to attend the funeral.
And she wanted to make sure they
sang, Cole Porter's "night and day."
Desi was left
with a babe in arms,
and a little black book
found by her husband's body.
It listed all the
works he owned,
many of which were already
in Goering and Hitler's hands.
On his 45th birthday, the Reich
air force minister, General Goering,
was awarded numerous decorations
and honoured by a visit from the Fuhrer,
who gave him a priceless painting
that would have
pride of place in his house.
Hitler and Goering
were great friends,
they had both fought
in World War I,
they were side by side
in the Munich beer hall
during their attempted
coup of 1923.
And they were together
on the 30th of January 1933,
the day Hitler became
chancellor of the reich.
But when the great looting
of Europe's art heritage began,
they became rivals,
vying for the finest pieces.
A great rivalry emerged between
Goering and Hitler,
they even tried to pinch works
from under each other's noses.
Hitler himself, who had
only recently realised
that he could exploit the situation,
issued an order that the Fuhrer
had first choice of the works.
For the leaders of the reich,
the need to build a strong,
absolute identity,
became an obsession that was
increasingly bound up with art.
The process of constructing
the Nazi narrative
also involved the quest
for an absolute aesthetic
harking back to the classical
ideals of perfection.
The relationship between
art and politics,
thus became central to the
organization of the new German empire.
Propaganda minister, Joseph
Goebbels,
led the campaigns against
anyone, who was out of step.
The Nazis knew full well how effective
art is in the public domain,
and they exploited art for propaganda
purposes - with great success.
The Day of German Art in Munich.
Chancellor Hitler attends
the impressive parade
commemorating German art
over the centuries.
On the 18th of July 1937,
Munich celebrated the opening
of the house of German art
designed by Paul Ludwig troost,
one of the Fuhrer's
favorite architects.
It was a triumph of swastikas,
floats and virile power.
The parade included a model
of the new building.
Hitler had just opened the great
exhibition on German art there,
"the art of the people,"
as he termed it in his speech.
"Majesty and beauty,
purity and wellbeing
to counter the last elements
of our cultural decay."
The next day, the 19th,
the exhibition of degenerate
art opened in the hofgarten.
And so in Munich, a few hundred
metres apart, began the clash
between what was now to be the
official art and the art that...
yes, it's no exaggeration to
say, that was to be destroyed.
The exhibitions were
polar opposites,
as art historian berthold
hinz explains.
One featured expressionism,
impressionism, surrealism, cubism
the art of the "isms," as the
Fuhrer scornfully dismissed it:
Fleeting fashions,
deviancy, chaos.
The other was about
classical art,
with its reassuring,
beautiful, immortal works,
like the paintings
of Adolf ziegler,
delegated by Hitler
to curate the exhibition.
In no other city were these two
extremes so dramatically expressed.
Distortion, expressivity,
radical questions, on one hand,
state-endorsed classical
beauty, on the other.
Joseph goebbels also
appointed Adolf Ziegler
to select the works
of the "degenerate" artists,
from Paul Klee to
Oskar Kokoschka,
from Otto Dix to El Lissitzky.
In just over two weeks,
650 paintings and sculptures
were commandeered from
32 German museums.
The exhibition would tour
to another 12 cities
in Germany and Austria.
It would be seen by an audience
of over two million people.
A remarkable success.
Many of the works were
hung haphazardly, askew,
some without frames, to make
it all look especially ugly and chaotic.
Freedom of expression and the
extreme languages of modern art
were presented to the public as a
threat to the aesthetic of the reich
and to Hitler's ideology.
That exhibition marked
a point of no return.
Some artists were Jewish,
but so, moreover,
were many collectors of the avant-garde.
And anti-semitism was
at the root of Nazi doctrine.
Teacher and architect
Paul Schultze-Naumburg
published a book,
"Art and Race",
which depicted human clinical
cases alongside modern artworks.
He was trying to create
a visual link between
artworks and disease, enfeeblement
and racial inferiority.
This text,
first published in 1928,
served as a reference for the
exhibition on degenerate art.
But the origin of this term
is quite ironic.
It was coined in 1892
by a Jewish doctor, Max Nordau.
He had studied modern social phenomena
and the decadence of the ruling classes.
He admired lombroso and his
theories of physiognomy.
He believed that the
artists of his era
had been seduced by the neuroses
and madness of the times,
and that their works were the
expression of a terrible epidemic
that had led to a
degenerate art.
So, the Nazis made
the most of this.
And since the new artistic
trends were supported,
above all, by the
Jewish dealers...
The connection became
tragically clear.
The Nazis' love for art
entered the realms of the absurd
with the sculptor Rudolf Belling.
His works actually appeared
in both the 1937 exhibitions.
His expressionist sculptures
the triad and head in brass,
featured in the degenerate
exhibition,
the boxeur, a portrait of boxer
Max Schmeling, in the German one.
- Max Schmeling.
In may 1936 in New York,
the German boxer Max Schmeling
knocked out the American Joe Louis,
nicknamed the "brown bomber."
For the regime, Schmeling became
the Aryan symbol to show the world,
in the year when Germany
hosted the Olympics in Berlin.
Two years later, when Schmeling
returned to America for the rematch,
he was the fighter
with the swastika.
Louis knocked him out.
Schmeling was no longer
of use to Hitler.
But in 1937, the year of the
two exhibitions in Munich,
he was still the
lord of the ring.
This is surely also why
the Rudolf Belling bust
was allowed to remain
in the exhibition.
Indeed, this provides
an interesting end to the whole story.
"The Triad" and "Head in Brass" were
removed from the degenerate-art exhibition
so that Max Schmeling could
stay in the other one.
Schmeling found himself amid
the swastikas,
lauded as an Aryan man
and portrayed like a Greek god.
This and the next seven editions
of the great German art exhibition
were a paean to rustic life,
to the old crafts and trades,
to bucolic landscapes,
to the family and motherhood.
It was simple rustic painting;
naturally, the mother and child
now became a strong theme,
and nudes were painted, incredibly,
that verged on the obscene.
This was clearly supposed to encourage
mothers to "give"the Fuhrer,
as they put it, many children.
Healthy, handsome, blond children.
Genes to improve the race,
in life and in the museums.
Those who failed to meet those
standards were to be eliminated
from art and from the world.
But even the most rigid ideology
can be prey to contradictions.
Emil nolde, a Nazi party member
and diehard anti-semite,
found his expressionist works
among the degenerate artists.
Yet Goering would keep
collecting his paintings.
The same applied
to Max Beckmann.
His art was suppressed,
yet it still hung in the
parlors of Berlin's elite,
frequented by the party's
leading lights.
In those tumultuous days,
many important German Jews
deplored the Nazi party's
ingrained anti-semitism...
While valuing the idea
of a strong, stable Germany.
They all felt German.
Soon, they would
become just Jews.
This is what happened to
Fritz and Louise Gutmann,
Simon's grandparents,
and his father, Bernard.
The affair would rear its head
many years later,
as a huge delivery of boxes
came from Germany
to invade his life in the usa.
The boxes arrived at my
brother's house in the valley.
And he called me over,
said, "you have to come.
All these things have just arrived.
What are we going to do with them?"
Simon knew that there was
something unspoken in his family.
His father had always
been sad and pained.
Now he was dead,
and here in front of him,
a mountain of old papers,
letters and exhibition catalogues
that had arrived in Los Angeles.
It all revolved around Fritz and
Louise Gutmann, his grandparents,
and those all-too-brief years
between the wars.
They lived here in the Bosbeek
estate, near the hague.
In that endless garden
full of centuries-old trees,
Simon's dad and his
sister, Lili,
played with a mini
Bugatti pedal car
surrounded by
all their white terrier dogs.
The Gutmanns were German,
they belonged to a
dynasty of bankers.
They had established
the Dresdner bank.
The founding father, Eugen,
a convert from judaism to catholicism,
had assembled the world's
most extraordinary collection
of renaissance gold
and silver objects.
Eventually I discovered
even the kaiser was jealous
of our renaissance gold
and silver collection
he muttered to Bismarck,
"this is fit for a prince."
The most priceless items
included three bracket clocks
with remarkable,
perfectly preserved mechanisms,
now kept in the landesmuseum
Wurttemberg, Stuttgart.
They measure the time
and the movements of the stars.
They are extraordinary objects,
like this piece
where monkeys, stags, lions,
elephants and unicorns listen,
spellbound, to the music of orpheus.
The ostrich flaps its
wings on the hour,
and the little bear beats the
drum, you know like a clock.
After the great war,
Fritz Gutmann left Germany
and settled in the Netherlands.
He was entranced by Guardi
and Cranach the elder,
Memling and Bosch.
But he also loved modern art.
In Paris, he bought
Le Poirier by Renoir in 1928,
Femme se Chauffant
by Degas in 1929,
and an another Degas,
Paysage, in 1931.
Meanwhile, the family decided
that he would become the trustee
of the renaissance collection.
But peace would quickly end.
And, as we have seen
with the Goudstikkers,
the Netherlands would fall
very soon to the German army.
Fritz and Louise still believed
that the rules of the civilized
world applied to the Nazis, too.
They stayed put in Bosbeek.
Then, the visits from
Goering's intermediaries began.
There was Walter Hofer again,
with Alois Miedl and
Julius Buhler, Jr.
The three of them came
to part the Gutmanns
from their gold and silver
at knock-down prices.
Fritz agreed to sell some of it in
return for a visa to leave the country.
When he went to the bank to deposit
the money from the forced sale,
he found his account frozen
and no visa in sight.
In march 1941, a new dealer
knocked at his door.
Karl Haberstock.
He left with the Memling,
Van Goyen,
all sorts of wonderful pieces.
Somebody like Karl Haberstock when
was arrested after the war, you know,
quite plainly declared
to the American soldiers,
"I didn't do anything wrong.
It was just normal business.
I had commissions,
I had to find out for my clients."
His clients were the biggest
mass murderers in history, but...
Gutmann had seen
what was coming
and transferred the administration of
the collection to his brother-in-law,
the Italian fascist
senator Luca Orsini,
whom his sister had married
and moved to Florence with.
He was the official owner,
and the Germans didn't dare touch him.
Their retaliation was to declare
gold and silver to be state assets,
to be locked in a depository in Munich.
Gutmann tried to hold firm.
There were several occasions,
where they tried to make him...
Because if he revoked that transfer,
the shares would come back to him.
And then it would be
a Jewish company again.
And then they could just
legally, under Nazi law,
confiscate everything
as "abandoned Jewish property."
On the 26th of May 1943,
a black Mercedes with two ss men
picked up the Gutmanns from their home.
They promised to take them
to Berlin and on to Italy,
where the brother-in-law
had negotiated safe passage.
But in the German capital,
they were greeted by Goering's henchmen.
Fritz rejected their
offers once again.
And that was it.
They were put on a train, bound for
the theresienstadt concentration camp.
After another ten months,
and refusing yet again to
sign away all their property,
on the 13th of April 1944,
the Gutmanns were told
that they would be freed.
It was the final insult.
Fritz ended up at the "small
fortress," run directly by the gestapo.
And I found the cell
that Fritz was locked up in,
for the last three
or four weeks of his life...
And it had no window.
It just had a little hole
at the bottom of the door,
where they could slide
some stale bread and things.
There was no light.
And from what I can deduce...
The last day of April 1944,
the guards drag him out...
And they were quite sadistic.
They drag him through
this awful dank corridor,
that follows inside the
old castle walls,
which housed all these
prison cells.
And he was taken out by this...
They call it the
"killing fields,"
and he was strangled.
By one report,
he was garroted with a wire,
by the captors, the guards.
And his body was thrown away.
So he doesn't have a proper
burial, a grave site.
His wife, my grandmother...
Was also in a cell,
but she wasn't in solitary confinement.
I don't know which is worse.
She was crammed into the women's
cell in the next section,
where about 40 women were
locked in a room half this size.
And they were there
for about a month...
Until they were put on a train
to Auschwitz,
where she was killed
the day she arrived.
They always say
that the Nazi past is history,
that we must let it lie.
But once again,
the Gurlitt case shows otherwise,
that our present and our future is
conditioned by the Nazi past every time.
In 2012,
fifteen hundred works that
had vanished without a trace,
reappeared in the Munich apartment
of an elderly gentleman...
Cornelius Gurlitt.
He was the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt,
faithful art dealer to the Fuhrer.
Masterpieces by Rodin,
Matisse, Monet, Renoir,
Kandinsky, Klee and Dix
came back to life.
It is the greatest rediscovery
of recent years.
Now, for the first time,
two exhibitions
have put some of the works,
now restored, on display.
It is often hard to establish
how and when these paintings,
drawings and sculptures
became part of the collection.
It's about the provenance of the works
the history, the biography of an artwork.
Gaps are a risk, of course,
especially between 1933 and 1945,
for then you wonder
how the work changed hands.
On show at the Bundeskunsthalle
in Bonn
are old-master prints,
seascapes and portraits
all genres that are easy
to appreciate and to sell.
Here in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn,
we focus on works that could
have been stolen. There are suspect cases.
In Bern, the city of bears,
the Kunstmuseum
mainly exhibits works on paper.
The works we see here in Bern
were all legally owned
by Cornelius Gurlitt.
The German state - the Nazis -
had confiscated them
from their own museums.
We are showing them in the context
of the Degenerate Art campaign.
The Gurlitt affair has been
shrouded in mystery from the outset.
We didn't know his name,
we didn't know exactly what he was called,
and we didn't know where he lived,
as he wasn't registered anywhere,
in any office, or in any document.
Gurlitt was a person
who did not exist in Germany.
He simply wasn't there.
Cornelius Gurlitt ceased to be
a ghost
one day in September 2010,
on the Zurich-Munich train.
In a random check,
customs inspectors found 9,000 Euros
in 500-euro notes in his pocket.
Suspicions were raised,
and his Munich home was searched.
It was dirty and untidy.
Gurlitt had lived
alone for years,
kept company
by a huge wealth of paintings,
officially lost in the bombing
of Dresden in February 1945.
The bavarian authorities
decided not to reveal the find.
But focus, a German
weekly, found out.
After a year and a half
of checks and research,
the paper was ready to break
the conspiracy of silence
in November 2013.
They published.
The scoop caused a scandal.
The state was forced
to confirm it was true.
The works belonged to him,
and the suspected
tax offences could be forgiven.
The state knew it had found
a real treasure trove
but couldn't really lay hands on it.
It hoped to reach
some kind of deal with Gurlitt.
Gurlitt was to agree to bequeath
the paintings to Bavaria after his death.
Various ideas of restitution
had been to restitute the Nazis.
But not their victims.
You know the Germans have done so much
to address the wrongs of the past.
But the art is a field
that they've really...
It's their achilles heel.
You know they have
never quite dealt with it.
The art hoard kept by Cornelius was
inherited from his father, Hildebrand,
who, before becoming
one of Hitler's dealers,
was an art historian and
supporter of the modern painters,
especially the expressionists
and the "die bruecke group."
That was enough to lose him
his job as a museum director
not once but twice.
A quarter Jewish, he became an
accredited mediator with the Nazis
when the racial laws
were issued,
thus keeping himself and his
family clear of any persecution.
Hildebrand Gurlitt
acquired works mainly in France,
and in 1942 he became
director of the museum in Linz.
He was stopped and questioned by
American soldiers in June 1945.
He said.
"I have never told anyone,
in Paris, about what I bought,
because the art business
is generally very secretive."
Gurlitt always used a broker
in all of his dealings,
to avoid any direct
responsibility.
He said.
"In all, I have bought
about 200 paintings in France.
My earnings have grown steadily,
with the acquisitions in France,
my income for 1943 reached
200,000 marks."
That is the equivalent
of 720,000 Euros today.
But what was interesting was,
that when the Gurlitt collection
was found by the allies
after the end of the war,
and they interrogated Hildebrand Gurlitt,
and they said to him,
"we've got a 148 paintings
we found of yours.
Do you have any others?"
And he said, "No, I had others,
but they were bombed and destroyed."
But actually he had another
1,100 up the road,
in the castle belonging to
friends of his in Bavaria,
Hildebrand Gurlitt
can't have been the only one,
who had 1,100 paintings
hidden somewhere else,
and so they didn't exist.
So the size of those collections have
not yet been properly established.
Hildebrand continued
to work serenely as a dealer
until his death
in a road accident in 1956.
The paintings that he hid,
and that would be found at the
home of his son, Cornelius,
included femme assise,
a masterpiece by Matisse
seized from parisian gallery
owner Paul Rosenberg.
In fact femme assise did not
even have a stretcher on it.
It was laid flat in a drawer...
Amongst valuable works
of art in fruit.
Some were kept in suitcases
amidst boxes of rotting food,
in cabinets and cupboards.
It was a horrendous way to live,
and a horrible way to store art.
After the scoop in focus,
Paul Rosenberg's descendants realized
that the family's Matisse was
among the confiscated works.
The legal battle to
reclaim it began.
They appointed an American lawyer
based in venice, Christopher Marinello,
an expert in recovering
stolen artworks.
After protracted negotiations,
he reached an agreement
with Cornelius' lawyer.
During that period,
a horrible thing happened.
Mr. Gurlitt passed away.
And then, it was a
complete disarray.
We discovered of course
that there was a will.
He was angry with the German
authorities for stopping him on a train,
for seizing his assets,
for questioning him,
for disturbing his very
bizarre lifestyle.
So he left everything
to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.
Femme Assise
by Henri Matisse
was one of the ill-starred works
exhibited at 21 Rue la Boetie,
where Paul Rosenberg, a sophisticated
art dealer and Jewish collector,
had opened his gallery in 1910.
His heirs were among the first
to raise the taboo topic of restitution
in the international courts.
Almost 80 years on,
his granddaughter Anne Sinclair
succeeded in paying tribute
to her grandfather
with an exhibition in Paris,
which was named after that street.
There were 70 modern
art masterpieces,
from Picasso and Leger to
Braque, Matisse and Laurencin.
In the early years of
the 20th century,
Rosenberg collected
the most innovative painters.
He was friends with
Braque, Matisse,
and especially Picasso,
whom he called, simply, "pic."
The two were neighbors
in Paris,
they talked of pictures, payments and
commissions from the kitchen window.
Picasso lived at number
23, Rue la Boetie.
From 1932 until the war,
the only agent
to represent him was Rosenberg.
His gallery was furnished
like a lounge.
The avant-garde artists
on the first floor,
the established masters, romantic
painters and impressionists on the second.
Paul loved paintings like people,
he documented their form and
genealogy on dedicated index cards,
he had them photographed
one by one.
And so they appear today,
impressions on old glass plates.
Black and white,
dusty and as fragile as memory.
This is the Rosenberg fund,
donated by his heirs
to the French culture ministry.
When the Germans entered Paris
on the 14th of June 1940,
Paul Rosenberg was fleeing to
Spain with his wife and daughter.
On the 17th, they boarded a Polish ship,
"the batory", which took them to America.
A few days later, Hitler,
accompanied by architect Albert Speer,
and the regime's favorite
sculptor, Arno Breker...
Visited the freshly conquered
capital like luxury tourists.
Paris was deserted.
La Madeleine...
Place de la Concorde...
Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile.
A view of the Eifel tower.
Professor Speer is to
the Fuhrer's left.
France's cultural heritage was
already being monitored from 1937.
Paris, for the Nazis the ultimate
city of culture and good living,
was the key battleground
for art.
The ERR,
the Nazi intelligence organization
that appropriated property
and led the looting of France,
was run by Alfred Rosenberg - no
relation to the parisian gallery owner.
It operated alongside the ss
in all countries
occupied by the German army.
It requisitioned books,
artwork, and political material.
The texts were used by the institute
for study of the Jewish question,
founded by Rosenberg in
Frankfurt in 1940.
The aim was to ideologize
anti-semitism
and to prove the inferiority
of the Jewish race.
There were dozens,
hundreds of art historians,
specialists and antiquarians.
The finest. This is awful.
Those who worked
for the Nazis were the best...
they all worked for the ERR.
up to 2,000 people, in the end.
The paintings now recovered
after being stolen by the ERR
from Paul Rosenberg's collection
also include baigneur
et baigneuses by Picasso
and Profil Bleu Devant la
Cheminee by Matisse.
Everything was seized.
Sometimes, the outcome was oddly ironic.
the Rosenberg gallery, for example,
was requisitioned as the Institute
for Study of the Jewish Questions.
As you can imagine,
it was not an academic
but a racial,
racist undertaking.
At 21 Rue la Boetie,
in place of the Matisses
and Picassos
appeared the poster promoting
the exhibition "Jews and France,"
which opened on the 5th of September
1941 at the Palais Berlitz.
It invited spectators to recognize the
physical traits of the "Jewish enemy,"
described as a vampire
with a long beard,
fleshy lips, and
an aquiline nose,
who was corrupting
the French institutions,
and every field of culture.
Meanwhile, Paul Rosenberg had
opened a new gallery in New York,
and was working with
what would become
the most important contemporary art
museum of the 20th century. Moma.
The fact that so many people had
to flee Germany, France and Europe,
and so many paintings
came to the United States,
definitely influenced
the migration of art,
and the center of the
modern art market,
and the modern art world
from Paris to New York.
In 1942,
Paul Rosenberg had an exhibition
in New York on Vincent van Gogh.
It included the portrait
of Dr Gachet.
The painting had been confiscated
in 1938 at Goering's behest
from the Staedl museum in Frankfurt
and sold to a German banker.
The work was resold and came
to America in the early 1940s.
The story has been pieced
together by Cynthia Saltzman,
a scholar of the Dutch painter.
Many modern-art masterpieces
reached America
through auctions in
Switzerland, as she explains.
On June 1939,
they had the fischer auction...
In Luzern,
that was advertised in art news
in the United States.
And Americans had people bidding
at the auctions.
The art world was
conscious of it,
except for people who I think
just wanted not to know.
In lot 49, for example,
is a self-portrait by Van Gogh.
The Van Gogh self-portrait
that he painted for Gauguin
in October 1888,
it made the highest price there,
175,000 Swiss francs.
The painting is now in Boston,
in the fogg art museum at Harvard.
The Nazi occupation
had often unexpected effects
on Europe's art heritage.
The walls of a house
in the Boston countryside
hang with priceless paintings...
Including a flemish altarpiece...
And 17th-century works
by Sebastiano Ricci,
Alessandro Longhi and
Alessandro Magnasco.
The owners are Tom Selldorff
and his wife.
He is the grandson
of Richard Neumann,
a textile industrialist and
Jewish collector from Vienna.
Tom proudly shows his
pictures of his grandfather,
who fought for the kaiser
in World War I,
and was then betrayed
by his own country.
When the Nazis annexed Austria...
Neumann left many of his paintings
behind and went to Paris.
Then he was able to leave
Austria with 38 paintings.
And so those are the paintings,
which wound up in the louvre,
and others have just disappeared
in the fog of post war.
One reason we were able
to recover them,
was that the custom's declaration
listed all these paintings.
So they were clearly identified
as having belonged to him,
at the time he left
Vienna for Paris.
Many of his paintings
were channeled via the ERR
to the collections of the future
Fuhrer's museum in Linz...
Or to Goering's residence,
Carinhall.
A period photo shows
the deputy leader of the reich
examining two matisses seized
from gallery owner Paul Rosenberg.
Alongside Goering
is dealer Walter Andreas Hofer.
Holding the paintings is Bruno
Lohse, critic and art dealer.
The photo was taken in 1941
at the Jeu de Paume.
The parisian museum was used
to house the sequestered Booty.
Goering often went there
to choose the best pieces.
Another dealer, Gustav Rochlitz,
told under interrogation
how Goering wanted to buy from
him for a staggeringly low price
a portrait by Titian
and a still life by Jan Weenix.
Bruno Lohse, Goering's man,
forced Rochlitz to accept an exchange
with works of degenerate art.
These are his words.
"You must exchange the pictures.
That's what Goering wants,
and when he gives an order,
it must be executed,
or you will pay the price."
The err hierarchy
regularly sent Hitler
leather-bound albums with
photos of the stolen objects...
Many belonging to the French
arm of the rothschild family.
They would be submitted
at the nuremberg trial
as evidence of what
the ERR had done.
These 39 volumes,
which are before me,
contain photographs of works of
art, secured by the "Einsatzstab,"
and are volumes, which were prepared
by members of the Rosenberg Stab.
And I offer them in evidence.
The aisles of the Bergkerk,
the medieval church of Deventer
in Holland,
hosted an exhibition
of 75 paintings,
that had been earmarked
for the Fuhrer's museum
and Goering's collection.
Hitler would receive the
16th- and 17th-century works,
paintings of flemish
families and couples,
still lives with animals,
books and fruit,
bucolic scenes and
Dutch landscapes.
The Reichsmarschall would get
the hunting scenes and nudes,
the venuses, the three graces.
Art historian Eva Kleeman
and her husband Daaf Ledeboer
curated the exhibition after extensive
study of the Dutch art archives.
They realized that while
part of the paintings
had been returned
to their rightful owners,
many others were still
in museums and galleries.
The exhibition also presented
thousands of police reports
compiled straight
after the war,
including the list of items
reported missing by the victims.
Difficult is, when people want
to reclaim their own goods,
they had to provide
ridiculous proofs.
"Can you prove?
Do you have a ticket that you bought it?"
"Do you have a photograph
that you can show it on?"
People coming back
from the camps.
Ridiculous questionings,
but it was done.
The exhibition included Christ
and the adulteress by Vermeer.
Goering had yearned
for one of his works for years.
He bought it for himself in
1942 through his usual dealers,
Alois Miedl and Walter Hofer.
Unfortunately, it was a forgery.
He was very happy to acquire it.
However, it was forged.
It was made by Han Van Meegeren
from the city of deventer,
which is where we are now.
He managed to forge it
by using a particular technique.
He used bakelite.
He mixed pigments with bakelite,
and he baked it off.
And he used an actual
17th century painting,
he stripped the paint off.
There was a lot of craquelure
he got by baking it off.
And then he put ink
in the crackles.
It was exactly the colors
that Vermeer used,
the yellow of Vermeer,
the blue of Vermeer.
And to every art historian in Holland,
it seemed like this was the real Vermeer.
Van Meegeren was one of
the most skillful forgers
of the 20th century.
After the war,
he was accused of
collaborating with the Nazis,
and risked the death penalty.
In his defense, he confessed
to making the forgery.
The court did not believe him
and made him paint a new work,
under close supervision.
Thus he proved that he really
had painted the Vermeer
that had fooled Goering.
He got away with a
minor conviction,
and for duping the Nazis,
he even became a national hero.
Goering sold many of his works
to amass more than 1.5 million
guilders of that period,
and to buy this forgery.
And before he died,
he was told that it was a forgery.
So he was quite unhappy,
of course, at that point.
Many of the paintings in
the exhibitions in Paris,
Bern, Bonn and deventer...
Have an often difficult and
painful restitution story to tell.
Tracing an artwork entails
identifying it,
discovering whose hands
it has passed through,
whether the title or artist's name
has been changed to cover its tracks,
and whether it is in a museum
or about to be auctioned off.
With museums,
there is a balance to be struck
between public interest
and personal claims.
As Anne Webber well knows,
she and her staff in London
have been on the trail of missing
artwork since the early 1990s.
Often they say that these works
of art
are better in public collections
than in private collection,
I think obviously there's a point
that museums are there to keep,
to look after the art,
not to give it away, but,
museums are also repositories
of our values,
of our values of societies.
And our societies don't
believe in theft,
and theft when it is associated
with murder as this was.
In Paris, Elizabeth royer,
an art expert and gallery owner,
began investigating the provenance of
the missing works in the mid 1990s.
Some say it's only about money. It's not.
Some heirs do it for the money,
but most don't.
A young woman came to see me.
She told me her family
had been robbed
with the Mobel Aktion
(the Furniture campaign),
there were very few artworks.
three paintings and a drawing,
nothing very important.
But her father had spent his whole life
and everything he had
in the hope of seeing
one of them again.
Many stories
have not been heard.
Many people have preferred
to forget
to resume their lives,
almost to blank out the horrors
and wrongs of the past.
For over 80 years,
Edgar Feuchtwanger,
whom we met at the start
of this story,
never spoke of the man who lived
in the block opposite in Munich.
When Hitler became leader
of the third reich in 1933,
Edgar's desk mate at school stopped
speaking to him, because he was a Jew.
In the evening,
his mother signed his homework
in his exercise books, red-eyed.
I was told,
"Do what the teacher tells you."
And she straight away put out
all this Nazi stuff.
This is the most
striking picture.
Normally, on labor day.
This was labor day, 1933.
One would have hammer
and sickle...
And here we have hammer
and swastika.
And I used to draw it
with my own hand.
I was told to do what my
teacher told me, so I did.
In November 1938, the gestapo
knocked on the Feuchtwangers' door.
Furniture and books were seized.
His father was taken to Dachau.
Edgar played the piano with the soft
pedal every afternoon after school,
until his father
returned home a month later,
in a sorry state, but alive.
The Feuchtwangers soon sent Edgar
away, before joining him in England.
Rarely in the history of our people
has there been a time of peace
so fervent as these 5 and a half years,
which from that memorable day
of 30 January 1933
have inaugurated the era
of National Socialist
government for our people.
Hitler,
Edgar's neighbor...
Opened the first three
great German art exhibitions,
held every year from 1937
to 1944, with a speech.
He waxed lyrical about the Aryan art
"of the sublime and the beautiful,
a vehicle of the natural
and the healthy."
He declared war on the artists guilty
of the country's cultural disintegration
and railed against cultural
bolshevism and the Jewish dealers.
The cultural programme
of the new Reich
is of a magnificence
without precedent in our history.
Many in the art world
followed him.
Historians, intellectuals and
academics made a pact with the devil
and opted to serve the Nazi regime
and the great looting of Europe.
All the art dealers whom
we have mentioned in this story,
returned after the war to
resume their former profession,
as if nothing had happened.
Timothy Garton Ash
has made an extensive study
of how people act
in a dictatorship.
I did not find a single,
truly evil person.
I found people like you and me,
weak human, all too human.
But I found a big evil.
So it's a way in which
an evil regime
can exploit and manipulate
all our weaknesses,
to build what was essentially
a kind of orwellian regime.
The head of the labor movement
of the Nazis said,
"the only time when someone
is a private individual,
is when they are asleep."
So a Mark of a totalitarian
regime is. Every area of life,
every area of art has to be controlled
because they're all dangerous.
And they are.
Art is often a key...
A trojan horse...
A brush that helps to portray
and to erase dictatorships.
Its power is immense
yet contradictory.
Art can be a means and an end...
It can Redeem and Condemn.
Be a tool of subversion
and a vehicle for consensus,
an expression of freedom
and the face of totalitarianism.
In Nazi-despoiled Europe...
Many Jewish families
saved themselves
by selling their entire collections for
an exit visa that meant staying alive.
Millions of others were exterminated
in the concentration camps.
One day, while all
this was happening,
a gestapo official was visiting
Picasso's studio in Paris.
The painter told the story
on the 24th of march 1945
to journalist Simone tery.
On the table was a postcard
of his painting, Guernica.
The officer asked,
"did you do this, maestro?"
"No," replied Picasso,
"this is your work."
Later in the interview,
he said to tery,
"what do you think an artist is?
An imbecile who has only his
eyes if he's a painter,
or ears if he's a musician,
or if he's a boxer, just his muscles?
An artist is a political being,
alive to the heart-breaking,
passionate or happy
events of the world.
How can one be indifferent
to other people?
Painting is not done
to decorate apartments.
It is an instrument of war
for attack and defense
against the enemy."