The international market had already been well primed for these sales, as such farsighted museum directors as Count Baudissin had begun deaccessioning “unacceptable” works soon after Hitler’s advent to power.46 The dealers were instructed to sell for foreign currency without “arousing positive evaluations” at home. Fortunately, the operation was managed by an enlightened lawyer and amateur art historian, Rolf Hetsch, who knew the true value of the contents of the warehouse. He set up a salesroom in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin. The four dealers could buy things for very little as long as they paid in foreign currency. Even Germans could buy if they had dollars, sterling, Swiss francs, or objects of interest to the Führer.47 A painter of modest means, Emanuel Fohn, who lived in Rome, heard of the sales in late 1938. Remembering Ziegler from student days at the Munich Academy, he rushed to consult him and was given Hetsch’s name. Hetsch agreed to accept works from Fohn’s collection of nineteenth-century German paintings in exchange for “degenerate” ones. Fohn took them back to Italy and promised to return these paintings someday to Germany. At his death the collection was indeed left to the Städtische Museum in Munich, the birthplace of his wife, Sofie.48
Word of the trade soon went much farther afield. The director of the Basel Kunstmuseum, Georg Schmidt, persuaded his city fathers to give him SFr 50,000 to invest, declaring that it was their duty to save good art. He spent it well both at the Schloss and at the Lucerne auction. Curt Valentin, still a German citizen, was able to obtain from this source much of the inventory which established him as a major New York dealer, and continued to make frequent and risky trips to Berlin. Hetsch sold works for practically nothing, simply to get them out of the country. A postwar study lists more than twenty pages of objects distributed from the Nation-algalerie’s collections alone. Even a little sample of the prices paid makes unbelievable reading:
M. Beckmann Southern Coast $20 to Buchholz
M. Beckmann Portrait SFr 1 to Gurlitt
W. Gilles 5 Watercolors $.20 each to Boehmer
W. Kandinsky Ruhe $100 to Möller [now Guggenheim Museum, New York]
E. Kirchner Strassenzene $160 to Buchholz [now MoMA, New York]
P. Klee Das Vokaltuch der
Sängerin Rosa Silber $300 to Buchholz
Lehmbruck Kneeling Woman $10 to Buchholz49
Needless to say, the anointed dealers often did rather better on the resales, which they did not always report to the Commission.
In the fall of 1938 Exploitation Commission member and dealer Karl Haberstock suggested to Hitler and Goebbels that a public auction would increase these minimal revenues. He brought a Swiss crony and fellow Cassirer alumnus, Theodore Fischer, to look over the depositories. Together they chose the 126 works which would be sold in Lucerne on that sunny day the following June. It was none too soon. Despite all the trading activity, the Copernicusstrasse warehouse remained distressingly full. Franz Hofmann, fanatically desirous of carrying out Hitler’s purification policies to the letter, pushed to get rid of the remaining works, which he declared “unexploitable.” He suggested that they be “burned in a bonfire as a symbolic propaganda action” and offered to “deliver a suitably caustic funeral oration.”50 Shocked at the idea of such destruction, Hetsch and the dealers took away as much as they could. But Goebbels agreed to Hofmann’s plan, and on March 20, 1939, 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 drawings, watercolors, and graphics were burned as a practice exercise in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department’s headquarters just down the street. The works in Schloss Niederschonhausen were reprieved and gradually sold or traded away. The whole process of “purifying” the German art world, and its “final solution” in flames, eerily foreshadows the terrible events to come in the next six years.
The German pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, 1937 (Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann)
II
PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT
The Nazi Collectors Organize;
Austria Provides, Europe Hides
To art professionals outside Germany the advent of Nazism and the bizarre goings-on of its art establishment were regarded at first as a passing phenomenon which would require some minor adjustments in international dealings. Even Alfred Barr, so upset by National Socialist ideas, planned to publish his exposés anonymously lest he alienate German museum officials who might later deny important loans to the Museum of Modern Art.
In the great museums of Europe the schedule of exhibitions and exchanges seemingly went on as it always had. Despite German militarization of the Rhineland and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, planning for the 1937 World Exposition in Paris was not interrupted. The German pavilion, designed by Albert Speer, was given one of the most prominent sites by the French, who had naughtily placed it directly opposite the Soviet pavilion, which was surmounted by two huge figures with hammer and sickle who appeared to be attacking the German building.