Haberstock had been a little premature, but the purges of 1937 would be just what he needed. During that operation he did manage to obtain Gauguin’s beautiful Riders to the Sea, newly removed from the walls of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Casting aside his anti-Semitism, he sold an interest in the picture to Georges Wildenstein in Paris, who, after some months, resold it through his New York branch to the actor Edward G. Robinson. Haberstock was upset and suspicious at the delay and Wildenstein was forced to write several times to explain that patience was necessary if the picture was to be sold “dans de bonnes conditions.”15
Over and over again he tried to con the German museums. The director of Leipzig was offered a ludicrous price for a Hans von Marées on the grounds that Marées’s mother had been Jewish. Later Haberstock tried to trade a Spitzweg, which the mayor of Nuremberg wanted to give Hitler for his birthday, for a top Pieter de Hooch in the Germanisches Museum. When the director, Dr. Zimmermann, objected, Haberstock tried to use his influence to have him fired. Despite this, Zimmermann was later named director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Nothing daunted, Haberstock sent him a congratulatory cake. Zimmermann sent it back. In the meantime, the Spitzweg had proved to be a fake.
After the director of Hamburg was fired for having invested in modern works, Haberstock tried to talk his way into the museum storerooms, to see what might be available. A city official who threw him out was reprimanded. Meanwhile, Haberstock had had the audacity to call the Jewish dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt, who had long since fled to Amsterdam, to ask him which picture he should take from Hamburg, the “little Degas of Mlle. Daubigny” or a Renoir.16 He got the Degas, and later sold it abroad.
Haberstock did help those who might be useful to him. Once he had become established as one of the Führer’s favorite dealers he persuaded Hitler to reinstate Dr. Hans Posse, who had been fired from his post as director of the Gemäldegalerie at Dresden for his refusal to join the Party and his purchases of unsuitable art. Posse, who had held the directorship at Dresden for some twenty years, wrote a thank-you letter to Hitler at his lodgings in Haus Wahnfried at the Bayreuth Festival, telling the Führer that he was “infinitely grateful” to have his “mission in life,” his work in one of the most beautiful museums in Europe, and one of the “most important monuments of the German Cultural Will,” restored to him.17 Posse was never allowed to forget this favor, which would soon bring him powers beyond his wildest dreams.
Hitler seemed to be unaware of all these nefarious goings-on, and began his collection of Old Master paintings through Haberstock. His first acquisition was a Paris Bordone Venus and Amor, which hung in the salon at the Berghof, his mountain retreat, all through the war. Speer described it as “a lady with exposed bosom.”18 The Führer’s early buying was all very low key. Dealers would show their wares at little shows arranged at the Führerbau in Munich. Hitler would view the works and choose those he liked. Experts such as museum directors Büchner and Posse would sometimes be asked for their opinions. By 1938 Hitler had gathered a modest collection paid for from the royalties on Mein Kampf and by a surtax on the postage stamps bearing his likeness.
In the four years it had taken to make quite clear what Hitler liked, Hermann Goering had not failed to indulge his own collecting fancies. With vast amounts of government funds now at his disposal, he soon was operating on a large scale. Goering was virtually the only member of Hitler’s inner circle who had an upper-class background and who had moved in sophisticated international society. His adored first wife, Carin, was from an aristocratic Swedish family, and at Schloss Veldenstein, near Nuremberg, which belonged to his Jewish godfather, Baron Epenstein, he had become accustomed to considerable creature comforts. Immediately upon Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, amazing quantities of presents began to be showered upon the sociable Goering as industrialists and office seekers scrambled to establish themselves with the new rulers. No one was quite sure, at first, how to approach the austere Hitler, but it was abundantly clear that the way to Goering’s heart was through his collections.
Released from years of living hand-to-mouth in exile, Goering wanted it all, and fast. He denied himself nothing. By 1936 he was Prime Minister of Prussia, head of the Luftwaffe, director of the Four-Year Plan, and official successor to Hitler. The salaries of all these posts flowed into his accounts. In 1934 he had obtained government funds to start the construction and furnishing of a country house fifty miles from Berlin. This was in addition to the refurbishment of the in-town villa which served as his official residence as Prime Minister of Prussia. The latter house, safely sheltered behind government buildings in the Leipzigerstrasse, was described by Speer as “a romantically tangled warren of small rooms, gloomy with stained glass windows and heavy velvet hangings, cluttered with massive Renaissance furniture. There was a kind of chapel presided over by the swastika, and the new symbol had also been reiterated on ceilings, walls and floors throughout the house.”19 The palatial effect was completed by two Palma Vecchios, a Jan Breughel St. Hubert, and five other very nice pictures “lent” by Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. Speer felt that this decor “rather fit Goering’s disposition,” but when Hitler criticized it as “too dark,” Goering immediately ordered Speer to do the whole thing over in the light and bare style favored by the Führer, complete with enormous study and oversize furniture designed to intimidate the visitor. Still, the baroque in Goering’s character could not be entirely denied, and he kept a few objects about, such as a huge Rubens Diana at the Stag Hunt, also borrowed from the museum, which he used to cover up his movie screen.20