Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (10 page)

T
HE
R
APE OF
E
UROPE

AS A YOUNG MAN IN VIENNA before World War I, Hitler had nurtured ambitions to be an artist and an architect, despite the fierce objections of his overbearing father, Alois Schicklgruber. In 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts but failed the entrance examination. Desolated, he applied again the following year but was rejected again, his portfolio winning only a cursory glance. This was a turning point in
Hitler’s life
. Attributing his rejection to the panel of academicians being Jews, he nursed a deep embitterment toward the Jewish race, although, ironically, on the few occasions that Hitler ever sold any of his paintings, it was through the Jewish Hungarian art dealer Josef Neumann.

For the next few years Hitler lived a vagrant’s life “of hardship and misery,” as he later recalled in
Mein Kampf.
His only solace was found in Vienna’s many art museums and the city’s deep tradition of classical music. His musical tastes were catholic—Beethoven, Bruckner, Chopin, Grieg, Schubert, Schumann, and even Mahler and Mendelssohn—but his abiding favorite was Richard Wagner and he knew the opera
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
by heart. Hitler gave up painting after World War 1 as his political career progressed, but he retained an illusion of himself as a great artist throughout his life and his interest in architecture never diminished.

Once in office as chancellor, Hitler pursued his obsession of “
racial purity
” with ruthless zeal, in parallel with a breakneck program of centralizing all power in the party’s hands. The Nazis’ election in 1933 was followed almost immediately by their virtual destruction of the German constitution in response to the Reichstag fire and, on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, by Hitler’s assumption of the dual leadership of the Nazi Party and the state as Führer (leader)—a coup d’état endorsed in a plebiscite by 38 million German citizens. Once parliament and the courts were castrated, the regime enjoyed unfettered power and was free to institute a policy of
Gleichschaltung
(enforced conformity), consolidating its hold over the nation by the elimination or neutering of any organized bodies that were outside the complete control of the Nazi Party. A spate of decrees revoked individual liberties and rights of association, silenced the media, banned rival political parties and free labor unions, and destroyed the independence of regional governments and the judiciary. The death penalty was introduced for a wide range of politically defined “crimes,” and there were mass arrests not only of communist, social democratic, and Jewish activists but also of freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals, and any others deemed deviant in the eyes of Nazi orthodoxy. Most of these “pariahs” were incarcerated in the fifty concentration camps that were opened during the Nazis’ first year in power.

In April 1933, Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter and editor of the Nazi weekly newspaper
Der Stürmer
(
The Attacker
), orchestrated an economic boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of the newly founded Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, called for the “cleansing by fire” of “un-German” books, particularly those by authors of Jewish background such as Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Marx—and even the works of the revered German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, whose tragedy
Almansor
contains the warning “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” On May 10, a crowd of 40,000 watched the burning of 25,000 books in Berlin’s Opernplatz. In November 1933 a national referendum showed that 95 percent of the population approved of Nazi policies, even as their rights and freedoms were being systematically destroyed.

IN THE HEADY DAYS
following their electoral victory, the Nazis concentrated on
eliminating political opponents
of the center and left. Now they had the opportunity to turn on the Jews. By 1934, all Jewish shops were prominently daubed with the word “
Juden
” or the Star of David, and storm troopers of the SA frequently hung around outside them to discourage customers from entering. Increasingly, Jewish business people were forced to close down as they lost their livelihood. Soon, German Jews were being forced out of the professions and government employment as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and civil servants. Shops and restaurants refused to serve Jews and they were banned from public parks, swimming pools, and even public transport. German children were imbued with anti-Semitism during school lessons and even during playtime—the object of a popular children’s board game was to render particular areas of Germany
Juden Frei
or “Jew-free.”

A major step in the process of
“Aryanization” of all aspects of German society
was taken on September 15, 1935, with the enactment of the so-called Nuremberg Laws. Henceforth, marriage or sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans was expressly forbidden, and Jews were deprived of their political rights as citizens. Increasingly, Jews attempted to emigrate to France, Switzerland, and further afield, but they were rarely made welcome and many were refused entry. Out of a total Jewish population of some 525,000, about 170,000 had already left Germany before October 5, 1938, when a decree invalidated their passports. The Swiss insisted that German Jews who needed traveling documents for emigration purposes be reissued passports with a large “J” for ready identification and rejection at the border. Many Jews could not afford the ever-increasing cost of emigration. Those who could were not permitted to take any capital with them, and few had any money left after being forced to sell their homes and businesses at greatly discounted prices to pay the
Reichsfluchtsteuer
(“escape tax”). Dealers in art and antiquities were specifically targeted, and this enforced liquidation of about 80 percent of such businesses in Germany caused a glut on the market and a sharp slump in prices.

On November 9, 1938, racial violence—sparked by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish Pole whose family had been deported from Germany—reached new heights. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria and the Sudetenland were attacked and burned in the orgy of destruction known as
Kristallnacht
—“Crystal Night” or the Night of Broken Glass—from the amount of broken glass it left carpeting the streets. At least ninety-one Jews lost their lives; another 30,000 were arrested and largely consigned to concentration camps. The survivors were actually forced to pay the material price of this pogrom. Replacing all the broken windows would cost some 25 million reichsmarks, and since almost all plate glass was imported from Belgium this had to be paid in scarce foreign currency. By now, the avaricious Hermann Göring was in charge of the “Program to Eliminate Jews from German Economic Life” and he decreed that all Jews remaining in Germany were to provide the Reich exchequer with “atonement payments,” totaling 1 billion reichsmarks, to cover the costs of repairing the damage. In addition, any insurance payments made to German Jews were confiscated by the state.

KRISTALLNACHT WAS THE CLEAREST WARNING YET
to German Jewry of their perilous situation, and, between then and the outbreak of war in September 1939, approximately 100,000 Jews somehow found ways to leave the Reich. Another Nazi legislative novelty was about to suggest that any who were unable or unwilling to do so might find themselves at the mercy of a state prepared to commit mass murder.

Among the plague of new legislation enacted in 1933 was a law for the compulsory sterilization of people suffering “congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, and severe alcoholism.” Germans were not alone in their enthusiasm for the pseudoscience of eugenics, which in the 1920s–30s was widely espoused across Europe and America in the interests of “racial hygiene.” One of its advocates was John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil of New Jersey. It was his Rockefeller Foundation that provided much of the funding for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Germany’s most prestigious medical school, to carry out studies on “anthropology, eugenics, and human heredity” under the direction of a Swiss psychiatrist and fervent Nazi, Ernst Rüdin. A mass program of sterilization of both the mentally ill and social misfits, as determined by 220 district “hereditary health courts,” was instituted. Among the several hundred thousand victims were such undesirables as convicts, prostitutes, and even children as young as ten from orphanages.

By inexorable Nazi logic, the next step was euthanasia or “mercy killing.” This program began in 1938 under the auspices of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. At first the victims were limited to mentally and physically handicapped children who were killed by lethal injection. But the program was soon extended to handicapped adults and to anyone judged an incorrigible social deviant. When lethal injection proved time-consuming and less than efficient, a
bureaucracy of murder
was established; this was designated the T4 program after the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The program was codified in law by decree of the Führer in October 1939. At every mental institution false bathhouses were built, where the victims were killed at first by carbon monoxide and later by poison gas.

SOON AFTER KRISTALLNACHT
, Göring devised yet more devious schemes from which to profit by forcing German Jews to leave the country. By a decree dated January 1, 1939, all their property and possessions were essentially confiscated by the state. Public Acquisition Offices were set up for “the
safekeeping of works of art
belonging to Jews,” and a subsequent decree demanded the surrender of “any objects in their ownership made of gold, platinum, or silver, as well as precious stones and pearls.” This expropriation of Jewish property was the first foreshadowing of the Nazis’ future plundering of Europe. After Göring had made his choice of artworks and trinkets, the proceeds from the loot went directly to the coffers of the AH Fund or the Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund. With such resources at his disposal, Hitler was able to indulge his passion for paintings.

The Führer’s personal taste was bourgeois in the extreme. He loathed all nonrepresentational art and his eye for quality was completely inconsistent. In 1934 he purchased a portrait of his great hero Frederick the Great of Prussia by the Swiss painter Anton Graff (1736–1813) for the then-considerable sum of 34,000 reichsmarks. It was Hitler’s favorite painting and it traveled with him everywhere. As an example of his more prosaic taste, Hitler paid 120,000 reichsmarks to Hermann Gradl, a
painter of idyllic landscapes
, to make six large oils for the dining hall of the New Reich Chancellery between 1939 and 1941. Their conventional character may be guessed from Hitler’s instructions that this commission was to illustrate “the typical appearance of the German Land, in its intertwining of Nature and Culture and its many different guises as Motherland of the German Nation.” To adorn the New Chancellery the Führer spent nearly 400,000 reichsmarks on other contemporary artworks of very mixed quality. Although he bought for his own collection paintings by Rubens, Canaletto, van Dyck, and Watteau at the behest of his art adviser, Dr. Hans Posse, his favorite painters were actually somewhat obscure German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists such as Franz Stuck and Carl Spitzweg, neither of whom has stood the test of time. One of his all-time favorites was Eduard von Grützner, whose particular specialty was portraits of drunken monks. In a conversation with Albert Speer, Hitler declaimed, “
Look at those details
—Grützner is greatly underrated. It’s simply that he hasn’t been discovered yet. Some day he’ll be worth as much as a Rembrandt.” This has not proved to be the case.

In one of his first acts as chancellor, Hitler ordered the construction of the House of German Art in Munich to display the finest examples of Germanic painting and sculpture. The task was entrusted to Alfred
Rosenberg
, the Nazi Party ideologue and chief racial theorist, who was given the grandiose title of “Führer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction of the National Socialist Party.” The fundamental contradiction was, of course, that the Nazi Party was profoundly anti-intellectual and as totally opposed to freedom in the arts as it was to any other sort of independent thinking. Nevertheless, the leadership devoted an inordinate amount of time to cultural matters—as
the character Wilhelm Furtwängler
says in Ronald Harwood’s modern play
Taking Sides
, “Only tyrannies understand the power of art.” But Rosenberg’s role was twofold; besides finding and glorifying politically acceptable German art, he was to root out all art that did not conform to Nazi ideology or Hitler’s personal taste. For fear of losing their jobs, museum directors and curators across Germany were obliged to surrender to the state “purging” committees all works by artists suspected of “degeneracy”—Cubists, Impressionists, Futurists, German Expressionists, Dadaists—and other “un-German” art.

In all, some 16,000 works of art were confiscated from museums across the country. As the new arbiter of artistic merit, Hitler dismissed the works of masters such as Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso as “twaddle,” and a new office was set up to implement his demands in the “unrelenting war of purification.” All active artists had to submit their work to this Committee for the Assessment of Inferior Works of Art; any works deemed substandard were confiscated without compensation, and artists who ran afoul of the committee were forbidden to purchase painting materials on pain of imprisonment, thus ending their careers. Many artworks were destroyed; for example, on March 20, 1939, 1,004 paintings and sculptures as well as 3,825 drawings, watercolors, and other items were burned during a practice exercise for the Berlin Fire Department.