The Rape of Europa (33 page)

Hélas je les ai vus, ces battalions de Boches
Dévaliser la France au profit de leurs poches

and to call upon the “god of mercy” to deliver “unfortunate France from the Teutons.”

No one in the German art world could understand this appointment, which seems to have been the deathbed wish of Hans Posse. Voss’s first interview was with Goebbels, who offered him the directorship of Dresden, next to the Kaiser Friedrich the greatest plum in Germany. When Voss stated that he was not a Party member, Goebbels reassured him that the only requirement was technical expertise. Voss accepted. A few days later he was taken by train to see Hitler at his Eastern Front headquarters. The Führer received him late in the evening, and talked for an hour “on the importance of such old princely galleries as that in Dresden, and subsequently explained his intentions with regard to the Linz Gallery.” Voss was to concentrate on nineteenth-century German and Old Master paintings from other countries.
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No one mentioned during this session that Kharkov, equal in Hitler’s mind to Stalingrad in importance, had fallen to Soviet troops that day.

Voss’s appointment was formally announced on March 15. One of his
first acts was to cut off further funds to Haberstock, whose voracious greed, Bormann told him, had even irritated Hitler. Voss would now channel his purchase funds, which would surpass those spent by Posse, through his own trusted agents, principal among whom was Hildebrand Gurlitt, who like Voss had been fired as director of his museum (Hamburg) earlier in the Nazi era. This was a blow to Haberstock, who was deeply embroiled in a four-way competition for a French Jewish collection which had so far escaped confiscation in Vichy France—that of Adolphe Schloss.

This collection, consisting of some 330 works by mostly minor Dutch seventeenth-century artists, was especially desirable as a large percentage of the pictures were signed and dated. In 1939, like so many others, the Schloss family had entrusted their collection to a relative, a Dr. Weil, who put it away in a bank vault in the tiny village of La Guenne, near Tulle in the Limousin. Rumors about it continued to surface and in August 1942 Dequoy told Haberstock that he was going to Grenoble to talk to one of the “heirs” about a possible sale. In December of the same year a dealer reported hearing that the family “needed money and might well sell part of their holdings.” Haberstock wrote back to say he would like the whole thing but added that he would only “pay he who actually delivers it.”

The ripples of German desire for such collections had not gone unnoticed by Laval, who was desperately trying to appease the ever-growing Nazi encroachment on Vichy France. He was more than happy to try to exploit the “sale” of the Schloss collection, so deeply coveted by Hitler and Goering. Through the sale of the pictures, worth upwards of FFr 50 million, he might also recoup a small percentage of the crippling occupation payments levied by the Germans. Early in March 1943, therefore, Darquier de Pellepoix set to work to locate, seize, and market the collection.

On April 6 Henry Schloss, son of the collector, and his wife were preparing to go to a funeral. For some time they had lived in a villa high above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, on the Chemin des Moulins, accessible only on foot. They had that day made their way to the bus station in Nice when three men approached them and forced them into a car. The party returned to the villa, where the Schlosses were told that their abduction had been ordered by Laval himself, who wished to know the whereabouts of their collection. The three men were not ordinary policemen, but the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs for Marseilles, a police inspector, and a dealer by the name of Lefranc. The house was searched and Schloss was put in jail. Two days later his brother Lucien was arrested by German policemen who ransacked his rooms and took all his papers.

In Paris, Darquier was already making arrangements to sell the collection. Bruno Lohse was amazed to find the Vichy official present at a meeting in von Behr’s office, along with Lefranc, who had been made
“provisional administrator” of the Schloss collection. The Nazis were told that they could buy paintings from the collection under certain conditions: they must promise not to confiscate it outright once it arrived in Paris, but leave it under French control, and the Louvre must be given first choice before any sales took place. After this brave beginning Darquier was forced to admit that German transport would be needed in order to move the collection to Paris.

Lohse reported all this to Goering, who agreed to the conditions, but said German trucks could technically not be employed. Von Behr remedied this by calling on one of his shady M-Aktion colleagues to provide transport. Meanwhile, Darquier’s informants had done good work, and two days after the meeting Lefranc and Co. appeared at the bank in La Guenne and loaded the cases onto trucks. After the convoy—entirely German—left, the local police prefect, spurred on by angry bank officials, sent an armed French patrol to intercept the collection just south of Limoges. This was reported to Goering, who ordered the collection returned to the French immediately. But the German interest had been revealed, and the confiscation was now widely regarded as a Nazi operation. Back home Utikal wrote to the Reichschancellery denying that the fiasco, which had caused embarrassment at Hitler’s headquarters, had been ordered by the ERR, and protested to Goering.

The collection did not get to Paris until October 1943, this time in French trucks. By then word of the terms of the deal had reached Hitler, who, outraged at the agreement made with the French, preempted any purchases by Goering but allowed the Louvre to make its choice, fuming all the while that he was getting only “leftovers.” Hermann Voss, though he had immediately heard of the confiscation from Lohse at a little dinner chez Frau Dietrich in Munich, left the arrangements entirely to subordinates, a fact considered odd by the ERR crowd. Haberstock, who had pursued the collection for so long, was completely out of the loop. The Louvre sent René Huyghe and Germain Bazin to choose their pictures. The Louvre took forty-nine works, for which they were to pay FFr 18.9 million. Two hundred sixty-two went to Linz for FFr 50 million, and twenty-two were given to “provisional administrator” Lefranc and fed into the Paris market. Needless to say, the Schloss family got nothing. The FFr 50 million went to Darquier’s agency, and Vichy never paid for the pictures “bought” by the Louvre. The part of the collection destined for Linz was photographed, a special catalogue in large type was prepared for Hitler, and the pictures were shipped to Munich in November 1943 to await the Führer’s pleasure, but as far as we know, he never found time to see them.
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The remarkable and competitive persistence of the gatherers continued
to the very end. One of the very last lots secured was that remnant of the Mannheimer collection which had been taken to Vichy France. Mme Mannheimer herself had long since gone on to Argentina. The pictures, which she had left in the care of her lawyer, were very fine, and included Crivelli’s
Mary Magdalene
, once in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, a lovely version of Chardin’s
Soap Bubbles
, and a number of Watteau drawings. All of these had been included in Mühlmann’s original deal in Holland, in which he had agreed to pay the Mannheimer creditors half a million guilders and himself the usual commission when he finally got the pictures, which were destined for Linz. But Mühlmann was not the only one who knew about the Mannheimer works. Karl Haberstock, once again, wanted the deal for himself. Having lost the support of Posse, he was now attempting to work through Fernand Niedermayer, chief of the German Administration for Reich-Seized Property in France, who was persuaded that Haberstock represented Linz. But just to be safe, Niedermayer asked Hermann Voss “to inform me by return mail which paintings are to be requested for the Führermuseum.” The answer was perfectly clear and not good news for Haberstock, who was stiffly informed that Niedermayer “was not in a position to take your purchasing wishes into consideration,” as the whole collection was going to Linz “through State Secretary Mühlmann.”
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By the time all this had transpired, the Allied armies had landed in Normandy and were well on their way to Paris. Nevertheless, in June 1944 room was found on a train which took the twenty-seven pictures to Germany to join that part of the collection bought previously in Holland. Mühlmann, true to his word, managed to extract from the depleted Reich Treasury DFl 500,000, which he paid to the Mannheimer creditors.
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The pursuit, trading, and confiscation of works of art concerned only a small fraction of the Germans in Paris. The rest of the occupiers were more interested in entertaining themselves in the Paris of legend, and this, within limits, their masters allowed them to do. (Total contentment was expressed as being “as happy as God in France.”
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) Everyone from Goering down flocked to the Folies and other more exotic night spots, shopped at Cartier, and filled the restaurants and theaters.

The more intellectual also found plenty to do. The German writer Ernst Jünger, posted to Paris, was fascinated by the life of the city. He dined with poet Sacha Guitry, who wore an enormous diamond ring on his little finger; went to lectures at the Ritz, met Cocteau, and visited Picasso. But the pleasures were not enough to mask the reality of Jünger’s situation. A colleague asked him to keep a file on “the struggle for hegemony in France
between the Commanding General and the Party” and another warned him that letters he had written to a Jewish friend had been found in a raided bank box. These he “carefully” tried to retrieve from the Devisenschutzkommando.

Faced with the discovery of the decisions taken at the Wannsee Conference, he wrote that only those within the military government could prevent the drastic measures, but that all such efforts had to be hidden: “Above all any appearance of humanity must be avoided … to reveal this would be like waving a red flag at a bull.” The firing of the moderate commander in chief for France, Otto von Stülpnagel, who had lost the “battle against the Embassy and the Party,” dashed any hopes that restraint would prevail. In early March 1942 news of the death camps where “certain butchers have killed with their own hand the equivalent of the population of a small town” led him to write that “often in the middle of this seething mass of lemurs and amphibians, death, it seems to me, would be a celebration.”
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There were still three years to go.

Pangs of conscience were also felt by another member of Jünger’s circle, Gerhard Heller, who had been put in charge of literary censorship at the Propaganda Office. It was his job to prevent the publication of unsuitable books. By the time he arrived, some twenty-three hundred tons of newly published books had already been destroyed. Books by Jewish authors never reached his office; these were “self censored” by French publishers. Heller saved what he could, and hid some unacceptable manuscripts away for posterity.

In the course of this work he gained entrée into certain French literary circles and eventually into the Salon of the young, American-born hostess Florence Gould, which amazingly went on all through the war, first in the Hotel Bristol and later in a large apartment in the rue Malakoff.
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(No one in Heller’s group knew where Mr. Gould was, but he was presumed to be in the south of France.) Here one ate so well—there was even real coffee—that some of the more deprived Parisians felt quite liverish after supper. Chez Gould, Heller met intellectuals who introduced him to the world of the “truly modern” hitherto forbidden to him at home. The Salon was for him an “island of happiness” where he could find friendship in the “ocean of mud and blood” which surrounded him, and solace for his self-loathing for not having the courage to resist more openly the atrocities being committed by his compatriots.

Mrs. Gould’s unprecedented freedom did not come without a price. In February 1942 she was denounced for having hidden weapons in her house at Maisons-Laffitte just outside Paris. The young Wehrmacht officer responsible for the investigation nervously wrote that “the affair must
be handled with the greatest delicacy on account of the citizenship of the proprietor…. Above all one must avoid giving the slightest indication that the denunciators were less interested in the weapons than in other allegedly hidden objects, viz., the art treasures and precious stocks of wine.” After telephoning Mrs. Gould he met her at the Hotel Bristol and they went to the now heavily guarded house.

The inspection turned up no arms and revealed that the collection of a hundred thousand bottles of wine was still intact, but that three valuable works of art, a triptych and two ivories, had been removed by the ERR. Mrs. Gould “declared herself ready to donate the total stock of wine for the soldiers of the Eastern territories” but “wished to reserve for herself the right to dispose of the art objects.” After a conference with von Behr, the young officer wrote that “although the ERR had no right to seize this private property, the following was agreed: that Mrs. Gould present the triptych to Goering, who would donate it to the Cluny Museum, which had been her intention, and that she then give the ivories to the Reichsmarschall in token of her thankfulness to him for donating the triptych.” Months passed; when Goering saw the objects he liked them so much that he took all three. The young officer was shocked, but Mrs. Gould “begged me not to take any further steps in the matter in order to avoid difficulties for her, e.g., her transfer to a concentration camp.” He does not say what happened to the wine.
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