The Rape of Europa (30 page)

These purchases were subjected to brilliantly contrived and endless bureaucratic delays by a Louvre curator, Michel Martin, seconded to the French Customs, who demanded reevaluations and ever more documentation before granting export permits. He did not have any illusions about
his ability to stop the exports, but in this manner was able to keep track of where declared objects were being sent. The conquerors were forced over and over again to reveal the mailed fist by appealing to the Military Government for intervention.

All this dazzling but relatively straightforward trade pales when compared to the extraordinary international transactions involving the top Nazi procurers which would peak in 1941–1942. In these dealings the competitive rapaciousness of the buyers was evenly matched by that of the sellers, it being the universal desire to acquire as much art or cash from each other as possible. There was no dearth of either. The German dealers had the great advantage of direct access to the government funds controlled by their patrons, not to mention special travel privileges and the ability to send their purchases across frontiers without the annoyance of customs controls.

Both Hitler and Goering had full-fledged but carefully separated buying operations going on in Italy as well as in the Low Countries. The Führer’s primary agent, Prince Philip of Hesse, a nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was particularly well placed, as he was married to Princess Mafalda, daughter of the Italian King. He had joined the Nazi movement in the twenties and risen to its highest levels when the war began. In 1940 Hitler had asked him to help Posse find pictures on the Italian market, an assignment he eagerly accepted.
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Hesse’s expertise and entrée were invaluable. Through him Posse was able to procure such gems as the Memling
Portrait of a Man
from the collection of Prince Corsini, Rubens’s
Equestrian Portrait of a Member of the Doria Family
, and a
Leda and the Swan
attributed to Leonardo from the Spiridon family. Posse made three trips to Italy in the spring of 1941, each time asking for more funds to be deposited at the German embassy. He needed them: the Spiridon Leonardo alone went for L 10.5 million, or RM 1.3 million. By May 1942 the total had reached RM 5 million, and Hesse had acquired eighty-eight works for Posse.
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Hofer, with less money to spend, had a more complicated network of dealers and free-lancers from whom he got regular kickbacks at Goering’s expense.

When the Reichsmarschall himself was in Italy, his principal dealings were with the self-made collector-dealer Count Contini Bonacossi, whose title had been granted by Mussolini. Contini had donated a large part of his collection to the Italian state, but he still had plenty for sale, as his extensive American trade was now cut off. A great bargainer, he sold more than fifty items to Goering, including a considerable amount of furniture.

In Italy the Nazi collectors had the great advantage of the cooperation of a sympathetic head of state who could help them circumvent the annoying
export laws meant to protect the national patrimony. In 1942 Minister of Education Bottai vainly published and tried to enforce stricter export regulations to stop their depredations, but he need not have bothered: when Mussolini or his Foreign Minister, Ciano, tired of these objections they simply presented the work in question to Hitler or Goering as a gift.

France was far more complicated. When in Paris, Goering did not limit himself to the staff of the ERR, but regularly shopped on the open market in perfectly aboveboard transactions, sometimes accompanied by such major buyers as Walter Bornheim of the Galerie der Alte Kunst (formerly A. S. Drey) in Munich. Bornheim also bought for Linz, various German museums, and many private collectors. He was particularly good at choosing the birthday presents those wishing to ingratiate themselves needed for Hitler and Goering. All the French dealers loved him, as he always paid in untraceable cash, carrying hundreds of thousands of francs in his briefcase. By war’s end he had dispensed some 100 million of them.
¹⁰

The dealer who bought the most for Hitler in France, and who clearly had the most fun doing it, was Frau Dietrich. Her very special relationship with him through Eva Braun is the only possible explanation for the amazing leeway she was given in her dealings. Between 1940 and 1944 she bought some 320 paintings in Paris, of which 80 went to the Linz collection. A lot of these were bad pictures, and no small number were fakes. But Frau Dietrich was the only dealer who could sell directly to the Führer without the approval of Posse or Bormann. In Paris she had a wonderful time, having created a network of finders, ranging from a Russian princess to Goering’s man at the ERR, Bruno Lohse. She was just as welcome at some Parisian galleries as Bornheim. Martin Fabiani sold her four dubious Guardi oil sketches, and ninety-nine other dealers sold her much more.

Frau Dietrich’s impeccable expense accounts not only enumerate all her acquisitions but show that she truly knew how to enjoy Paris life. She may not have known much about pictures but she certainly knew her wines. On December 14, 1940, she lunched at a restaurant suitably called Chez Elle, where she consumed a filet and washed down with a nice Pomerol ’29. It must have been a good day, for she dined that night at Prunier on caviar, lobster, and a little Moët. The next night she ordered Veuve Clicquot (FFr 520) at a cabaret called Don Juan in the rue Fromentin, and on the sixteenth went all out at La Crémaillière, feasting on more caviar, soup, and duck à l’orange, accompanied by a fine Château Latour. All this was subsidized by a steady flow, in the hundreds of thousands, of reichsmarks to her Crédit Lyonnais account.

Some deals did not turn out well, but Frau Dietrich was never discouraged. In July 1941 she cheerfully returned four pictures to the dealer
Roger Dequoy, two of which had been judged fakes by Buchner and Voss, one as having been cut down, and the fourth as being “school of.” Dequoy replaced them with three presumably better pictures for the same price. It was a scenario frequently repeated, but Frau Dietrich could afford to be cheerful, her yearly income having by then reached more than RM 500,000 ($200,000).
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Receipt for Frau Dietrich from Roger Dequoy

Karl Haberstock took it all much more seriously. Though initially he
was prevented by Reichschancellery officials wary of his dishonesty from going to Holland with Posse, the Linz director’s requests that the dealer be allowed to do business in the occupied nations could not be denied forever. By the fall of 1940 Posse had so many countries to deal with that he welcomed Haberstock’s interest in acting on his behalf in France, as Prince Philip of Hesse was doing in Italy. Through Posse’s influence the all-important travel documents were provided. Haberstock obtained an authorization from Goering as well. These passes gave him the great advantage of early access to the Unoccupied Zone, in which, as Posse put it, “there is much to be gotten in future, since this area for the moment had been spared from the many other German dealers.”
¹²

In 1940–1941 the Free Zone had also still been spared the inroads of the ERR and other agencies implementing Jewish confiscation, and was full of refugee dealers and collectors with whom Haberstock had dealt in the past. He arrived in Paris with Posse in October 1940, set himself up in great style at the Ritz, and sent out cards soliciting business from the principal dealers still in town, Jewish or not. Some of them must have been surprised. Duveen’s wrote back a polite note saying they were “closed at present” and Léonce Rosenberg replied that he had only works by living painters, which were probably not suitable.

At Wildenstein’s, Haberstock found only longtime employee Roger Dequoy presiding over the house and galleries, from which Abetz and the ERR had already removed the remaining stock, and would later remove even the furniture. But Haberstock was sure that Georges Wildenstein, awaiting passage to the United States in Aix-en-Provence, had other assets which would be of use to him. In November he and Dequoy went to Aix, where they met Wildenstein and came to certain agreements. Haberstock recalled this as a friendly meeting; Wildenstein, in his later conversations with the T-men in New York, did not, and said that Haberstock had been accompanied by a high-ranking German officer and had brandished a letter of recommendation from Pierre Laval.
¹³
Be that as it may, the French dealer was as anxious as Haberstock to make the most advantageous arrangements possible.

It was proposed that Wildenstein would exchange “acceptable” pictures from his stock for the modern works so unacceptable to the Nazis, which Haberstock would send to him in the United States. Wildenstein would sell them through the New York branch of his firm, as he had done so successfully with the Gauguin before the war. In November 1940 this was not so far-fetched: it seemed likely that the war would soon be over and Haberstock could then simply ship items to New York. The German dealer also proposed that Wildenstein buy things for him from the refugees
crowded into the Unoccupied Zone, for which he would pay in francs, marks, or lire. When Wildenstein suggested that dollars would be better, Haberstock declared that dollars would not be a desirable currency after the Germans “had finished with America.” To this Wildenstein retorted, “Do you think the US is going to be such an easy job?” and Haberstock replied, “It will be an easier inside job than France was.” It was further suggested that if Haberstock could somehow recover the Wildenstein pictures held by the Louvre at Sourches, which the ERR also wanted, these too would be available for the market.

Haberstock indicated that he had a German buyer for Wildenstein’s weekly,
Beaux Arts
, which he urged him to sell before it was confiscated or Aryanized. At the same time Wildenstein made certain private arrangements with Dequoy, who was to continue to oversee the firm’s interests in Paris and try to use its European assets to buy locally, in the hope that these stocks too might be somehow transported to the Americas. Letters containing Wildenstein’s instructions would be sent care of Dequoy’s father-in-law in Marseilles.
¹⁴
The French dealer himself left for the United States on January 29, 1941.

While he was in the Unoccupied Zone, Haberstock made contact with a number of other refugees. From former Berlin colleague Arthur Goldschmidt he bought a Brouwer and a van Ostade, which he sold to Linz. Herbert Engel (son of the Austrian refugee dealer Hugo, who would later become part of Haberstock’s Paris operations) was recruited to watch for available works in the south of France. From the brothers Ball, Alexander and Richard, originally of Berlin, who soon left for America, Haberstock gleaned vital tidbits of information on the exact location of various prominent private collections. For appraisals he found yet another person in limbo, a German expert on Spanish painting and former director of a Munich museum, August Meyer (referred to in correspondence by the code name “Henri Antoine”), whose wife and child had remained in occupied Paris.
¹⁵

Haberstock was not the only one arranging things in this hotbed of survival intrigue. Martin Fabiani, on his way back from sending his pictures off from Lisbon, found an escaping dealer with whom he made a happy agreement: Fabiani would take over the fugitive’s premises in the rue Matignon for the duration of the war, and return the business to him when it was over. This worked out very well for Fabiani, a self-confessed opportunist who, through his friendship with Dequoy, would be privy to some of the occupation’s bigger deals. Louis Carré made a similar arrangement with André Weil, also of the rue Matignon, who stayed in hiding in the country while Carré did an excellent business in French modern works.
¹⁶

On his return to Paris, Haberstock duly arranged for
Beaux Arts
to be sold to a Herr Brauer, the publisher of the German magazine
Weltkunst.
From then on the periodical kindly gave Dequoy a discount on advertising. The problem now was how to keep the Wildenstein firm going and get hold of the stocks belonging to it which were held by the Louvre—before the ERR did. On April 2 Wildenstein impatiently wrote to Dequoy to say that “there were doubtless ways and means of so doing.”
¹⁷
And indeed there were. Haberstock once again would use his government’s ideology to his own advantage. This time it was “Aryanization.”