The Rape of Europa (80 page)

It was now abundantly clear why M. de Galea had not wished Rorimer to take his pictures to Paris and had instead hidden them in a duck blind. On June 2, 1949, the City of Paris put a restraining order on the Fabiani collection. They were just too late. Diplomatic inquiries revealed that the pictures had been released to Fabiani and a M. Jonas in Ottawa on May 30 and had been taken, it was thought, to London and the USA. The French sent a note to the U.S. State Department requesting help, noting that “their sale in the United States would defraud the French Treasury of a large sum in foreign exchange.”
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Just how Fabiani had managed to get to Canada and how all was resolved among the interested parties is unclear, but he
continued to trade in Paris for many more years, and even wrote a charming, if not entirely accurate, book about his dealings.

By 1947 twenty more French dealers had been fined, among them Dequoy and Petrides. Their German colleagues Lohse and Rochlitz (the latter gleefully delivered to Paris by James Plaut after a long ride across France in an unheated Jeep) were in French jails. Efforts by the Commission de Récupération and French Customs to bring charges against the Wildenstein firm were, however, rejected in 1949 by the courts on the grounds that there was no proof of voluntary sales to the enemy.
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Similar trials for “economic collaboration” took place in Holland. The museum community there, according to the waspish reports of British MFAA officer Ellis Waterhouse, first on the scene in 1945, was a shambles. Many of its distinguished members had died or retired. Hannema, director of the Boymans, had been thrown into jail by the citizens of Rotterdam. The Dutch restitution commission was riven by what Water-house termed “local art politics” and self-preservation tactics. Things finally settled down when two men who had been out of the country during the war, Alphons Vorenkamp and Dr. A. B. de Vries (the latter having spent the war years in Switzerland after being dismissed from the Rijksmuseum by the Nazis), were put in charge. Citizens were required to submit lists of objects taken to Germany and dealers were questioned.

The MFAA and OSS officers in their brief time in Holland took a dim view of the Dutch dealers and their captive experts, Friedländer and Vitale Bloch, who, Waterhouse contemptuously wrote, “is now busily reinsuring by turning King’s evidence.” He was equally suspicious of the dealer de Boer, accusing him of trying to get on “any commission of Dutch experts which might eventually go to Germany to examine restitution claims” and “wishing perhaps to cover some of his own traces.” Goering’s favorite, Hoogendijk, on the other hand, he found to be “of good intentions” but “obsessed with the problem of the five religious works ascribed to Vermeer.” As well he might be: if they were fakes, which seemed more and more likely as Holland emerged from the hothouse atmosphere of the occupation and the pictures were exposed to international scrutiny, he could be liable for considerable sums.
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Accounts of the Dutch collaboration investigations are, like those of every country, unedifying. The depositions and hearing reports are full of gossipy testimony, innuendos of anti-Semitism, Communist leanings, and cronyism. De Vries himself got into trouble for returning thirty-one pictures without the consent of his colleagues to Nathan Katz, who had helped him in Switzerland. The problem was that the Commission felt that
these works had not been a “forced sale.” To make matters worse, Katz immediately shipped ten of them off to Switzerland, where they were inaccessible, and where at least one, Rembrandt’s
Portrait of Saskia
(ex. Ten Cate), soon appeared in the “voracious” Bührle’s collection. The matter was quietly settled by requiring Katz to give three pictures back to the Dutch state.

De Boer hid nothing and maintained that all his sales had been forced, pointing out that his wife and many of the colleagues he had helped were Jewish. He said he had charged the Germans ridiculous prices in order to keep the good things in Holland but that they had bought anyway. He was not further prosecuted. Who after all was to say where survival ended and collaboration began?
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The only full-fledged art trial to result from the events of the war in Holland seems to have been that of the Vermeer forger Hans van Meegeren, who was arrested not for fraud but for economic collaboration. Van Meegeren had warned his intermediaries not to sell to the Germans, but had not reckoned with Goering’s Vermeer obsession. When the Reichmarschall’s
Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery
returned to Holland, investigators naturally wished to know exactly from whence it came so that accounts could be settled. Van Meegeren, as one of the previous owners, was routinely questioned. When he refused to reveal the picture’s origin he was taken to jail, where he declared that he had painted it himself, and, furthermore, that he had done all the rest as well. Van Meegeren was acquitted of collaboration charges and became a folk hero. He was retried for forgery in 1947. The trial was quick: the experts did not much want to testify to their failings in public. The press found them anyway. It was the forger’s last moment of glory; he died soon after the trial. He had made a reputation of sorts: in November 1990 the picture he had painted for the court, the
Young Christ Teaching in the Temple
, was sold for $23,000 at Sotheby’s.
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German dealers were just as eager as their colleagues to get their trade going again, but all dealing had been prohibited well before the invasion of Germany by Military Government law. Again the trade went underground. In some areas, in order to prevent underworld activity and interzonal smuggling, local commanders devised their own licensing systems and allowed dealers’ associations. They were not only thinking of stolen Old Masters: they also wished to promote opportunities for the modern painters so long suppressed by the Third Reich.
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But no one went so far as to permit the export of works from Germany, and all sales of works valued over DM 1,000 had to be reported. Those dealers known to have done business with the Nazis were not licensed, and indeed most of them were
under some form of detention, but they had not given up. In 1949, when licensing requirements for most other businesses were relaxed by General Clay, the dealers were ready to start anew. The effect of this, MFAA officer Theodore Heinrich wrote from Wiesbaden, “has been the appearance in the art dealing trade in this area of several dealers previously refused licenses because of notorious malpractices during the Nazi regime.”
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The licensing and export laws were immediately reinstituted for the art trade and remained in place for the duration of the American occupation.

The shipments out of Germany, massive though they were in the first year of occupation, in no way kept up with the “items” which continued to arrive at the Collecting Points from every conceivable quarter. To the things discovered in hiding places were added thousands of others brought forth by Military Government Law 52, which required German citizens to report all property acquired in foreign countries during the war and allowed them to return it to the authorities, no questions asked.

By April 1, 1946, a total of 23,117 items had been logged into Munich, while 5,149 items, representing 8,284 actual objects, had been returned. The December 1950 summary for Wiesbaden reported that 340,846 items had been returned since its establishment, a rather meaningless statistic given the fact that one single “item,” a library, had contained 1.2 million objects, and another, 3 million. In the storerooms some 100,000 items still remained to be liquidated, and more would trickle in during the last two years of occupation.
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The United States Army had certainly not planned to deal with all this. By the spring of 1946 most of the original Monuments officers who had fought across Europe and found the great caches had gone home, leaving the job of restitution to a much reduced number. The Army, assuming that the return of identifiable loot would be completed by September, at which time responsibility for the remaining items would be turned over to the German Länder, or states, planned by then to limit the number of Monuments officers to twelve. The Roberts Commission itself, which had barely survived the Congressional budget process in 1945, ended operations in June 1946, turning its records over to the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs of the State Department, headed by Miss Ardelia Hall. Before it disbanded, there still being no international agreement on the subject, the Commission went on record to say that “cultural objects … should not be considered or involved in reparations settlements growing out of World War II.”
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But termination of operations in the fall of 1946 proved to be impossible. Indeed, many repositories had not even been revisited or emptied at
that date, and the Collecting Points were still full of objects of unknown provenance. The Army, despite all its efforts to rid itself of the burden, had become the recuperation commission for an enormous number of works which could not simply be shipped off “in bulk,” and whose disposition the MFAA officers adamantly believed should not be left to the Germans. The very eagerness of the Military Government to be rid of the art prolonged the process, for after the euphoria of the big discoveries the old demons of lack of personnel and transportation reappeared with a vengeance, and measures such as cutting down coal allotments to the Collecting Points, which made working conditions miserable, slowed progress even more.

By 1947 the whole picture in Germany had begun to change. The big repositories were nearly empty and the Monuments men were faced with the very different problems of tracking down individual works which had vanished into the hands of thieves and black marketeers, both Allied and German. This required a certain amount of detective work in the field, and even the use of disguise. MFAA officer Edgar Breitenbach, fluent in German, roamed the villages around Berchtesgaden dressed in lederhosen, attempting to recover objects from the Goering collections from the reluctant locals. An extensive ring of fences who had been trading in the things stolen from the Führerbau in Munich was slowly exposed by underhanded techniques. The trails sometimes led to unexpected places: it was discovered that six paintings bought for General Clay’s office had been looted from Holland, and they were quickly replaced.

The conditions of return also changed. As the Cold War took hold, the Monuments officers had to deal with the claims of citizens of countries dominated by the Soviet Union who had fled to the West and now, as refugees, claimed title to objects held at the Collecting Points. Strict adherence to the tenet of returning things to the country from which they had been removed would, in these circumstances, have to bend to political realities. A case in point was that of the Lvov Dürers so beloved of Hitler. This was a particularly thorny problem as Lvov, formerly Polish, was now in the USSR. The drawings had in truth been quite forgotten in the vastness of the Collecting Point, where they had remained in the packing case in which they had come from Alt Aussee.

In April 1947 the MFAA office at headquarters received a letter informing them that Prince Georg Lubomirski, currently living in Switzerland, wished to claim the drawings as his property and donate them to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. This was not quite accurate, as the Prince had simultaneously written to the firm of Rosenberg and Steibel in New York to ask them to help him recover the works, after which he
planned to sell them. It took until January 1948 for this inquiry to reach the Collecting Point. The current director, Stewart Leonard, unpacked the drawings and reinterrogated Kajetan Mühlmann, still in custody, about details of their removal. Going by the book, he explained to the Prince that the drawings could only be released to nations, and not individuals. Lubomirski protested, pointing out that the Russians had confiscated everything he had left behind and claimed that he was the legal heir to the Lubomirski estates. Bernard Taper, the American MFAA investigator assigned to the case, who had heard many a story, was not so sure, and noted in his report that he “seemed to remember having read somewhere that the Lubomirskis had donated these drawings to the Lvov Museum.”
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Nonetheless, the Prince was told to pursue his claim.

Nazi photograph of one of the Lubomirski Dürers; note caption: “Formerly Lemberg [Lvov]”