The collection for the planned museum in Linz was accumulated through several methods. Hitler himself sent
Heinrich Heim, one of Martin Bormann's adjutants who had expertise in paintings and graphics, on trips to Italy and France to buy artworks, which Hitler paid for with his own money, which came from sales of
Mein Kampf, real estate speculation on land in the area of
the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat on the
Obersalzberg, and royalties from Hitler's image used on postage stamps. The latter, which was divided with his official photographer
Heinrich Hoffmann, amounted to at least 75 million marks over the course of Hitler's reign. This, however, was not the primary method used to build up the collection.
Hitler's birthday In Nazi Germany, Hitler's birthday was celebrated nationally on 20 April beginning in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, through 1944. For his
50th birthday in 1939, the day was declared a National Holiday. As part of these celebrations Hitler would receive numerous presents, among which were paintings and other art objects. These were set aside for use in the planned
Führermuseum in Linz. Hitler's 56th birthday in 1945 was a private celebration held in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin as the Soviet
Red Army battled to take the city; even under those circumstances, Hitler would frequently spend hours in the bunker of the Chancellery looking at the scale model of the proposed rebuilding of Linz, which centered on the cultural district around the
Fŭhrermuseum. Ten days after his birthday, Hitler married
Eva Braun, and they committed suicide together on 30 April 1945.
Führer-Reserve In the first weeks after the Anschluss in March 1938, which brought Austria into the German Reich, both the
Gestapo and the
Nazi Party confiscated numerous artworks for themselves. In response, on 18 June 1938, Hitler issued a decree placing all artwork that had been seized in Austria under the personal prerogative of the Führer: As part of the seizure of assets hostile to the state – especially Jewish assets – in Austria, paintings and other artwork of great value, among other things, have been confiscated. The Führer requests that this artwork, for the most part from Jewish hands, be neither used as furnishings of administration offices or senior bureaucrats' official residences nor purchased by leading state and party leaders. The Führer plans to personally decide on the use of the property after its seizure. He is considering putting artwork first and foremost at the disposal of small Austrian towns for their collections. The intent of the order was to guarantee that Hitler would have first choice of the plundered art for his planned
Führermuseum and for other museums in the Reich. This later became a standard procedure for all purloined or confiscated art, and was known as the "
Führer-Reserve."
Sonderauftrag Linz On 21 June 1939, Hitler set up the
Sonderauftrag Linz ("Special Commission Linz") in
Dresden and – at the recommendation of art dealer and Nazi Party member
Karl Haberstock – appointed
Hans Posse, director of the
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister ("Dresden Painting Gallery"), as a special envoy. A few days later, on 26 June, Hitler signed a letter intended to give Posse the authority he would need to do this job. He wrote: I commission Dr. Hans Posse, Director of Dresden Gallery, to build up the new art museum for Linz Donau. All Party and State services are ordered to assist Dr. Posse in fulfillment of his mission. in 1938 Posse had a checkered relationship with the Nazis. His wife had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, but when Posse himself tried to join in 1933, his application was rejected a year later. He was later accused of having promoted so-called "
Degenerate art", and of having Jewish ancestry. In 1938 he was asked to resign as director – a position he had held since 1910 from the age of 31 – but refused, taking a leave of absence instead. He was nevertheless fired, only to be restored to the position on Hitler's orders, possibly through the influence of Haberstock. Although Hitler had favored German and Austrian paintings from the 19th century, Posse's focus was on early German, Dutch, French, and Italian paintings. Posse wrote in his diary that Hitler intended the museum to hold "only the best of all periods from the prehistoric beginnings of art...to the nineteenth century and recent times." Hitler told Posse that he was only to answer to him. The
Sonderauftrag not only collected art for the
Führermuseum, but also for other museums in the German Reich, especially in the eastern territories. The artworks would have been distributed to these museums after the war. The
Sonderauftrag was located in Dresden had approximately 20 specialists attached to it: "curators of paintings, prints, coins, and armor, a librarian, an architect, an administrator, photographers, and restorers."
Under Hans Posse On 24 July 1939,
Martin Bormann, Deputy Führer
Rudolf Hess's assistant, informed
Josef Bürckel, who Hitler had appointed to head the administration of Austria after the
Anschluss, that all artwork which was confiscated was to be made available for examination by Posse or by Hitler personally. Although the order did not originally include the artworks taken earlier from the Vienna
Rothschilds, by October Posse had managed to get those included in his remit as well. In the late summer and autumn of that year, Posse traveled a number of times to Vienna to the Central Depot for confiscated art in the Neue Burg to pick out art pieces for the Linz museum, Hitler was pleased with Posse's work, and in 1940 awarded him the honorific of "Professor", something the Führer did for many of his favorites in the arts, such as
Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and film director; architects
Albert Speer and
Hermann Giesler; sculptors
Arno Breker and
Josef Thorak;
Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the
Berlin Philharmonic; actor
Emil Jannings; and photographer
Heinrich Hoffmann; among others. In October 1939, Hitler and
Benito Mussolini had made an agreement that any Germanic artworks in public museums in the
South Tyrol – a traditionally German-speaking area which had been given to Italy after the First World War in return for entering the war on the side of the
Triple Entente – could be removed and returned to Germany, but when Posse attempted to do so, with the assistance of
Heinrich Himmler's
Ahnenerbe, the Italians managed to keep putting things off, and no repatriations ever took place. Posse died in December 1942 of cancer. His funeral was a high state event to which Hitler invited the directors of all art museums in the Reich; Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels delivered the eulogy, although there was no mention made of the Linz Museum project, since it was a state secret Posse had gathered more than 2500 artworks for the Linz museum in the three years he was head of the
Sonderauftrag Linz.
Under Hermann Voss In March 1943,
Hermann Voss, an art historian, director of the
Wiesbaden Gallery and former deputy director of the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin His appointment was considered odd by some, since he was known to be an anti-Nazi with a considerable number of Jewish friends and colleagues, but Hitler was known to overlook political factors when dealing with matters of art, and Voss's knowledge of southern German artwork, as well as French and Italian painting, may have decided the matter for him. Voss was not nearly as active or energetic as Posse had been, but was still "caught squarely in the flow of loot." He was prone to send out agents rather than to travel himself to make purchases, or to make dealers bring works to him. Up to that time, only two works which had been collected for the Linz museum had been seen by the public, although even for these their ultimate destination was never revealed. The first was
Myron's sculpture
Discobolus ("The Discus Thrower"), which Hitler obtained surreptitiously in 1938 through the Berlin State Museum, but ordered to be displayed at the
Glyptothek in Munich, where he proudly told his invited guests at the unveiling: "may you all then realize how glorious man already was back then in his physical beauty". The other work was
Makart's triptych
The Plague in Florence, which Hitler acquired as a gift from Mussolini, who, when the owners refused to sell it, seized their villa and confiscated the painting. He then presented it to the Führer himself at the train station in Florence.
Results By December 1944, Posse and Voss had collectively spent 70 million Reichsmarks (equivalent to million euros) on accumulating the collection intended for the
Fuhrermuseum; although artworks bought in
Vichy France were paid for with francs which were set by the Nazis at an artificially low exchange rate with the Reichsmark. In 1945, the count of art items in the collection was over 8,000. in 1939
Legal authority The legal authority for the collection of artworks for the
Führermuseum began with Hitler himself, who, after the
Enabling Act of 1933, had the power to enact laws without the involvement of the
Reichstag. In effect, whatever Hitler directed to be done had the absolute force of law. It was his personal desire for the creation of a museum and the revitalization of Linz which began the collection program. Martin Bormann, who became chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery and also Hitler's private secretary, was also closely connected to the program from the beginning, in particular as a conduit providing access to Hitler. Originally thirty-one volumes existed, but only nineteen have been preserved in Germany, and 11 are considered to be lost. Notably, the collection included three Rembrandts,
La Danse by
Watteau, the Memling portrait by Corsini, the
Rubens Ganymede, and
Vermeer's
The Artist in His Studio, a forced sale far below market value. and "administrative chaos" that was typical of the way the Third Reich operated, the
Sonderauftrag Linz was not the only Nazi agency collecting artworks. In France, as in
many other countries in Europe, the office of
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Special Purposes Reich Leader Rosenberg) was the primary agency. Hitler then issued on 18 November his own directive, a
Führerbefehl similar to the ones he had issued for Poland and Austria, announcing his prerogative over all confiscated art in occupied Western Europe. Rosenberg thus became a formal procurement agent for the
Führermuseum, except when Göring intervened. This apparently brought about some internecine squabbling, as Dr. Posse had been given the authority to act on Hitler's behalf, and the German commanders of occupied countries were required to keep him regularly informed about their confiscations of artwork. Probably because of Göring's interference, Posse formally requested that the Reich Chancellery reiterate his power to act for the
Führer. The result was a "general high-level directive" confirming Hitler's primacy through Posse, and a direction to Posse to review the ERR's inventory in regard to the needs of the planned museum in Linz. Several years later, on 16 April 1943, Rosenberg sent Hitler photographs of some of the more valuable paintings seized from throughout Western Europe, in addition to the 53 photographs he had sent earlier. Rosenberg asked for permission to see Hitler personally, to present a catalog of works seized, as well as 20 additional folders of photographs. By one conservative estimate, about 21,903 objects were confiscated from France alone. Of these, about 700 went to Göring, 53 were earmarked for the Führermuseum in Linz, In 2008, the
German Historic Museum of Berlin published a database with paintings collected for the
Führermuseum and for other museums in the German Reich.
Wolff-Metternich, Jaujard and Valland The German occupation of
Paris began on 14 June 1940, and on 30 June Hitler ordered that artworks in the French national collection be "safeguarded", and in particular "ownerless" art and historical documents – meaning works which were the property of Jews and could therefore be confiscated from them – be "protected" as well. Three days later, the German ambassador in France,
Otto Abetz, ordered the confiscation of the collections of the 15 most important art dealers in the city, most of whom were Jewish. These pieces were then brought to the German Embassy. Through the actions of Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich, the head of the
Kunstschutz (Art Protection) – an agency which dated from
World War I and which had a mission which was superficially similar to that of the Allied
Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) – Nazi military authorities intervened and stopped Abetz from making any more confiscations. Most of the artwork in the Embassy was then transferred for storage to the
Louvre, at the suggestion of
Jacques Jaujard, the Director of French National Museums. Wolff-Metternich continued in his efforts to protect the artworks, which what he saw as the proper role of his agency. In particular, he was able to fend off
Joseph Goebbels' demand that almost a thousand pieces of "Germanic" art held in the collection of confiscated pieces be shipped immediately to Germany. Wolff-Metternich did not disagree that the artworks properly belonged in the Reich, but did not think that sending them at the time was the correct course of action, and held off Goebbels with bureaucratic maneuvers and a strict interpretation of Hitler's directive, which specified that artwork in France should not be moved until a peace treaty between France and German had been signed, which had not as yet occurred. – were systematically subjected to confiscations under various bureaucratically outlined pretenses of "protection", and were then brought to the
Jeu de Paume museum, where they were
cataloged and divided up for Hitler's collection – Posse took 53 paintings, – was a member of the
French resistance, and had remained working at the museum on Jaujard's orders. Valland kept lists of all the works which came in, the secret storehouses where they were stockpiled when they left the museum, and the numbers of the train cars when the last of the paintings were shipped to Germany just before the Allied recapturing of Paris. Using Valland's information, the Resistance was able to delay the train sufficiently so that it never reached Germany.
Hermann Göring Although the ERR, in theory, was part of Alfred Rosenberg's Nazi empire, Rosenberg was an ideologue who had no interest in art, and did not appreciate the value to Germany of looting the patrimony of the occupied countries.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, on the other hand, Hitler's anointed successor and the head of the
Luftwaffe, was an avid collector of confiscated artworks, with an unquenchable appetite for jewels and finery as well. As a result, the ERR in France became in large part "Göring's personal looting organization." During the course of the war, Göring paid 20 visits to the
Jeu de Paume in Paris to views the results of the ERR's confiscations. At times Göring also utilized
Kajetan Mühlmann, an Austrian art historian and
SS officer, as his personal agent. and which became Hitler's most cherished painting in his collection. Later on, in 1945, Göring gave Hitler 17 paintings and 4 bronzes from the
Naples Museum. These had been confiscated by the Hermann Göring Panzer Division while they were being shipped to safety from
Monte Cassino to the
Vatican, and were later presented to the
Reichsmarschall at
Carinhall, At its peak, Göring's art collection included 1,375 paintings, 250 sculptures and 168 tapestries. Its value has been estimated at several hundred million marks. When the Soviet Army was about to cross the
Oder River into Germany in February 1945, threatening Carinhall, Göring began to evacuate his art collection by train, sending it to his other residences in the south of Germany. A second trainload went out in March. and a third in April. The contents of the shipments were personally chosen by Göring, who, at first, was inclined not to take the artwork he had acquired through the confiscations of the ERR, in case there might be questions of provenance in the future, but he was dissuaded from this course by Walter Andreas Hoffer, who was in charge of Göring's collection. Even after the contents of three long trains had left, Carinhall still had a considerable amount of art left in it, statues buried around the grounds, and looted furniture still in the rooms. Göring had
Luftwaffe demolition experts wire the estate for destruction, so the treasures he had left behind would not fall into the hands of the Russians.
Dealers and agents A number of art dealers and private individuals profited greatly from Hitler's campaign to stock his planned museum. Primary among them was
Karl Haberstock, who operated a wide network of German agents in Paris, the south of France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, but also at least 75 French
collaborators. Haberstock declined to take a commission on the major purchases for the museum, but took his regular fee otherwise, amassing a fortune. When Posse went to France under Hitler's orders, he took the unscrupulous Haberstock with him, and the dealer, working through 82 local agents, purchased 62 pieces for the Linz collection, including works by
Rembrandt,
Brueghel,
Watteau and
Rubens. in 1914 Maria Almas Dietrich was another art dealer who did well by the Nazi obsession with obtaining art. An acquaintance of Hitler through his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, Dietrich sold 80 paintings to the Linz museum collection, and a further 270 for Hitler's personal collection, as well as over 300 for other German museums and Nazi Party functionaries. Prolific rather than knowledgeable, Dietrich still managed to make a considerable amount of money from the Linz program. It may also have helped that Hitler's mistress Eva Braun was a friend of Dietrich's daughter. Unlike Dietrich,
SA-
Gruppenführer Prince Philipp of Hessen was a connoisseur of the arts and architecture and acted as Posse's principal agent in Italy, where he lived with his wife, a daughter of
King Victor Emmanuel. A grandson of the German Emperor
Frederick III, and a great-grandson of
Queen Victoria, Philipp provided "a veneer of aristocratic elegance which facilitated important purchases from the Italian nobility." Another dealer used by Hans Posse was
Hildebrand Gurlitt, through whom he made expensive purchases of tapestries, paintings and drawings. However,
Jonathan Petropoulos, a historian at
Loyola College in
Baltimore and an expert in wartime looting, argues that most of the purchases were not "
arm's length" in nature.
Gerard Aalders, a Dutch historian, said those sales amounted to "technical looting," since the Netherlands and other occupied countries were forced to accept German
Reichsmarks that ultimately proved worthless. Aalders argues that "If Hitler's or Goering's art agent stood on your doorstep and offered $10,000 for the painting instead of the $100,000 it was really worth, it was pretty hard to refuse." He adds that Nazis who encountered reluctant sellers threatened to confiscate the art or arrest the owner. On the subject of purchases versus confiscations, Dr. Cris Whetton, the author of ''Hitler's Fortune'' commented: I had expected to find that [Hitler] was directly responsible for looting and stealing of paintings that he wanted for himself, and I couldn't find any evidence of it, I found evidence that he
paid for them; sometimes at knock-down prices, but not direct theft in any way. I was quite surprised by this, and I have to say in all honesty that's what I found. The Dutch Advisory Committee on the Assessment of Restitution Applications for Items of Cultural Value and the Second World War assesses sales by Dutch Jews to the
Sonderauftrag Linz. At least two restitution claims were rejected because the Committee argued that there were not enough indications showing coercion as the cause of the sale. For example, in 2009 the Restitution Committee rejected the application for the restitution of 12 works sold by the Jewish art dealer
Kurt Walter Bachstitz to the
Sonderauftrag Linz between 1940 and 1941. The Committee argued that Bachstitz had been "undisturbed" in the first years of the occupation and said it had not found signs of coercion. In 2012 the Commission rejected a claim of the heirs of Benjamin and Nathan Katz, former Jewish art dealers in the Netherlands. The claim related
inter alia to 64 works that the art dealership Katz sold to the
Sonderauftrag Linz. The Commission came to the conclusion that there were not enough indications demonstrating that the sales were made under duress. Works which Hans Posse purchased in Vienna for the Linz collection included
Vermeer's
The Artist in His Studio /
The Art of Painting,
Titian's
The Toilet of Venus,
Antonio Canova's
Polyhymnia, and several works by
Rembrandt. Among the many paintings Karl Haberstock sold to the collection were two Rembrandts, one of which,
Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels is now thought to be from the Rembrandt workshop and not a work of the master. Oddly, Hitler purchased these for an inflated price, despite the fact that seller was a partly Jewish woman and the paintings could have been confiscated. Posse also purchased over 200 pieces which Jewish owners had managed to get into Switzerland, where they were safe from expropriation. On the other hand, Posse did not shy away from confiscation either, particular in the former Czechoslovakia and Poland, where all property was subject to it, but also in the Netherlands. , 10 days before he and his newly married wife,
Eva Braun, died by suicide on 30 April 1945
Size of the collection and Hitler's will It is not possible to determine with any accuracy the size of the collection which had been amassed for Hitler's planned museum in Linz, but Frederick Spotts suggests that something around 7,000 pieces had been confiscated, bought or purloined specifically for the
Führermuseum, and that others from the many other art repositories scattered around Germany would most probably have been added had Hitler won the war and he and his art experts had the opportunity to sort through the artworks and assign them to various museums. According to Spotts the figure of 7,000 accords well with the data released by the Art Looting Investigation Unit. Other experts quote higher figures of up to 8,500 for the ultimate size of the collection. Despite its size, and the unprecedented access Hitler' agents had to artworks throughout Occupied Europe, the Linz collection had noticeable flaws. According to Spotts, its "gaps" included
English art,
Spanish art and art of the
Northern Renaissance; major artists were missing from the
Italian part of the collection as well. Still, in his "
Private Testament" – dictated in the underground
Fuhrerbunker in the garden of the ruined
Reich Chancellery building in Berlin, shortly before he committed suicide – he specified that the collection should go to the museum when it was built, writing that "The paintings in my private collection bought by me during the course of the years were never assembled for private purposes, but solely for the establishment of a picture gallery in my home town of Linz on the Danube." ==Storage and recovery==